God

Our Spiritual Life

Faith, free will, testing, punishment, and sin; the spiritual aspects of life with God have very concrete effects on how we live every day.

Day One: Faith
Our relationship with God is similar to our relationship with others in that all relationships require faith. We can never fully know any other person. We cannot experience all they experience nor enter into their minds to know what their thoughts and emotions are...
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For more, see: "Does God expect us to have blind faith?" and "Faith vs. Works"

Day Two: God's Sovereignty and Our Free Will
When we talk about free will, we are usually concerned with the matter of salvation. Few are interested in whether we have the free will to choose salad or steak for our dinner tonight...
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For more, see: "Free Will and God's Sovereignty"

Day Three: Father God
"See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know Him" (1 John 3:1)...
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For more, see: "What does it mean that God is our Abba Father?"

Day Four: Testing Us
When we ask why God tests us or allows us to be tested, we are admitting that testing does indeed come from Him. When God tests His children, He does a valuable thing. David sought God's testing...
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Day Five: Sin and Consequences
In order to answer this question, we first need to distinguish between punishment and discipline. For believers in Jesus, all our sin—past, present, and future—has already been punished on the cross...
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For more, see: "Why should we be punished for sin when sinning is our nature?"

Day Six: Forgotten Sins
There are several passages in the Bible that indicate that God forgives and forgets our sin. Isaiah 43:25 says, "I, even I, am he who blots out your transgressions, for my own sake, and remembers your sins no more"...
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Day Seven: Temptations
In Genesis 22:1, the Hebrew word translated "tempted" is the word nacah, and it means "to test, try, prove, tempt, assay, put to the proof or test." Because it has so many possible synonyms, we must look to the context and compare it to other passages...
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Image Credit: skeeze; Untitled; Creative Commons