At church the unspoken rule is that you must keep doubts to yourself. Bury your questions. But when you bury questions and doubts alive, they haunt your faith forever.
How do you keep the faith when faith has a way of getting mucked up with doubt and disappointment? And why does nobody talk about this?
Death ain't no joke. It's the one undisputed fact of life. Death wins every time. You die then you're dead. There's no coming back. Or so we thought. Easter changes everything!
When Jesus was on trial, Pilate offered the crowd a prisoner exchange. Jesus or Barabbas? One man lives, the other man dies. The choice was already made by Jesus himself, to die in the place of the guilty one.
A tourist went missing in Iceland. After hours of looking, the search party found her...IN THE SEARCH PARTY. She didn't realize she was the one they were looking for. Can a person be lost without even knowing it?
Blink and you will miss him, but there's a naked man that runs through Gethsemane as Jesus is arrested. Who is he? Why does the Bible include him? What does his desperate escape say about the cost of following Jesus?
He wasn't a traitor when he first followed Jesus, healed the sick, and cast out demons in his name. Jesus said there was a traitor among the 12 and nobody suspected Judas. How does a follower of Jesus become a servant of the devil? Could it happen to you?
You can do ordinary things every day. But when you have the chance to do something extraordinary for Jesus, don't let that moment pass you by. The common-sense crowd will criticize. The lukewarm crowd will try to quench your fire. Let nothing stop you.
Proverbs 6 gives a list of the 7 things God hates. Lying and murder are there, but what's at the top of the list? Looking down on other people. If your attitude toward people is wrong, you can't be right with God.
So there's a rich man, who loves his wealth, drops dead, and his poor naked soul enters eternity. When Jesus tells the story, he calls the man a fool, and it makes you wonder: What make a person rich? and Who's Jesus calling a fool?