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Living for Jesus

HI ,

I live in Arizona, where we’ve been having record heat. Every day in July topped 110 degrees Fahrenheit (43.3 degrees Celsius). No matter how you measure it, that’s hot!

So the family and I got away from the heat at the end of the month. We took a cruise to Alaska where the temperature was almost 1/2 of what it was at my home. We had a great time, seeing bears and whales and enjoying the cool for sure!

I took my current writing project with me and spend some nice hours up on the deck of the ship writing – on my phone. The section I was working on… Old Testament Application Patterns:

  • Special Person Syndrome
  • Covenant Callbacks
  • Stony Hearts and the Missing Holy Spirit
  • Temple Temptations
  • Ancient Artifacts

Yep. Those are the sections that I was writing about. Do you have any idea what I might have been saying? I’d love to know how you would fill in the blanks with those headings when talking about applying passages from the Old Testament.

Turns out that I had to write it all on my phone, because the app I use is Apple only – and that was the only compatible device. It’s not the first time I’ve published something that I ended up writing on my phone – it’s a convenient and “always available” platform.

This is all fun and good. but not what I really wanted to write about. I really wanted to talk about how hard it is to follow Jesus. This is something I’ve been thinking a lot about.

I’ve really been wrestling with the falleness of our world. How it is totally opposed to God. I think back to what Paul said in Ephesians 6. We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers against the ruler of the darkness of this world. Strong language. But I really sense it in these late days.

The ONLY way to persevere against the pressure to confirm is to be firmly grounded in God’s word and His will. I’m not talking about a casual assent, but about a fierce clinging. God’s people need to be increasingly about God. The only other option is to become diluted.

In my Bible reading, I’ve been getting a lot of the Prophets. They were a strident voice calling Israel back to God. They pulled no punches. They laid it bare. it’s a major thing to not let error creep into your life. And that’s a lot of what happened in Israel.

It’s been very convicting. And it really calls me back to the utter necessity of Biblical Literacy. If we don’t learn from the Bible, we won’t learn. So it’s on us to engage and do so with intention and with purpose. We’re in a war. There are no half measures.

So I’m looking forward to what I can do to create tools for Biblical literacy. Nominally that will be books and Bible studies.

I hope you feel a bit of this burn too. Loss of intention is a really big deal. And I hope you can find a way to maintain your intention in a way that really drives you toward holiness.

The weather in Arizona is still hot. There’s no doubt that we’re in a desert. The temp might not be over 110, but it’s still over 100. So I’ll be staying inside mostly and continuing to work on projects. So I hope to be releasing my next item in the early fall.

Click here to see my new book and even sign up to be notified when it gets published.

Stay tuned!

Dennis

denthewise

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