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What Is Baptism and Why Is It Important?

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What is baptism, and why is it important? Short answer. Baptism is the act Jesus commanded: being placed under water, or having water applied, in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, as the public sign that a person belongs to Christ. It pictures what has already happened by faith, your old life going under with him in death and a new life rising with him. It matters because Jesus told his followers to do it (Matthew 28:19), the earliest church did it the same day people believed (Acts 2:41), and it remains the ordinary way a Christian says, in front of witnesses, that they belong to him. It does not earn salvation. It follows faith and declares it. Baptism pictures dying and rising with Christ Paul doesn't waste time being decorative about this. He asks the Roman church a blunt question: don't you know what your baptism meant? Going under the water was a burial, and coming up out of it was a resurrection, a small, physical rehearsal of the biggest event in your life...
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Matthew 7:7 Ask, Seek, Knock: What It Really Means

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There is a particular tiredness that sets in when you've prayed for the same thing so many times you've lost count. You start wondering whether God has stopped listening, whether you're asking the wrong way, whether there's some formula you've missed. This is exactly the kind of exhaustion Jesus is speaking into here. Read the three short commands slowly before anyone, including me, explains them to you. Photo by Markus Spiske on Pexels Quick answer In Matthew 7:7-11, Jesus tells his disciples to ask, seek, and knock, promising that God the Father responds to those who come to him. This is not a technique for getting whatever we want. Jesus is arguing from the lesser to the greater: if flawed human parents know how to give their children good things, how much more can God, who is not evil at all, be trusted to give good things to those who ask him. The passage is about God's character, not a prayer formula. It calls for persistence, not manipulation, and its c...
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A Prayer for Wisdom When You Must Decide Alone

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If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him. James 1:5 Maybe it's a job offer that has to be answered by Friday. A relationship to end, or not end. A parent's care that only you can arrange, because you're the only one left to arrange it. Nobody is going to make this call with you, and the not knowing is its own kind of exhausting, quite apart from whatever the decision actually costs. If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him. James 1:5 Photo by Anna Shvets on Pexels Bringing this to God There is a particular kind of loneliness in decisions nobody else can carry with you. You can talk it through with a friend, and that is good and worth doing, but at some point the phone goes down and the choice is still yours to make and yours alone to answer for. Scripture takes that loneliness seriously rather than smoothing over it. James...
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Bible Verses About Hospitality and Welcoming Others

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Some of you reading this are worn out by how much your home already holds, other people's needs, other people's mess, and hospitality feels like one more thing you're failing at. Others of you are on the receiving end this week, new to a church, new to a country, wondering if anyone will notice you standing at the edge of the room. These verses were written for both. Scripture treats welcome as costly and ordinary at the same time, which is closer to how most of us actually live it out. How to read a page like this Don't read this the way you'd scroll a newsfeed. Take one group at a time, out loud if you can, and let the notes sit before moving on. Ask which group names something true about your week right now: the guest you've been avoiding, the welcome you're still waiting for, the exhaustion of hosting when you have nothing left. Then take one verse and pray it back to God in your own words, before you jump to what you should do about it. If a verse stea...
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How to Know If You Are Truly Saved

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It is usually two in the morning when the question comes. You have prayed the prayer, you have sat in church for years, maybe decades, and still something in you asks whether any of it took. You go looking for a feeling that will settle it once and for all, and the feeling will not come. This guide will not give you that feeling either, but it will give you something more solid to stand on. Photo by Free Nature Stock on Pexels Why this is genuinely hard Assurance is one of the places where good, careful Christians land in different spots, and that alone can make the search more confusing rather than less. Some traditions teach that once God truly saves you, he keeps you, full stop; others teach that a believer can walk away and lose what they had. I will tell you where I land and why, but I will not pretend the debate is settled, because it genuinely is not. There is a second difficulty, and it is not theological at all. For some people the question 'am I really saved' is no...
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What Does It Mean to Be Filled With the Holy Spirit?

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What does it mean to be filled with the Holy Spirit? Short answer. To be filled with the Holy Spirit means being so yielded to God's Spirit that his character and power increasingly shape what you do and say. It isn't a one-time spiritual high; it's an ongoing, repeatable reality. Paul commands it in Ephesians 5:18 using a grammar that means 'keep on being filled,' not 'get filled once and move on.' You see it less in a feeling than in fruit: love, patience, boldness to speak of Christ, a life gradually more under his control than your own. Scripture doesn't make one dramatic experience the required proof of it. Photo by Ron Lach on Pexels A Command, Not a Reward for the Spiritually Elite Paul writes to the church in Ephesus, 'And do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit' (Ephesians 5:18). Notice what he sets side by side. Drunkenness is a state where something outside you takes over your speech and ju...
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