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Bible Study

In Bible Study, Blog, Luke on
February 28, 2022

Jesus Draws Near to the Grieving

“But what is grief, if not love persevering?”

Quoted by Vision in the Disney+ series Wandavision, this question quickly resonated with viewers all over the country and all over the world when episode eight aired. We live in a broken world, and none of us are strangers to grief. We’ve all experienced the deaths of aging parents, close friends, and unborn children. We’ve all dealt with painful break-ups and awful falling-outs with people we loved dearly. We’ve all been betrayed or attacked by someone we once trusted and thought very highly of. And with everything that has happened in our world over the past two years, our levels of grief are higher than they’ve ever been before.

Grief causes us to feel a lot of things. Angry. Confused. Numb. Depressed. Anxious. Devastated. Guilty. Listless. Helpless. Alone. When we’re grieving the loss of someone or something, we may even feel like God is far away from us, ignoring our prayers and pleas. But the truth is that God draws near to us in our grief. And this is made evident to us when we see Jesus encounter a grieving widow in Luke 7.

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In Bible Study, Blog, Psalm on
February 14, 2022

My Heart’s Desire

Today is Valentine’s Day. And like many of you, I will be spending it alone.

I mean, I won’t be completely alone today. I’ll go to work and interact with co-workers and clients, and I’ll likely have dinner with my parents tonight. But I won’t have a boyfriend or husband who will send flowers to me, do something special with me, or profess their undying love for me.

Like every other single Christian, I’ve been told that singleness is a gift and, in some cases, better than marriage. But it truly is my heart’s desire to fall in love, get married, and start a family with a faithful and godly man. I would be lying if I said my heart doesn’t sink a little every time I see someone I know getting engaged, married, or pregnant. But there are no possible marriage prospects in my life at the moment, and it appears that my heart’s desire is not on the horizon of my near future.

However, there are some Christians who believe that they can make their hearts’ desires come to fruition. They think that they can manifest, declare, and claim their desires in Jesus’ name, and all their wishes and dreams will come true. This is based on one of the most misunderstood, misinterpreted, and misapplied verses in the Bible: Psalm 37:4.

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In Bible Study, Blog, Luke on
January 31, 2022

Jesus Draws Near to the Powerless

I cannot imagine what it must be like to never be able to walk or run. I cannot fathom what it must feel like to never be able to stand up and stretch and move around. As a person who likes to be in control of her life, I can’t conceive how frustrated I would be and how powerless I would feel that I couldn’t do normal, everyday tasks, like buying groceries, or putting on clothes, or going to the bathroom.

It can be easy for able-bodied people to take these things for granted, to forget how many things we need our legs for. I thank God that He has blessed me with legs that can run, walk, bend, stretch, skip, jump, crouch, and squat. But the unimaginable, the unfathomable, the inconceivable, the frustrating powerlessness is a reality for many people, including the paralyzed man in Luke 5.

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In Bible Study, Blog, Genesis on
January 17, 2022

Savior of the World

I am very thankful that I had the privilege of attending Bible college. I know it’s not an opportunity that many Christians have, and I’m glad that I was able to spend five years of my life studying theology and the Bible on a more academic level. Those five years made me into the theology nerd, Bible student, and writer I am today. During my bachelor’s and master’s degree programs, I learned about a lot of fun topics, like exegesis and hermeneutics, aseity and theophanies, cessationism and special revelation, double imputation and substitutionary atonement.

One of my favorite theological topics I learned about was typology. Theopedia defines typology as “a method of biblical interpretation whereby an element found in the Old Testament is seen to prefigure one found in the New Testament.”[1] Essentially, a type is someone or something in the Old Testament that foreshadows a greater someone or something in the New Testament, and many of the types found in the Old Testament point forward to Jesus and the salvation He provided for us. One such type was a man named Joseph.

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In Bible Study, Blog, Luke on
January 3, 2022

Jesus Draws Near to the Hurting

By some miracle, I’ve managed to never test positive for COVID-19 over the past two years. I say it’s a miracle because I’ve continued working throughout the entire pandemic, and I come into contact with a lot of different people at my job. I’m convinced that I have had it at some point and was just asymptomatic or had really mild symptoms and didn’t realize it was COVID.

I’m very grateful that I’ve never had COVID (or at least had no COVID symptoms) for many reasons. But one of the main reasons I’m thankful for never having COVID is that I never had to quarantine. At the beginning of the pandemic, it was hard enough to only go from home to work back to home again and never go anywhere else or see anyone else other than my immediate family and co-workers. I can’t imagine what it would have been like to be isolated for days or even weeks on end and never see anyone or even go outside. I can’t imagine what it would’ve felt like for everyone to avoid me at all costs.

Sadly, many people, whether they’ve tested positive for COVID-19 or they’ve been diagnosed with something else, have been avoided, shunned, made to be outcasts because of their illness or disease, both in present times and in ancient times. And we can see this clearly in the story of Jesus cleansing a leper.

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