The snake in Genesis didn't come hissing. It came asking questions. Looking concerned. Sounding reasonable. Discernment is learning to hear the agenda underneath the question.
I believed in God my entire childhood because I never found enough evidence to disprove what my parents taught me. (I was actually into apologetics as a kid so this sentence does make sense lol)
Then at 10, I was hit by a car and should have died. I was healed miraculously in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. That affirmed for the rest of my life God was real.
I tried my best to live like it, I tried to prove to God I loved Him, but the older I got, the more I felt like the gap between me and Him widened.
Then at age 17, I was praying alone and reading my Bible when in the quiet of the room I heard, "Sierra, I love you."
(Sierra is my real name)
Suddenly everything clicked. God loved me. His love was not something I could or was expected to earn. It's not something that grew with my obedience or shrunk with my disobedience. It was a constant, a truth more real than my existence. God loves me. Me.
That's when I went from believing God was real to knowing who He was.
The book of Daniel in the Bible is so inspiring. Daniel never over explained himself, he didn’t spiral, he stayed discipline, quietly audacious, & God kept moving him into higher rooms of favor. Know who you are & know who GOD is.
If there's one person in the Bible I'm jealous of, it's Enoch.
Do you know what it means for God to like you so much; He's like, "Nah, I can't wait for you to live out your years or die, just come be with me now."
What did he do? How did he walk with God?
I want!
NEW: 13-year-old Australian boy swims for four hours in cold and dangerous waters to save his mom and siblings who were swept into the ocean, says God is who got him to shore.
The family was on kayaks & paddleboards when they were swept about 2.5 miles out to sea.
After a conversation with his mother, Austin Appelbee decided he would swim back to shore to find help.
Appelbee says he prayed throughout the four-hour swim and told God he would get baptized if he made it out alive.
"I don't think it was actually me [swimming]... It was God the whole time. I kept on praying, kept on praying. I said to God, 'I'll get baptized.'"
"The waves are massive, and I have no life jacket on… I just kept thinking 'just keep swimming, just keep swimming,'" he said.
"And then I finally made it to shore, and I hit the bottom of the beach, and I just collapsed."
Appelbee says when he got to shore, he had to sprint for about a mile to find help.
According to AP, the family drifted 9 miles from Quindalup and spent 10 hours in the water.
When he reached the shore, Appelbee alerted authorities, who then sent out a helicopter to find his mom, 12-year-old brother, and 8-year-old sister.
Austin's mother, Joanne Appelbee, said one of the hardest decisions of her life was sending her son to shore.
"One of the hardest decisions I ever had to make was to say to Austin: 'Try and get to shore and get some help. This could get really serious really quickly,'" she said.
What a remarkable kid.
Video: 7 News.
This kid swam for four hours in the dark to shore, then sprinted over a mile to get to a phone to call emergency services to save his mum and siblings.
He prayed the whole time and credits God for getting him there.
Warrior.
Please let us all remember to speak with grace in our hearts and in our speech, remembering first that we were also once ignorant of the things we now know and also remembering the forbearance of the Lord towards us when we walked in error. May God show us mercy.
Phillipians 4:8 Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.
The Holy Bible contains 63,779 cross references.
It was written by 40 different authors, over a span of 1,500 years. It was written on 3 different continents, and in 3 different languages.
Are we to believe that these men were time travelers and were somehow communicating with each other to “keep up the lie”?
If one author had written The Holy Bible, it would be a feat of epic proportions. The author would be known as the greatest composer in history.
This is 40 different men. Spread across a millennia and a half. They did not have the means or ability to “conspire” to concoct a lie.
How many coincidences before mathematically impossible?
If it is all a myth, then why bother with the cross references? Surely you wouldn’t want those because they prove the improbability of the Bible being written by anything other than divine inspiration.
The Holy Bible was indeed inspired by one author.
The Father.
Resist that urge not to treat prayer as urgent. This is the beginning of the sequence of sin. The lusts of your heart are more pronounced in the absence of true fellowship with God. Until you realize your pressing need for Christ in prayer, the cycles of sin will prevail.