Book: Luke

There is only one Kingdom that will last forever! And that Kingdom is the only place we can take refuge. Until Christ comes again, earthly kingdoms will rise and fall. Christians will face persecution, but our hope is in the one who reigns forever.

You can give all the money in the world to the Church and still not be right with God! True stewardship consists of giving God the best of our time and talents, as well as our treasure. Most importantly, right stewardship starts with the condition of the heart. And if we are spiritually fatigued, then our stewardship is going to be limited. We can’t give our best to God if we are running on spiritual fumes!

Do you ever grow tired of hearing the noise of the world around you? Our world has been saturated with evil since the fall of man in the Garden of Eden. For the Christian, it is easy to be discouraged by the many voices that speak out against the Gospel. Even greater is the temptation to give in to them. Here, the Rev. Galloway shares God’s reminder for us to be still, and trust in Christ.

Can you really be a Christian when you don’t pray every day? A recent Pew survey indicates that roughly half of all professing Christians do not pray every day. Without daily prayer, we cannot be truly happy. And when we pray, we should pray like the tax collector, begging for God’s mercy. We need to be people of real prayer.

It is said that our issue as Christians is not that we ask God for too much, but that we ask God for far too little. The same is true of our frequency in asking. Our problem is not that we come to God too much, but that we hardly come to him in prayer at all. Listen as the Rector encourages us to be persistent in prayer.

Here’s the great preoccupation of Americans: We do everything in our lives to avoid mortality. Are we not all going to die, however? We can’t avoid mortality, but we can enjoy eternal life in the presence of God, like the Samaritan and like Ruth, if we simply put our trust in Jesus Christ to save us.

How many of us have gone through a season of chaos and hardship in our lives – be it illness, financial hardship, or broken relationships – and lost sight of what the LORD is doing? We cry like the prophet, “How long will I cry for help, God, and you will not listen to me?” But hindsight is twenty-twenty, is it not? How differently would we approach our present sufferings if we only considered how God was using them to increase our future holiness!

The rich man in Jesus’ parable about Lazarus isolated himself in his wealth, never inviting the poor and the lowly to join him. The rich man’s greed separated him from Abraham across a great chasm in the afterlife, which could never be crossed. Christians living in 21st century America should be careful to consider how we, like the rich man, might be allowing our own arrogance to prevent us from loving God and our neighbor.

In our sinful nature, we naturally seek personal gain and prosperity over the Word of the Lord. We are tempted to fool God into thinking we are perfectly good (when we are not), just as we fool other people into thinking we are more righteous than they. But God will not be fooled by our human deceptions, and we cannot escape our own hypocrisy except through the Grace of Jesus Christ. Prosperity will always disappear, but the Word of the Lord stands forever.