Dormancy

By Dean Murphy

Lots of things experience dormancy. Many species of plants for example. Look out your window at the deciduous trees (the ones that have lost their leaves for the winter). They are dormant. Many animals also experience dormancy, and it comes in a variety of forms. Hibernation is a sort of dormancy. Dormancy means that an organism stops growing, stops developing and largely ceases activity. Dormancy results when adverse conditions occur and a plant or an animal recognizes that to survive, it must cease normal “life” and put the brakes on growth, development, and activity. Dormancy comes in a couple of ways. Predictive dormancy happens when the length of days shortens, temperatures lower or water is limited. The organism reacts to signs like these and goes dormant prior to adverse conditions. Consequential dormancy happens after the fact. After unpredictable environmental conditions worsen, the plant or animal reacts by going dormant.

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Human Free Will and God’s Providence

By Jim Jonas (The Centreville Journal)

There are two forces at work in this world that are difficult to reconcile:  human free will and God’s influence.  On the one hand, those who accept the sovereignty of God believe that He can both foreknow and determine the result of any situation He desires.  Scripture is full of examples where God has revealed ahead of time a particular outcome:  Jacob’s supplanting of Esau; Pharaoh’s resistance and eventual release of  Israel; David’s enthronement; Nebuchadnezzar’s insanity and recovery; Cyrus’ reversal of exile.  The list goes on and on.

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Commitment – The Beginning to restore the Foundation?

By Jim Mettenbrink

Although we tout the USA is the land of liberty, in recent years liberty has been redefined or we have a misunderstanding of what constitutes liberty. Examples are the liberties of speech and religion. The first universities in the USA were established by not only believers in God, but those who revered Jesus of Nazareth as the Lord and Savior of mankind. Harvard was established in 1636 to train ministers in biblical faith. Harvard’s motto became “Truth for Christ and the Church” (1692). As was typical of the genuine university environment, Harvard’s was one of open discourse, honoring the free expression of opposing views. Through time, Harvard changed its motto to “Truth” (eliminating Christ and the church). The university environment has been increasingly atheistic and more and more void of open discourse. Some 15 years ago, a biology professor informed a close friend, that in order to get along in the scientific community, you must give up the premise that our origin was via creation by the eternal God of heaven. That statement indicates the closed mind of the university – discourse not allowed about our origin by God.

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What Builds A Strong Church?

By Charles Box

There are two divine institutions – the home and the church. A third institution exists with God’s approval – government. God desires strong homes and strong churches. Both are an honor to His name. Following are some things that will contribute to building strong churches:

Prayer builds strong churches: When Peter was released from prison by the angel of the Lord he went to a home where the church was gathered for prayer. “So, when he had considered this, he came to the house of Mary, the mother of John whose surname was Mark, where many were gathered together praying.” (Acts 12:12) Our work will never be bigger than our prayers.

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Where do You begin to restore the Foundation?

By Jim Mettenbrink

To whom is the responsibility given to build the foundation of a stable society? Although this is a group, yea community effort, it requires the agreement of an objective unchangeable standard and it always begins with one person… one person talking to another and an idea. Honorably this is a forthright and honest proposal to establish a solid foundation for society.

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Our Refuge and Our Strength

By Donnie Bates

God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble ( Psalm 46:1). Truer words were never spoken. There really is no refuge and strength other than God. There is no one else to whom we can turn when we find ourselves in trouble. And sometimes trouble seems to have us squarely in its sights. The psalmist continues: Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change and though the mountains slip into the heart of the sea… (Psalm 46:2).

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What does Your Spirit do? Part 3

By Jim Mettenbrink

In our search to determine the traits of you, i.e., the invisible spirit that is you, we concluded last week, that our spirit makes decisions – one’s rational process. Since we can not see it nor, is it tangible, we are not even aware we have a spirit. However the Bible alone informs us that we have a spirit, actually that the “you” are a spirit in a body of flesh and that it is eternal. Upon conception, you are that God-given eternal spirit. In calling Jeremiah to be a prophet, God declared to him, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you; before you were born I sanctified you; I ordained you a prophet to the nations” (Jer 1:5; cf Isaiah 44:2, 24). God created you as a spirit. What are the traits of your spirit?

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What does Your Spirit do? Part 2

By Jim Mettenbrink

Last week we began to consider what the spirit of a person does. Recall that we consist of body (flesh) soul (life force; Leviticus 17:11) and the spirit. We considered that the heart and spirit are either synonymous or inseparably connected. That your spirit is paramount above all else in your life is implicitly declared by the prophet in his brief summary about God’s activity in the creation – “Thus says the Lord, who stretches out the heavens, lays the foundation of the earth and forms the spirit of man within him (Zechariah 12:1).

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Personal Work is Personal

By Dan Jenkins

It is easy for us to overlook the important role personal conversation has in the conversion of the world. We long for days like that Pentecost when the response to preaching resulted in 3,000 conversions. That was not the normal happening as the church grew. We must never overlook how often lives were changed when Jesus and the apostles had one-on-one conversations with others. The world will always be saved by the preaching of the gospel, but so much of that teaching involves private studies with others.

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What does Your Spirit do? Part 1

By Jim Mettenbrink

In the last article, we considered the Bible’s declaration that humans consist of three separate parts – body (matter), soul (life force; Leviticus 17:11), and the spirit (eternal part) (1 Thessalonians 5:23). (By the way this in contrast to all living non-humans. Although many have accepted the evolutionary ruse that humans are animals, thus animals are our relatives, nowhere in the Bible is an eternal spirit assigned to an animal). The life force and the spirit are not tangible, but literally invisible. They cannot be touched or contained. One looks at his body and says, this is my body. One does not say, this is me. Inherently, a person knows he is actually separate from the body, that it is a container of the spirit. Yet nowhere is your spirit found in the body. It is invisible. As noted in the last article, at the moment of death Jesus and Stephen commended their spirits to the Father (Luke 23:46; Acts 7:59). Other than one’s spirit is the eternal part, what is its character? Note, without the Bible, we do not have a clue that we even have a spirit, let alone its traits.

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