When you're up to your neck in trials, it's easy to forget you are in training to be a member of the God family.

Pain is not something we normally consider positive, nor is guilt. However, guilt is like pain in that it is a spiritual warning signal to change course!

Jabez's brief but powerful prayer identifies him as a spiritual beacon, a man born in pain who seeks blessing and alignment with God's will.

As God has designed the physical healing process, God has also designed spiritual healing, requiring that faith, suffering, and healing be part of the same process.

Modern Israel seems to have great difficulty managing money because of an addiction to greed. Wealth, without a powerful character, is a destructive drug.

What allows some to take the hits that life throws at them and keep going, while most tend to become mired in the muck and bogged down by life's troubles?

True repentance involves pain, particularly emotional pain. To repent is wrenching to the psyche. It really hurts because it is difficult to do.

After God forgives our sins, He still allows residual memories of these transgressions to remain in our memories, evidently to help us in overcoming.

Matthew's encapsulation of the Beatitudes, the essence of Jesus Christ's teaching, contains the foundation of His teaching through the entirety of His ministry.

God does not want us to find a cozy comfort zone because that is when we are most likely to slip into dangerous spiritual drowsiness and complacency.

Bitterness is like a poison that springs from unresolved hurt, helplessness, or disappointment, leading to caustic sharpness in speech or behavior.

When Joel describes the devastating locust plagues, instead of promising a silver lining on a very black cloud, he says things are going to get intensely worse.

Christ's suffering was not confined to crucifixion, but also consisted of rejection, humiliation, and the duress of persecution. Glory follows suffering.

In Lamentations 3, the narrator finally convinces Lady Jerusalem that her own sins have caused her necessary punishment and affliction by God.

In God's hands, trials and afflictions are tools to produce refined character and joy, and to move us away from worldly choices and back to His purpose.

Why did God allow this tragedy? Why do the good suffer and the evil prosper? We want answers to these questions, but Jesus points us in another direction.

Reaping good fruit does not happen immediately. If we feel we are not reaping, we must consider that we might be reaping some negative things we have sown.

Crucifixion is man's most cruel form of punishment. Why did Jesus need to die this way? What does it teach us? And was Jesus stabbed before or after He died?

Christ's sacrifice was not merely substitutionary, but representative, with Christ giving us a pattern for life - mortifying our flesh and putting out sin.

We accept most of our opinions, prejudices, and beliefs unconsciously. We must scrutinize our own beliefs through the principles of God's Holy Scriptures.

Like the Ephesians, the weary veterans in Hebrews were becoming apathetic through outside pressures, losing their former zeal and devotion to Christ.

Even though we have the free moral agency to run counter to God's purposes, we court disaster if we presumptuously plan against these purposes.

Calamities, trials, anxiety, evil, and calamities, as well as blessings, happen to Christians in order to become fashioned and molded into God's image.

Why are we satisfied with what we are when we know we could be doing much better? Many believe God will be satisfied with just about anything.

Many are shocked at the seeming lack of sensitivity in the Father's bruising of His Son. He struck the Being He loved most to add multiple members to His family.

As members of God's family, we must be quick to forgive one another for real or imagined slights. Those in God's Kingdom, will all be working together.

Neither Satan nor his demons cause us to sin; we chose to sin, and we die as a result. We were created upright, but bring judgment on ourselves.

Films try to depict the suffering and death of Jesus Christ, but have all fallen short of presenting the full dimensions of the event—the price of our sin.

Nothing happens in our lives (including repentance) until God initiates it. A change of heart, by God's Holy Spirit, results in a total change of direction.