by GotQuestions.org Psalm 23 The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul. He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name's sake. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me. ... Psalm 23 is a beautiful poem that uses the image of God as shepherd. David, who penned this psalm, had been a shepherd himself and understood the parallel between the task of a shepherd caring for his sheep and of God caring for His people. Sheep are totally dependent on the shepherd for food, water, leadership, and guidance as they move from place to place, just as we are dependent upon God for all that we need. Sheep depend on the shepherd for protection from a wide range of predators and dangers, just as we look to God as our Protector and Defender. In...
"And because you are sons [and daughters], God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying out, “Abba, Father!”" Galatians 4:6 It is a well-known prayer even for non-Christians. However, not many people know that it is basically a prayer pattern and not a mantra that loses its meaning after a while. Many people today pray it automatically. Jesus the King prays it systematically . We need to rephrase some of the following expressions to make their meaning clearer. We must see that Jesus Christ showed this pattern to his disciples to give them a framework for their daily prayer. It is a preference & reference too: for Jesus, the key issue is that God's names be known and His Kingdom be here on Earth in the splendour and power as it is in Heaven. In other words - that the Heaven would touch Earth and God's restoration would be at work. When Heaven touches the Earth our perspective is restored....
Peter and Paul. Two men from radically different backgrounds. Two people whom the Lord Jesus called to the same most noble and most difficult ministry. We know their sermons. We know their martyrdoms. We know their letters, copied and re-copied for two thousand years, sitting in the same Bible, side by side, world without end. But there is a small, easily-missed sentence buried in one of those letters — a sentence that tells us something almost nobody preaches on. Paul writes, almost in passing, that three years after his conversion, three years after the beginning of his devoted services he went up to Jerusalem, and he stayed with Peter for fifteen days. Fifteen days. Two men. One place, one house, in one city, for two full weeks. And Scripture tells us almost nothing about what happened in that time... ... After Pentecost, Peter becomes the recognized voice of the Jerusalem church — preaching to the crowds (Acts 2:1...