A Prayer to Cultivate a Heart of ForgivenessBy Lynette Kittle Bible Reading:"Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you"– Colossians 3:13 Listen or Read Below: Where does forgiveness begin? And how do we cultivate it in our lives? Is it something we can stir up within ourselves, willing ourselves to forgive? Not at all, because forgiveness is not something we draw from within ourselves. Rather, it comes from drawing it from Christ Jesus and the forgiveness He gives us. Ephesians 4:32 urges, "Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you." When we receive God's forgiveness through Jesus, receiving His free gift, we are receiving an unending source of forgiveness that springs forth from Him. When we tap into it, we surrender our claim to holding an unforgiving heart towards anyone else. How God's Forgiveness Works God's forgiveness has stipulations that many of us just breeze over, not often paying much attention to them, especially when we are holding unforgiveness in our hearts. But as Matthew 6:14 points out, "For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, Your heavenly Father will also forgive you."  Many believers tend to skip right over these words, believing God can forgive us of our sins, even though none of us deserve it because we haven't earned it, but when it comes to forgiving others, that's another story. Funny how some of us believe it's up to us to decide who deserves forgiveness and, if so, what route they have to go to receive it from us like saying the right words, the ones we want them to say to make it right in our eyes. The trouble is that God doesn't give us discretion in choosing whom we forgive based on our reasoning and rationalization. He doesn't even exempt us from forgiving those who have done unspeakable things. Yet Jesus made it clear in Matthew 6:15, "But if you do not forgive others their sins, Your Father will not forgive your sins." Cultivating Forgiveness Include Self Examination Truthfully, none of us deserve God's forgiveness, a stark reality that many individuals are unwilling to accept, rejecting the truth that they are in no way, by no effort or merit of their own, deserving of God's forgiveness. It's looking at the speck in another person's eye while missing the plank in our own that Jesus addressed in Matthew 7:3-5: "Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?  How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,' when all the time there is a plank in your own eye?  You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye." Often, we compare ourselves to others, thinking we're not so bad, so God didn't really have to do much to forgive us. But, this is pride misleading us when we consider ourselves more deserving than others of receiving His forgiveness. We're basing our Salvation on ourselves rather than receiving it through the finished work of Jesus on the cross. It's self-justifying ourselves rather than being justified by Christ, based on what we consider our own moral goodness. But like Romans 4:25 explains, only Jesus can justify us. "He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification." Cultivating Forgiveness by Receiving Forgiveness for Ourselves  By looking at ourselves and seeing how much God has forgiven us, it helps us to cultivate a heart of forgiveness towards others rather than seeing how much we think they need forgiveness. Receiving forgiveness for ourselves softens the hardness of our hearts that unforgiveness creates within us. It's the key to cultivating it for those around us. Let's Pray: Dear Father,How can we ever express enough gratitude in our hearts for the forgiveness You give us through Jesus Christ? It's Your forgiveness that cleanses us and makes us righteous in Your sight, freeing us from the power of sin. We sincerely ask today, and each and every day, for You to soften and cultivate forgiveness within our hearts. Take away any hardness that may have built up over the years and try to keep us from forgiving each other. Help us to forgive each other, as You have so graciously forgiven us. O Lord, may Your forgiveness flow freely from Your heart through ours to those around us.In Jesus' name, amen. Photo credit: ©Getty Images/Nata Bene Lynette Kittle is married with four daughters. She enjoys writing about faith, marriage, parenting, relationships, and life. Her writing has been published by Focus on the Family, Decision, Today's Christian Woman, kirkcameron.com, Ungrind.org, StartMarriageRight.com, and more. She has a M.A. in Communication from Regent University and serves as associate producer for Soul Check TV. Related Resource: Remember God’s Enduring Love for You in this Guided Meditation on Psalm 100! This guided Christian meditation from Psalm 100 will help you experience and praise God for his unending love for you. Become aware of God's presence with you, and praise God for his loyal and enduring love from the beginning of time and into the future. Listen to every episode of the So Much More Podcast on LifeAudio.com, or subscribe on Apple or Spotify so you never miss an episode! Now that you’ve prayed, are you in need of someone to pray for YOU? Click the button below! The post A Prayer for Cultivating a Heart of Worship – Your Daily Prayer – September 22 appeared first on GodUpdates.

A Prayer to Cultivate a Heart of ForgivenessBy Lynette Kittle Bible Reading:"Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you"– Colossians 3:13 Listen or Read Below: Where does forgiveness begin? And how do we cultivate it in our lives? Is it something we can stir up within ourselves, willing ourselves to forgive? Not at all, because forgiveness is not something we draw from within ourselves. Rather, it comes from drawing it from Christ Jesus and the forgiveness He gives us. Ephesians 4:32 urges, "Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you." When we receive God's forgiveness through Jesus, receiving His free gift, we are receiving an unending source of forgiveness that springs forth from Him. When we tap into it, we surrender our claim to holding an unforgiving heart towards anyone else. How God's Forgiveness Works God's forgiveness has stipulations that many of us just breeze over, not often paying much attention to them, especially when we are holding unforgiveness in our hearts. But as Matthew 6:14 points out, "For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, Your heavenly Father will also forgive you."  Many believers tend to skip right over these words, believing God can forgive us of our sins, even though none of us deserve it because we haven't earned it, but when it comes to forgiving others, that's another story. Funny how some of us believe it's up to us to decide who deserves forgiveness and, if so, what route they have to go to receive it from us like saying the right words, the ones we want them to say to make it right in our eyes. The trouble is that God doesn't give us discretion in choosing whom we forgive based on our reasoning and rationalization. He doesn't even exempt us from forgiving those who have done unspeakable things. Yet Jesus made it clear in Matthew 6:15, "But if you do not forgive others their sins, Your Father will not forgive your sins." Cultivating Forgiveness Include Self Examination Truthfully, none of us deserve God's forgiveness, a stark reality that many individuals are unwilling to accept, rejecting the truth that they are in no way, by no effort or merit of their own, deserving of God's forgiveness. It's looking at the speck in another person's eye while missing the plank in our own that Jesus addressed in Matthew 7:3-5: "Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?  How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,' when all the time there is a plank in your own eye?  You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye." Often, we compare ourselves to others, thinking we're not so bad, so God didn't really have to do much to forgive us. But, this is pride misleading us when we consider ourselves more deserving than others of receiving His forgiveness. We're basing our Salvation on ourselves rather than receiving it through the finished work of Jesus on the cross. It's self-justifying ourselves rather than being justified by Christ, based on what we consider our own moral goodness. But like Romans 4:25 explains, only Jesus can justify us. "He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification." Cultivating Forgiveness by Receiving Forgiveness for Ourselves  By looking at ourselves and seeing how much God has forgiven us, it helps us to cultivate a heart of forgiveness towards others rather than seeing how much we think they need forgiveness. Receiving forgiveness for ourselves softens the hardness of our hearts that unforgiveness creates within us. It's the key to cultivating it for those around us. Let's Pray: Dear Father,How can we ever express enough gratitude in our hearts for the forgiveness You give us through Jesus Christ? It's Your forgiveness that cleanses us and makes us righteous in Your sight, freeing us from the power of sin. We sincerely ask today, and each and every day, for You to soften and cultivate forgiveness within our hearts. Take away any hardness that may have built up over the years and try to keep us from forgiving each other. Help us to forgive each other, as You have so graciously forgiven us. O Lord, may Your forgiveness flow freely from Your heart through ours to those around us.In Jesus' name, amen. Photo credit: ©Getty Images/Nata Bene Lynette Kittle is married with four daughters. She enjoys writing about faith, marriage, parenting, relationships, and life. Her writing has been published by Focus on the Family, Decision, Today's Christian Woman, kirkcameron.com, Ungrind.org, StartMarriageRight.com, and more. She has a M.A. in Communication from Regent University and serves as associate producer for Soul Check TV. Related Resource: Remember God’s Enduring Love for You in this Guided Meditation on Psalm 100! This guided Christian meditation from Psalm 100 will help you experience and praise God for his unending love for you. Become aware of God's presence with you, and praise God for his loyal and enduring love from the beginning of time and into the future. Listen to every episode of the So Much More Podcast on LifeAudio.com, or subscribe on Apple or Spotify so you never miss an episode! Now that you’ve prayed, are you in need of someone to pray for YOU? Click the button below! The post A Prayer for Cultivating a Heart of Worship – Your Daily Prayer – September 22 appeared first on GodUpdates.

The world’s response to israel since October 7 can be boiled down to this. There is a double standard when it comes to Jews and the state of Israel. pic.twitter.com/bcZrNuAnje — Maccabi Lev-Ari (@Maccabi226km) September 21, 2024

I can neither confirm nor deny being a Mossad Agent in Nasrallah’s bunker… https://t.co/ERv8b7kcmP — (((Emanuel Miller))) ?? (@emanumiller) September 20, 2024

When you read in Scripture that church members must submit to their leaders (e.g., Heb. 13:17), do you cringe, imagining servile compliance to even unbiblical demands? When you hear Luke praising the Bereans for fact-checking Paul’s preaching (Acts 17:11), do you hear an endorsement for church members independently evaluating which parts of pastoral leadership they’ll respect? Both those responses are wrong. Yet Scripture does require us to be both submissive and thoughtful. These two principles are hard for us to harmonize; we mustn’t reject proper authority or abdicate our responsibility to be intelligent listeners. There must be another way. The closing admonitions of the book of Hebrews call church members to submit to their leaders and practice discernment by refusing to be “led away by diverse and strange teachings” (Heb. 13:9). We must submit thoughtfully. What Is Thoughtful Submission? Thoughtful submission is the practice of respecting and obeying proper church authority while maintaining a biblically judicious walk with God. God Requires Believers to Be Submissive The author of Hebrews says, “Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls, as those who will have to give an account” (13:17). We must trust them, listen to them, and heed their biblical instruction. In traditional vows for church membership, members promise to “submit to the government of the church,” and “to its admonition and discipline” in the sad event of personal backsliding. Church leaders are overseers under Christ (Acts 20:28), tasked by him to use the keys of the kingdom to bind and loose on earth as he does in heaven through the preaching of the Word and the practice of church discipline (Matt. 16:19). This is a challenging command. Our leaders are ordinary and flawed people; they’re peers who wield Christ’s authority. Yet as we love and submit to them, we show our love for and submission to God (see 1 John 4:20). But submission isn’t servility. God Requires Believers to Be Discerning The Reformation rejected the Roman Catholic notion of implicit faith, or an uninformed trust in church teaching. Seventeenth-century Reformed theologian Francis Turretin argued that Roman Catholic leaders sheltered the Bible that they might “the more easily . . . subject the people to them by a blind obedience.” But God calls faithful Christians to “grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” (2 Pet. 3:18). This requires more than simply accepting what a church leader says. Scripture requires us to be both submissive and thoughtful. The “noble” Bereans exhibit this discernment. “They received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so” (Acts 17:11). By refusing to be ruled by human opinions, they exemplify the calling of all believers to share in Christ’s priestly anointing, striving “with a free conscience against sin and the devil,” as one Reformation catechism puts it. The Bereans had no Bibles; they weren’t independent judges of apostolic preaching. Possessing a Bible, reading it, and deciding for yourself what it means isn’t Berean-like. Instead, we should examine Scripture collectively, as a “church, under the leadership of pastors and elders, in consultation with the Christian community past and present.” Because of the importance of thoughtful submission, you should join a church that aligns with your biblical convictions. And if you later find that your core beliefs are mismatched with those of the leadership, it may be right to find a new church where you can submit with a clear conscience. God wants believers to graciously submit to their leaders as free people in Christ (1 Pet. 2:16). How Can I Practice Thoughtful Submission? Several Christian disciplines can help us as we strive to maintain the tension between submission and thoughtful Christian liberty. 1. Be ‘strengthened by grace’ (Heb. 13:9). We must all grow in true Christian teaching lest we be “carried about by every wind of doctrine” (Eph. 4:14). But we should use Scripture, and especially the preached Word, not as ammunition for disagreement but as a means of grace to strengthen our faith in Christ. Instead of looking for the preacher’s shortcomings (see Luke 11:54), we should listen like prospectors eagerly panning for gold, examining what we hear with Spirit-generated charity. Growing in grace equips us to “go to [Jesus] outside the camp and bear the reproach he endured,” even in our commitment to submission (Heb. 13:13). We should pray for grace to “[submit] to one another out of reverence for Christ” (Eph. 5:21) and for leaders to “act honorably in all things” (Heb. 13:18). 2. Distinguish the issues. Church members will struggle to “amen” the preaching and leadership of their overseers, but in different ways depending on the issue. For example, on some matters, you mustn’t agree to disagree. Paul justly confronted Peter when he denied the gospel (Gal. 2:11–14). As members of the priesthood of all believers, Christians must defend the truth against error. But often leadership flaws are less critical. Apollos, for example, was a competent but imperfect preacher. So “when Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they took him aside and explained to him the way of God more accurately” (Acts 18:24–28). Good leaders will welcome such help. Some of our struggles with leaders are even less substantial. Personality differences can complicate the process of leading and submitting. Let’s refuse to allow nonessential matters to fracture peace and give the Devil a foothold in church life. 3. Ask questions. Sometimes in their struggle to submit to Jesus’s teachings, the disciples asked helpful questions (see Matt. 19:25). Sincere questions can produce greater clarity, either by sharpening the questioner’s mind or by strengthening the leader’s teaching. Still, sometimes, even humbly asking thoughtful questions won’t satisfy your conscience. Even then, there ought to be a way to object appropriately. In just leadership structures, there’s a proper appeals process. Church leaders must be willing to either clarify or repent of their teachings—perhaps through the influence of other leaders to whom they’re accountable (see Acts 15:1–35). Asking important questions isn’t defiance; it’s essential for thoughtful submission. 4. Trust ‘the great shepherd of the sheep’ (Heb. 13:20). God will “equip you with everything good that you may do his will, working in us that which is pleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever” (Heb. 13:21). Do you accept Jesus’s promise that your thoughtful submission will bring “joy” to church leaders and great “advantage” to the flock (v. 17; cf. Phil. 2:29)? Do you believe that a “gentle and quiet,” submissive spirit, worked in you by God’s Spirit, “in God’s sight is very precious” (1 Pet. 3:4)? Let’s refuse to allow nonessential matters to fracture peace and give the Devil a foothold in church life. Jesus is leading his church in perfect wisdom according to a flawless plan. That plan includes faithful shepherding and the wise submission of God’s sheep.You must submit to your leaders on matters in which God has given them authority to decide: They can’t prescribe a diet for you (Mark 7:14–21). But they can discipline you for adultery (v. 21). But you shouldn’t submit thoughtlessly. That’s a delicate balance to maintain. But because doing so is God’s will, you can be sure that Jesus will help you and that the act of thoughtful submission will result in a closer walk with him.

Democrats are losing their advantage over Republicans regarding requests for mail-in voting in the 2024 presidential election, according to recent data. A chart created by Eric Daugherty, the assistant…

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Amjad Taha on “X” h/t Nita Who is Amjad Taha? British-Bahraini social media influencer Amjad Taha, a journalist and political commentator on Arab affairs,…

Vice President Kamala Harris is reportedly planning to skip the historic Al Smith fundraiser dinner, according to her campaign. Officials from the Harris campaign reportedly told organizers of the event…