And just like that, I judged them. I lowered myself to the standards of thinking I was somehow better of a person than them. Judgement ( Matthew 7:1-3) is where it may start and eventually it grows into something worse (James 1:15). Being a Christian is not such an easy task, in fact, it may be the hardest one of all. We seem to only give God 50% of ourselves and pretend like the other 50% is somehow going to add up to be a perfect 100%. We dismiss that snap judgment we just made about a person we just came in contact with or perhaps it was a different form of sin that we seem to be calling ‘acceptable’. We give ourselves the label Christian and acknowledge that we are in some way or another
Have you ever heard someone say the phrase “I do [insert activity] religiously.” I watch football, I run, I eat pizza, follow stocks, listen to music, practice my instrument… religiously. The uses of the words “religious” or “religiously” have developed into a way to describe someone devote, zealous, or deeply invested in a particular subject. The more I think about that phrase the more of a compliment it seems. Really what people are saying is “I’m as devoted to doing [insert activity] as Christians are to serving God.” What a nice thing to say about us! But is it true? Are we as devoted to serving and loving our God as the world is to its own ambitions? Do we practice our religion religiou
I’m sure we’ve all seen a cartoon or two in our lifetimes. Cartoons are a form of animation in which the smooth motions that we see are the product of many many MANY images being shown quickly in sequence. Each of these individual images are known as a “frame.” In your typical Bugs Bunny episode, for instance, the number of frames necessary to show 1 second of footage is 24. So that’s 24 individually drawn images needed to make Bugs Bunny move for one second. If an average short episode is about 8 minutes long, it takes 11,520 individually drawn frames to be fully animated. That’s a lot of images! Looking at just one frame shows us only a still image and it’s only with the full combination t
The title /played (“slash played”) is a common command used in several large scale games I have played. When entered it tells the player how much time they have put into the game; be it hours, days, months, or years. It’s a handy little function that’s been used both as a bragging point to friends and an eye opener for concerned family. We deal with time a lot in our lives. Actually, we deal with time… all the time. Because time is the marker, or the organizing box if you will, we use to categorize our efforts, our money, our actions, our energy, our very existence! Things can get a little “duct tape around the head” when talking about time in the Bible, but I want to focus on the time that
