All Blog Posts Tagged 'Relationships' (27)

4 am Beat Down

by Jo Lena Johnson, Steven Charles Martin and Kevin Fleming; book excerpt from Strategic Planning for Love & War, Relationships and Adult Conversations

“Seven Whole Days” Toni Braxton

“Don’t Be Afraid” Aaron Hall

“Killing Me Softly With His Song” Roberta…

A Double Edged Sword 

Daily we make decisions which can have life-changing consequences but often we don’t see them that way – especially if they affect others, and not ourselves. I guess that’s the human part of us that has a limited capacity to feel empathy or even care when we, ourselves have so much going on. Some things just aren’t real until they become ours.…

I’m listening to a preacher tell his story about how he tithed and sowed seeds for his ministry 38 years ago. He seems to be a very sincere person and has had lots of success drawing to him blessings and miracles in resources, abundance and money. He’s speaking of the Boaz anointing. I'm not sure about it because I don't have personal experience with him but, the heart of what I'm getting from the message is, "What you put out, you get back," and I know about that...…

Get to the heart of why people struggle, why men and women see love and

 relationships differently, and what to do about it! 

“This is a must read book for everyone that is looking to take their relationship to the next level.…

“Ultimate confidence in the goodness of life cannot rest upon confidence in the goodness of man. If that is where it rests, it is an optimism which will suffer ultimate disillusionment. Romanticism will be transmuted into cynicism, as it has always been in the world's history. The faith of a Christian is something quite different from this optimism. It is trust in God, in a good God who created a good world, though the world is not…

AS WE DECIDE, SO WE ARE

“Every time you make a choice, you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And, taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central…

HOLINESS

“We want to be holy because we know that to be holy is to be like God and to be near him. But sometimes we drift. Pleasure entices us. Troubles mount. Sin calls. The world beckons. We wonder why our hearts seem empty and cold. What happened to the zeal we had? What happened to…

"The concept of sin is a stark acknowledgment that we can never be omnipotent, that we are bound and limited by human flaws and self-interest. The concept of sin is a check on the utopian dreams of a perfect world. It prevents us from believing in our own perfectibility or the illusion that the material advances of science and technology equal an intrinsic moral improvement in our…

"No man has ever risen to the real stature of spiritual manhood until he has found that it is finer to serve somebody else than it is to serve himself."
- Woodrow Wilson 

"Jesus' kingdom (and Paul's 'citizenship in heaven') was about the real world, hear and now. It was about allegiance. Jesus and Paul were telling the people that they must live here with their identities as aliens. They must live by the rules of heaven amid the violent earthly powers. And to claim that one's citizenship is in heaven is to say that you pledge allegiance not to any of the kingdoms of the world but to Jesus and the body of those who take on his…

"If human beings were created for an eternal existence, nothing could be more important than finding out what that eternal future is all about and making sure that we are going in the right direction."

- Kenneth D. Boa & Robert M. Bowman, Jr.

ON PRAYER

"What would happen if God answered every prayer? By answering every possible prayer, God would in effect abdicate, turning the world over to us to run. History shows how we have handled the limited power granted us: we have fought wars, committed genocide, fouled the air and water, destroyed forests, established unjust political systems, concentrated pockets of superfluous wealth and grinding…

VERSE TO PONDER

"At just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us."…

"If the people of God were to transform the world through fascination, these amazing teachings [in Matthew 5-7, the Sermon on the Mount,] had to work at the center of these peculiar people. Then we can look into the eyes of a centurion and see not a beast but a child of God, and then walk with that child a couple of miles. Look into the eyes of tax collectors as they sue you in court; see their poverty and give them your coat. Look into…

“'Evangelical' means being radically open to the gospel in all of its implications, including challenges to our comfort zones and vested interest in upholding the status quo and reiterating the past."
- Roger E. Olson, in How to Be Evangelical without Being Conservative

Technically, self-pity cannot exist. By definition from the New World Dictionary of American English, it is literally impossible to achieve, but much like other oxymorons such as jumbo-shrimp and plastic-glasses, two words, contradictory in nature, are put together to form a completely new noun. Let's take a look at each word: Self- One's own person as distinct from all others. Pity- Sorrow felt for another's suffering or misfortune.      …