Pastors' Blogs (Page 8)

Please note that there are just five readings this week: Acts 18:24-28; Acts 19:1-10; Acts 19:11-20; Acts 19:21-27; Acts 19:28-41

We continue our reading in the Book of Acts: Acts 15:22-41; Acts 16:1-15; Acts 16:16-40; Acts 17:1-15; Acts 17:16-34; Acts 18:1-23

Here are our readings for this week: Acts 11:19-12:5; Acts 12:6-25; Acts 13:1-12; Acts 13:13-52; Acts 14:1-28; Acts 15:1-21

I hope your Bible reading and meditation is going well.  Consider sending me a brief email to let me know how it is going, or if you have a question you would like me to address in the weekly blog about meditating, praying, and applying Scripture.  Please send to: mgisaiah6 [at] yahoo [dot] com

Open Doors Ministry provides these eight prayer requests: Pray for boldness to stand firm and to witness for Christ (Rev. 2:10). Pray for God’s protection (2 Thess. 3:2-3). Pray for grace to forgive their oppressors (Lk. 6:27-28). Pray for deliverance of their nations from spiritual bondage (Eph. 6:10-18). Pray for God to open the doors of religious freedom (Col. 4:3-4). Pray for wisdom for the ruling authorities (1 Tim. 2:1-2). Pray for God to raise up church leaders who have…

The Bible reading verses for this week are: Acts 6:1-15 Acts 7:1-22 Acts 7:23-43 Acts 7:44-60 Acts 8:1-25 Acts 8:26-40

Oh how I love your law! It is my meditation all the day. Psalm 119:97 Our Scripture readings this week are: Acts 2:42-3:10 Acts 3:11-26 Acts 4:1-22 Acts 4:23-37 Acts 5:1-16 Acts 5:17-42

We finish Luke and move to the book of Acts this week.  Remember I wrote that we would meditate through the New Testament, but not necessarily in book order.  This will allow us to spread the gospels out over the year.  Luke is also the author of the book of Acts.  While meditating through Acts, one truth that will become clear is that the Holy Spirit wants the world for Jesus and he empowers our mission (our witness).

Remember that meditation is a command that comes with a promise of success.  This promised success is spiritual in nature.  It is a God-given capacity to do his will more and more.

Remember that meditation is selecting from the assigned passage a sentence or two or a verse or two to ponder more deeply and pray into your life.  Read the passage carefully and then meditate deeply on what you selected.  This will allow the broad contact (the whole passage you read) to aid your meditating (on the selected section).

Charles Spurgeon said of John Bunyan (author of Pilgrim’s Progress): “Prick him anywhere; and you will find that his blood is Bibline, the very essence of the Bible flows from him.  He cannot speak without quoting a text, for his soul is full of the word of God.”

Yesterday at our baptism service at Jordan Lake, I had planned to talk for a few minutes about how God saves us by his grace. My plan was to remind us that Ephesians 2:8-9 says we have no reason to boast because God’s saving of us is totally a grace gift. Before I was to speak and while we were singing, Galatians 6:14 suddenly flooded my thoughts.

“When we depend upon organizations, we get what organizations can do; When we depend upon education, we get what education can do; When we depend on man, we get what man can do; but when we depend on prayer,

Asking the right questions can help us to seriously meditate on a passage of Scripture. Here are some questions that have been widely used by Christians for many years.

Donald Whitney offers this helpful analogy: …let’s define meditation as deep thinking on the truths and spiritual realities revealed in Scripture for the purposes of understanding, application, and prayer.  Meditation goes beyond hearing, reading, studying, and even memorizing as a means of taking in God’s Word. 

Walter Kaiser shares this encouraging testimony in his book “Finding God’s Will:” When I came to Regent College, I was asked to teach a hermeneutics course, so I went to the library to find the best books on interpreting Scripture.  I poured through eighty or ninety, and read about ten of them carefully  They all said the same thing: read the Bible as you would any other book.  I was astounded.  No one mentioned the importance of praying through Scripture. …

Oh, how I love your law! It is my meditation all the day.  Psalm 119:97 Meditation is not a guru sitting cross-legged with palms up contemplating nothingness. It is filling our minds with truth, not an irrational emptying of our minds. The Hebrew word for “meditate” means to “ponder deeply.”  It is to mull over God’s truth.  You are meditating when you take a bit of Scripture and “chew over” each sentence, phrase, and word.  Meditation is saturating your mind…

Last Sunday, we heard some startling statistics: on any given day, about 85% of believers have not spent time in the Scriptures; and over the course of any given week, about 68% have not been in the Word at all.  I think we would do well to personalize the question.  Ask yourself, “Where do I fit in those numbers?” Not “where do I want to?”  or “where do I pretend to?” or “where will I be when life settles down?,”…

I invite you to join me in a slow-paced reading through the New Testament that will enable us to engage in the spiritual practice of meditating in God’s holy and true word.  I’ve created a meditating plan that will take about two years to complete.  We will start with Luke’s Gospel, followed by the book of Acts.  In other words, we won’t be reading the books in the exact order they appear in the Bible.  This approach enables us to…

This past Sunday morning we looked at what the apostle Peter had to say about “the end of things.”  It is “at hand,” and that should make a difference in our priorities.  Like a spiritual bucket list, there are some things of eternal value that become more important in view of the end: prayer, loving others, practicing hospitality, and using the unique opportunities that the Lord has given us to build up others (1 Peter 4:7-11). Those unique opportunities are…