Ziklag F5.31 - The Nature of Principle

Trust, Evil, and Vanity Matters Deeply

SOS Discipline - Daily Proverb and Red Letter Reader

Evil promises supply. Righteousness draws back on principle. cf Pr. 10:2

Trust is the fear-killer. cf Mt. 8.26

The nature of principle is that it is leveraged. cf Sun Tzu 5.24

From Today’s Stack

from the upcoming That’s All It Takes

Vanity matters deeply to everyone.

This is why obsession with comparison to others gets in the way of almost everything. Incomplete projects, goals and dreams sit about in garages, kitchens and basements everywhere because we all want to be the best at something else. We see the images of what we might be, and chase the pretty picture.

But once we get the real life engine fired up, it doesn’t turn out the way we expect. When things don’t go our way right away, we quit because in our heads is the idea that everything we do must be great, fun and awesome, all the time, forever, right now, or else.

This is a self-defeating soul quest, and those who sell you the pharmaceuticals between episodes know it.

Comparison to others is not only isolating and demoralizing, but it is also a primary result of scarcity thinking, a type of unbelief that manifests itself as a godless fear that there will not be enough. Enough of what? It doesn’t matter. What were we last talking about? Probably that.

Scarcity thinking is like viewing life through a constant lens of “never enough.” Always searching for more, enough stays ever elusive. Always fearing tomorrow, today is lost in the wind.

From the Archive

from Without Flesh

Take courage.

Christianity cannot die.

So, have some moxie.

Grab a glass of tenacity with me.

Listen and remember.

Patience, grasshopper.

Zeal without knowledge is fire without light.

There is a gut-deep, mind-transfiguring, change-invincible ***faith*** given in Jesus Christ “so that you may believe” (John 20:31) that no matter how bad it looks, the Church of Jesus Christ is not going anywhere.

Except forever.

Because Jesus is alive.

Jesus is not only a man of our past, but the Lord of our present and our future. He submitted to death not to get bound by it, but in order to rip out its sting by the root. He rose again not to abandon us, but in order to bind himself to us eternally. He ascended to the Father, not to leave us as orphans, but to compel the first twelve men he left behind to “*more than conquer*” (Romans 8:37) the world.