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I love to read Scripture, but I also love to listen to it on audio. I was listening to David Suchet reading Galatians, and I kept hitting the reverse button on my Audible app to go back and listen to this verse again and again: “So you are no longer a slave, but God’s child; and since you are his child, God has made you also an heir” (Galatians 4:7).

I loved this post from author and pastor Ray Ortlund. It’s a great reminder that we need to examine ourselves and correct ourselves. We who are truth-oriented, or in Ray’s words, “all certainty,” when it comes to every area of theology, need to go out of our way to affirm grace and choose humility. We who are grace-oriented, or as Ray says, “all openness,” need to go out of our way to affirm God’s revealed truth and anchor ourselves to it.

Recently a number of reports coming out of China indicate that persecution of Christians is increasing.

When we’re prideful, we make God our opponent: “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. Humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s mighty hand, that he may lift you up in due time” (1 Peter 5:5-6). There are many things wrong—not to mention ludicrous—with making God our opponent, but the most obvious one is this: it’s a battle we can never win.

Jesus asked, “Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to your life?” (Luke 12:25, NIV). Nothing is more impotent than worry, and nothing so robs us of happiness in Christ.

Recently, feeling a weight about Nanci’s fight with cancer, I also felt a great need to sense God’s presence and joy. The Lord led me to Psalm 100. When I read verse 2, which says “come before Him with joyful songs,” I realized I rarely sing to Him in my quiet time.

What is the difference between the study materials available for the Heaven book?

Today’s guest post is by our dear friend Diane Meyer, who tells a great and fun story that really fits with the character of our generous, delightful God. Most giving stories I hear don’t involve a dice game and a Harley Davidson motorcycle. But that’s what makes this one so unique.

My son-in-law Dan Franklin is teaching pastor at Life Bible Fellowship in Upland, California. Dan is married to my daughter Karina, and the father of three of my grandsons, but that’s not the main reason he’s one of my favorite teachers. In this video, Dan talks about the problems behind the phrase, “Speak your truth.”  

This article by Greg Morse is vitally important. Its message, which has been on my heart a long time, is this: on the one hand, it’s true that we are sinners saved by grace, meaning for now we are still sinners. On the other hand, when we talk about how normal sin is, suggesting it’s inevitable that we as Christians sin, we are really missing something vital about Christ’s empowering grace.

I think Charles Spurgeon comes as close as anyone I’ve read to articulating what Scripture as a whole reveals. Sadly, though I attended both a good Bible college and a good seminary, I never read Spurgeon or learned anything about him. I’d been a pastor for ten years before I discovered him, and then I couldn’t get enough of him.

Relativism dominates the thinking of most educated people (which means sometimes that uneducated people are morally smarter). The “it all depends” morality, controversial fifty years ago when called situational ethics, denies the existence of any objective standards of right and wrong. What’s wrong for one person, so it insists, may be right for another. One uses internal, not external, standards to judge morality.

Because work began before sin and the Curse, and because God, who is without sin, is a worker, we should assume human beings will work on the New Earth. We’ll have satisfying and enriching work that we can’t wait to get back to, work that’ll never be drudgery.

Question from reader: In Heaven, you make a case that we will have some type of body in the intermediate Heaven. So what body do we receive in 1 Thessalonians 4:17? It says, “Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord.”