The Gospel of Luke

Tag Archive - Bible

Memorizing Scripture

February 10, 2008 in Bible, Spirituality with 7 Comments

I’m in my second month now of a year-long mentorship program called Successful Living. The point of it is to go through different areas of your life and see how God wants you to grow in each and ultimately where He wants you to be. One of the things that you do for each account is to memorize a Scripture passage.

Now let me be vulnerable and confess something to you. I haven’t truly committed myself to memorizing Scripture since I was a kid. I don’t know why I quit doing it once I grew up. So this program challenged me to try it again. And I’ve been blown away.

Already I’m noticing how amazing this is. My method of doing this is to write the verse on a 3×5 notecard and keep it in my car with me. Then, I recite it over and over as I drive. This has allowed me to retain what I’m trying to memorize and to keep me focused on God and His Word CONSTANTLY. And that is a tremendous thing. So far, I’ve memorized Hebrews 11:6 (which I slipped into my sermon last week) and 1 Corinthians 13:4-8a. Let me strongly encourage everyone to try this and allow God to transform you in a new way as He has been doing with me this last month. Here’s to memorizing it all someday…

Compassion

January 27, 2008 in Bible, Chaplaincy, Spirituality with 3 Comments

I recently read through the book of Matthew and something stood out to me that I hadn’t noticed before. There are 4 times when Jesus looks at people and feels compassion for them (9:36, 14:14, 15:32, 20:34). I was extremely challenged by this as I thought about it. Is that my natural response when I see people? Rarely. So I started praying that God would change my heart so that this would be true of me as well. And I haven’t had much luck with it being changed lately. So God gave me another opportunity on Friday night.

I was in my police chaplain role on a ride-along with an officer and it was a pretty slow night. The last call we had was catching two guys who had been caught trying to break into a car. As we debriefed them and searched through their things, I had a weird experience as I watched them sit on the curb. One guy was homeless and the other lived in a halfway house. I felt something that I didn’t expect…compassion. I felt sorry for these guys in a way that kind of shocked me. Here were two guys, who were living lives that none of us would ever want and they had just made another mistake that would make things even worse for them.

It felt great. I knew none of the officers I was with had any sense of anything for these guys and thought they were lost causes. So my feelings were kind of odd. But I savored the moment knowing that God had answered a prayer. So maybe there is hope at last that God will make me more like Him. Here’s to feeling more compassionate.

Taste and See

May 15, 2007 in Bible, Spirituality with 2 Comments

I read a phrase today out of Psalms that got my mind thinking. In 34:8a it says,

“Taste and see that the Lord is good.”

This simple statement brings with it the imagery that we are to enjoy God not just through understanding his goodness intellectually, or merely thinking about how good He is; but we are to experience His goodness. It is fun just to try and think of how we could do this. This is the kind of faith that I want.