The Plumbline

I'll throw out the old plan I set up with their ancestors when I led them by the hand out of Egypt. They didn't keep their part of the bargain, so I looked away and let it go. This new plan I'm making with Israel isn't going to be written on paper, isn't going to be chiseled in stone; this time I'm writing out the plan in them, carving it on the lining of their hearts. I'll be their God, they'll be my people. They won't go to school to learn about me, or buy a book called God in Five Easy Lessons. They'll all get to know me firsthand, the little and the big, the small and the great. They'll get to know me by being kindly forgiven, with the slate of their sins forever wiped clean. (Hebrews 8:7-12) The old saying "Don't throw out the baby with the bath water" always made we wonder. Just how many parents and nannies of those tiny children actually made them disappear with the bath water? Silly as it seems to consider that one, the...

Romans 12:1-2 - it is time to train our minds (Craig Groeschel) - the greatest power to overcome the lies within our minds is the truth. So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you. The more we think a thought, the easier it is to think it again. The more we think a thought, the more we make it the dominate thought pattern, it will freely emerge without us having to think upon it with very much eff...