Category: Bible
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Is God Good?: The Challenge of Faith in a World at War
What man among you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to…
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Seeking and Finding: The Reason to Look, Ask, and Knock Is to Find
For everyone who asks receives, and the one who searches finds, and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened. (Matthew 7:8) In Buddhist philosophy, desire is the cause of all pain. Since all is ultimately illusion, desire is futile. It is a meaningless yearning after nothing, and so it hurts us. To…
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What If We Are Not Entitled? Asking, Seeking, and Knocking in Community
Keep asking, and it will be given to you. Keep searching, and you will find. Keep knocking, and the door will be opened to you. (Matthew 7:7) What if we are not entitled? What if we don’t assume that anyone owes us anything, but in everything, we recognize that we have tremendous power through the…
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How to Read the Bible (The Ask, Seek, Knock Approach)
Keep asking, and it will be given to you. Keep searching, and you will find. Keep knocking, and the door will be opened to you. (Matthew 7:7) Asking, seeking, and knocking is a posture of the heart. It is an approach to all of life, especially spiritual life. It is characterized not just by openness…
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You Can Hear from God: Listening Prayer and the Choice to Believe
Last week I wrote about coming to God in prayer with an ask-seek-knock kind of approach—with an expectation that God will speak, so we should listen. When you try to do this, you will be challenged. By distractibility. By frailty. Mostly by doubt. Don’t Doubt In James 1:5-7, we are told: Now if any of…
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The Prayer that Listens: How to Practice a Lifestyle of Ask, Seek, Knock
Keep asking, and it will be given to you. Keep searching, and you will find. Keep knocking, and the door will be opened to you. (Matthew 7:7) If I had to sum up my spirituality—the way I do life, the way I commune with God and the way I approach him—in three words, those three…
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To Seek and Keep on Seeking: Jesus’ Call to Continual Exploration
Keep asking, and it will be given to you. Keep searching, and you will find. Keep knocking, and the door will be opened to you. (Matthew 7:7) Matthew 7:7 describes a fundamental way of life. It is an approach to all of life that changes who we become. It’s also one of “my” verses, one…
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Pearls Before Swine: Jesus the Riddler and What He Might Have Meant
The Greeks and Romans didn’t use paragraphs. So when my Bible lumps Matthew 7:6 in with the discussion on judgment right before it, I take it on faith that they’ve got the flow right. In this case, though, I’m not sure they do. It’s curious either way that Jesus would follow up a long teaching…
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How to Be a Judgment-Free Zone: Jesus on Judgment, Part 4
In an earlier post I wrote that seeing, understanding, and discerning are intuitive, things we do automatically and instinctively, but judgment is a choice. I believe that to be true, but it isn’t obvious. For most of us, judging itself FEELS instinctive. We do it so fast we aren’t aware we’re doing it. So Jesus’s…
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The Comparison Trap: Jesus on Judgment, Part 3
Why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye but don’t notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ and look, there’s a log in your eye? Hypocrite! First take the log out of your eye, and…