Nobody lives up to the norms that God had in mind when he first created human beings.
From John Ortberg
Real spiritual authority has to do with the truth of the actual words being spoken, and the spirit of the person behind the words. Really, authority is about truth: honest-living truth.
Politics, after all, is largely about power. And power goes to the core of our issues of control and narcissism and need to be right and tendency to divide the human race into 'us' vs. 'them.'
We all want to feel spiritually vigorous, and we hurt when we don't. This pain is intensified for people who lead church ministries.
Pastors have historically understood their primary battle to be not the battle to build a big church, but the battle against the power of sin.
The irony is that 'looking down on everybody else' is a violation of the law of love, which, according to Jesus, is the absolute essence of righteousness.
Sin is protean. It is a cancer that keeps mutating, and just when you think you have killed off one form, it turns out a deadlier strain yet is threatening your heart.
Amusement is a way of boredom-avoidance through external stimulation that fails to exercise our minds. It's mere diversion.
In the context of worship, amusement is a waste of time and a waste of life, and therefore a form of sin.
Sometimes, an inability to believe in Satan reflects a larger inability to believe in a spiritual plane at all.
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