Bringing Scripture to Life

Why do we do baby dedications? First off, baby dedications are not a commandment in Scripture, although they are practiced in the Bible. Baby dedications do not save the child, that comes when they get to an age where they trust Jesus as their Savior. The reason we do baby dedications though, is because of the precedence we see set in Scripture for us. For example, we know in the Old Testament, that Hannah dedicated young Samuel, who would grow up to be the prophet of God, and would eventually anoint David as Israel's king. In 1 Samuel 1:26-28 Hannah says to Eli the priest, "O my lord! As your soul lives, my lord, I am the woman who stood by you here, praying to the LORD. For this child I prayed, and the LORD has granted me my petition which I asked of Him. Therefore I also have lent him to the LORD: as long as he lives he shall be lent to the LORD." So they worshiped the LORD there." So we see here that Hannah dedicated her first born son, Samuel to the...

La Dolce Vita, Carmel by the Sea While Lyndsey and I were in Carmel by the Sea, we ate at this amazing Restaurant called Le Dolce Vita . The salad was one of the best salads we ever ate, the thin-crust pizza was also very good, but our favorite was actually the dipping sauce they brought out for the bread. It was their own special recipe, and we had never tasted anything so great before. In fact, we liked it so much that we bought a jar of it to take with us. Because I can have many bright-ideas at times, I decided to store this amazingly great-tasting sauce in the center console of our SUV. It was while we were traveling up to Portland, Oregon a couple of days later that we discovered the jar had cracked, and the sauce was all over the inside of our center console. Pastor James MacDonald, Jeremy Camp, Selah, Mercy Me, and many more Christian Artists were covered with this once great tasting sauce, but now messy and somewhat smelly nuisance. Well, of course, it was not actually Pa...

I don't know if I have ever heard a better explanation of how faith and works go together, as what General William Booth of the Salvation Army once said. He said, "Faith and works should travel side by side, step answering to step, like the legs of men walking. First faith, and then works, and then faith again, and then works again - until they can scarcely distinguish which is the one and which is the other." The only thing that I would say could be added to this, is one last important ingredient, and that is love. Love should be the muscle that moves our faith into action. The Apostle Paul says in Galatians 5:6, "For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision avails anything, but faith working through love." Faith accompanied by works, motivated by love. May your week be filled with faith that leads to works, that is motivated by the love of Jesus Christ.

I have been reading an incredibly edifying, while at the same time inspiring book entitled, "They Found the Secret: 20 Transformed Lives that Reveal a Touch of Eternity". Story after story I find myself saying, "I can relate to that (their weaknesses), and I want to experience that (their God-moments that were so impacting upon their lives, that it changed their entire relationship with God, and their effectiveness in ministry). The author, V. Raymond Edman is best remembered as president of Wheaton College in Illinois, and as the writer of several devotional style books. In this book, Edman documents the various struggles that 20 Christians faced in their journey of faith, and how God significantly delivered them and then transformed them, and ultimately used them to transform their world. The amazing stories of such heroes of the faith like, Oswald Chambers, Hudson Taylor, John Bunyan, Amy Carmichael, D.L. Moody, Charles Finney, and Andrew Murray are shared in this b...