We will find compassion if we “confess and forsake” our sins. The Lord loves us, and His convicting hand is His loving hand, designed to pressure us to release what is hurting us and others. He will rush to our aid if we get transparent with Him and others. Are there sins that you are covering and hiding? 

He who conceals his transgressions will not prosper, but he who confesses and forsakes them will find compassion. (Proverbs 28:13)

All of us want to be liked, well thought of. If we are not careful, we will give a better impression of ourselves than is really true. Our driving desire is to be loved by others, and we think the road to this acceptance is to act like we have no problems. Because of this desire, our natural tendency is to cover and hide our sins and failures. When we need to be transparent and honest, we usually conceal or blame others.

God is honest. We are made in His image, and He wants us to be honest also. Our dishonesty is usually based on a vain desire to preserve or build a reputation at all costs. And God will not honor this. He cannot because it is not like Him … and He is in the process of conforming us to the image of His Son.

And He also knows that our security and joy comes from knowing and believing the “love God has for us.”

Read More
Related Posts:

We think the absence of pain is the goal, but God is known for allowing acute pain in service of deeper healing. Like a broken bone that must be reset, the parts of us that have learned to get by without an ever-present awareness of God’s compassionate and knowing care need to be broken afresh in order for us to be made whole again.

It was my first day back at work, and as I sat at my desk I tried my best to get back into the mode of responding to emails and updating myself on what had happened over the past two weeks. I was determined to have some semblance of a normal day. The prior three months had been filled with so much torture and grief. It began with the news that I was pregnant and that my hidden thyroid problems might cause complications. It ended with the news that they could no longer hear our baby’s heartbeat, and then, a miscarriage. I had spent time mourning, reversing the anticipation of carrying this little one to term and becoming parents to a newborn. I had been deeply moved by the outpouring of compassion, prayer, and food from our loved ones and community, but it felt like it was time to put this behind me and return to the life I knew prior to all of this.
I felt myself falling back into my work groove when I glanced up and saw David.1 He had just returned from being out of town, and now he was standing silently in my doorway, staring at me, his eyes filled with compassion and knowing.
He said quietly, “I just heard the news…”
And something within me broke. Tears began to flow down my face as he came and sat down beside me. He shared that he had some idea of the unspeakable pain I was experiencing because he and his wife had miscarried many years ago. He asked how I was doing, and I jokingly said, “I was doing fine until you stopped by.”
I’ve seen this same emotional pattern unfold repeatedly. You go through a horrific experience or loss; it is overwhelming and all-consuming, but then it passes. Things get better and it appears as if the whole thing is behind you, and you even begin to stabilize and recover some sense of normality. And then, it hits you out of the blue. Something taps into the deep well of sorrow that resides deep inside of you—sorrow you didn’t even know was there—and you are flooded with the pain. I call it “the breaking.”
I’ve watched it happen in front of my eyes many times in my counseling. I meet with someone for the first time and as soon as I ask what brought them to counseling, they immediately begin to cry. They have only just met me, but the combination of my empathy, my question, and the opportunity for them to face what they have experienced is enough to break the dam. They almost always apologize for their tears, and I inform them that I will someday have a plaque on my wall that says, “Crying is expected; apologies aren’t welcome.”
Why do these “breakings” come and what is going on? This is what I have gathered.
Read More
Related Posts:

Written by Samuel D. James |
Wednesday, June 22, 2022
To miss God’s design is to not live as God intended. It’s to sell ourselves short, to make for us lives and identities and destinies that are far, far poorer than what God intends. That’s why Christians talk about this stuff: because the good life really is possible.

Let’s begin with the observable facts of anatomy. Males have different reproductive organs than females. More than that, the reproductive organs of males appear to be designed to fit together with those of females. If you took a class on safe sex in high school, your teacher (or book, or video, or whatever) almost certainly assumed that female reproductive organs had to be treated differently than male ones. Thus, every boy in that class was expected to know how to put on a condom, and every girl in that class was expected to know what the birth control pill does. I doubt there was much confusion in the class over why girls weren’t expected to practice with condoms on themselves or the boys weren’t asking questions about the pill.
Now of course, this doesn’t prove that all the biological males in the class experienced male gender identity, or that the biological girls experienced the opposite. But the point is simply that sex education depends on a meaningful distinction between maleness and femaleness, and that this distinction is a given one, not simply an artifact of culture. No one was brainwashed into thinking they have the physical parts between their legs that they can plainly see. Boys see their boy parts, and girls see their girl parts, and from the moment boys and girls are born other people relate to them not simply as generic humans but as boys or girls, mostly because of these observable human parts.
Christianity begins with the teaching that God created a man and a woman, Adam and Eve. When Adam saw Eve for the first time, he was so excited that he broke out into song. Christians take “Bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh” to mean that Eve was like Adam, yet unlike him. She was a human being, but she “completed” him in a very real way. In fact, in Genesis, we are told plainly how this completion was immediately expressed: through sex. “The man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed.” Adam and Eve’s natures as like yet unlike demanded sexual union. So in the Christian religion, men and women were created by God with bodies that are like yet unlike, and the expression of this mysterious, complementary creation is sexual union. There is no sex without bodies, and there are no bodies without maleness and femaleness.
Now here is where many critics of Christianity argue that this doctrine simply fails to describe the lived reality of many people. What about the intersex? What about those with gender dysphoria? What about those who say they know they are a different gender than their biological sex?
Two answers are in order here. First, while the existence of intersexed persons and persons with gender dysphoria is often treated like a golden gun against the Christian position, this is a gross oversimplification of what usually happens with these folks. We have research that suggests more than 90% of teens diagnosed with gender dysphoria will eventually grow out of it. Gender dysphoria should be understood as a psychological malady, not as a kind of person.
Second, the Christian position certainly anticipates the possibility of feeling alienated from one’s body. Christians believe that Adam disobeyed God and introduced sin into the world. Sin corrupted the Adam’s relationship with God, with Eve, with the earth, and even with himself. Adam and Eve’s recognition that they were naked and now ashamed is a sign of profound alienation between Adam and Eve and their bodies. Before sin, they accepted themselves and each other and rejoiced without shame. After sin, they cover their bodies and hide their persons from God.
Read More
Related Posts: