called to stand here

I'm reading a book called Pure Heart: Restoration of the Heart Through the Beatitudes . The forming concept of the book is intriguing: that the Beatitudes offer healing and guidance in a couple of critical areas. First and foremost, our identity as children of God. Secondly, as children of imperfect parents. I'd always understood the spiritual aspect (as much as I could grasp such a far-reaching concept), but never the richness of the natural piece of this. As I have delved into this very personal teaching by Tom and Donna Cole, who both have come out of the homosexual lifestyle, I did a little study on this passage in Matthew 5. Lo and behold, Matthew Henry's Commentary sheds some very interesting light on this second principle. He points out that the Old Testament concludes with a curse in Malachi 4:6: He will convince parents to look after their children and children to look up to their parents. If they refuse, I'll come and put the land under a curse." (The Me...

In Genesis, the Lord God commands Adam not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, "for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die" (2:17b). The serpent was all over that warning, telling the woman, "You will not surely die" (3:4). And the woman saw that the fruit was delightful. She ate it, handed some to Adam, and they didn't "die"; but their eyes were opened, just like the serpent promised. He's batting 2 for 3, it appears: they didn't "die," their eyes were opened, but now what about them becoming like God, knowing good and evil? I spent an hour with my nine-year-old on Genesis 2 and 3 this morning, and it is dawning on me that God's definition of die was completely different than the one the serpent presented to the woman. The temptation he offered her was based on a cunning deception, and his understanding of her desire to be deceived. Just like my nine-year-old sometimes doesn't want to believe the...