How to Listen When Someone Is Venting
And yet a lot of people don’t know how to listen to someone venting. Usually, people take one of two attitudes. Option 1 is to jump in and give advice — but this is not the same as listening, and the person doing the venting may respond with “Just listen to me! Don’t tell me what to do.” Option 2 (usually attempted after Option 1) is to swing to the other extreme, and sit there silently. But this doesn’t actively help the person doing the venting to drain their negative emotions. Consequently, it is about as rewarding as venting to your dog.
Do Contradictions In The Gospels Make Them Untrustworthy?
In his commentary on the Gospel of John, Leon Morris writes, “The differences between the Gospels amount to no more than a demonstration that in them we have the spontaneous evidence of witnesses, not the stereotyped repetition of an official story” (p. 731).
In other words, the contradictions in the minor details point to the fact that the main parts of the story that have unanimous agreement (Jesus died, was buried, raised from the dead, and was seen) are to be believed.
What we’re dealing with in the gospels are legit eyewitness testimonies.
And you can trust them because of the contractions, not in spite of them.
“Gates of Hell” and Another Look at Matt. 16:18 & Rev. 9:1-11
The word “gates” is a synecdoche that represents the entire underworld. Thus, Jesus is saying, according to my view, that the region of the dead, or death will never triumph over his disciples. Strangely enough, the ESV renders Matt. 16:18 “gates of hell,” but in the notes says it means death. I guess those editors haven’t seen the problem with trying to have both “gates of hell” and death as the meaning.
The Problem With Vampire Christianity
Some years ago, A.W. Tozer expressed his “feeling that a notable heresy has come into being throughout evangelical circles — the widely accepted concept that we humans can choose to accept Christ only because we need him as Savior and that we have the right to postpone our obedience to him as Lord as long as we want to!”
This “heresy” has created the impression that it is quite reasonable to be a “vampire Christian.” One, in effect, says to Jesus: “I’d like a little of your blood, please. But I don’t care to be your student or have your character. In fact, won’t you just excuse me while I get on with my life, and I’ll see you in heaven.” But is this really acceptable to Jesus?
Everything I Know about Pastoral Ministry I Learned Riding with Pastors
Nearly everything I think I know about pastoral ministry I’ve learned from someone else. Usually the learning has come in one-sentence statements mentioned in almost throw-away lines. Often it’s been driving along in the car talking about life and ministry.
This work speaks eloquently of how God uses weakness; and, indeed, of how Christians are to make themselves weak in order for God to be shown to be truly strong. Herein lies the difference between the much-trumpeted theology of the cross and a theologian of the cross. A theology of the cross can simply be a way of thinking, an intellectual technique; as such it can ironically be found on the lips of a theologian of glory if it is simply his sales pitch, his means of drawing attention to himself, of honing a hip patois. Recent days have indeed seen the theology of the cross used by some as a kind of triumphalism; yet for Packer, as for Paul and for Luther, it is a means of seeing through present pain and affliction and the existentially painful contradictions of life to the glories of the resurrection – glories which are real despite their utter invisibility to human experience here and now. A theologian of the cross combines a cross-shaped way of thinking with a cross-shaped way of living, not escaping from pain and weakness but looking through such and that only by God-given faith.
22 Maps That Show How Americans Speak English Totally Differently From Each Other
Everyone knows that Americans don’t exactly agree on pronunciations.
Regional accents are a major part of what makes American English so interesting as a dialect.
Joshua Katz, a Ph. D student in statistics at North Carolina State University, just published a group of awesome visualizations of Professor Bert Vaux and Scott Golder’s linguistic survey that looked at how Americans pronounce words.
Duluth woman training for half-marathon gives birth to surprise baby
An aspiring half-marathon runner in Minnesota whose two-hour training session left her with a sore back was stunned to discover that the pain was not due to a pulled muscle or a slipped disc but that she was about to give birth.