Sometimes it’s hard to pray. Sometimes it feels like you’re repeating words, not talking to a person. From this we may even wonder if our faith is weak.
When that happens, what are we forgetting? What is missing?
For the good, the bad, and the uncomfortable, go to the Old Testament. Because it’s largely a narrative, the Old Testament shows cause and effect—of every kind. You can trust it to tell the juicy parts.
I want to show you some match-ups I discovered. It’s a set of revealing comparisons of those who got it right and those who didn’t.
1. Why holiness matters.
2. How people become holy.
I’ll share these principles at the end. But see if you can find them yourself in the following comparisons:
The treasures of Egypt did not hold him back, nor the pleasures of sin. Moses set his course. He refused to be called a prince of Egypt. Instead he chose affliction with the people of God.
If ever there was a case of laying aside a wealth of distractions, it was Moses.
Moses chose God’s vision. Why was he able to make the right choice?
Those two words, “judge not,” can threaten to stop a dialogue.
But two more words can restart it: “keep reading.”
By the third verse Jesus has pointed out that we should indeed be judging our own spiritual state:
“And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”
By the fifth verse Jesus commands that a hypocrite ought to take the beam out of his own eye:
“And then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.”
Sometimes I worry that there are as many versions of “Christianity” as there are Christians. On matters of our faith, and especially on modern disputes, how can we understand the Bible more clearly?
When you see so many interpretations, you begin to wonder if it’s possible to know what the Bible even teaches about a given issue—until you actually read the Bible, that is.
