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The purpose of these blogs is to help you live for Christ.  In the last blog I explained that you need both a right heart and right beliefs in order to live for Christ. God wants a holistic faith, not just a superficial one.  It is now time to talk a little bit about Christian beliefs, but before we delve into specific doctrines, I ought to take a couple blogs to discuss some broad issues related to truth and doctrine. Doctrine is a foul word to some people.  To them, it represents silly arguments that people have fought and died…

The heart is a wonderful thing.  I would not want to be married to Leanne if my heart did not love her, but my heart must be informed by the facts.  I want to be in love with the real Leanne and not with a creation of my own desires.  I also want Leanne to be in love with me and not with some image she has fashioned in her mind. I want my heart affections for my wife to be based on the truth, for they are richer when they are built on reality. We have spent half a…

These books will focus you in some way upon having a right heart before God.  Some will sing to your heart.  Some will explain the heart.  Some will challenge it.   a Kempis, Thomas.  The Imitation of Christ.  My favorite devotional book.  This book warms the heart for God.   Brother Lawrence.  The Practice of the Presence of God.  Lawrence was a 17th century monk who wrote about continual prayer with God.  A series of conversations and letters.   Carmichael, Amy.  Toward Jerusalem.  This book is a collection of Carmichael’s poetry.  If you are not good at reading poetry, you…

The simple things are sometimes the most difficult.  A right heart is a simple thing.  Children can have it.  In fact, often they have better hearts than we adults.  I wrestle with having a right heart.  This section on heart attitudes has been the most difficult to write.  I have found it hard to write about a godly heart when my own heart struggles so.  How do you write about authority when you sin?  How do you tell people to enjoy God when you are so busy with other things?  I have been unable to write these chapters on heart…

Over the past months, we have discussed different aspects of a right heart:  peace, joy, humility, submission to authority, confidence in God, the fear of God, simplicity, and  more.  Because each discussion focuses on only one characteristic, we might think that these characteristics are somehow separated from each other as the stripes on a zebra are.  Such thinking would be a mistake.  The heart is a holistic thing. Its attitudes are the sounds of a symphony. They do not exist in isolation but interact together to create a concerto of the soul. Consequently, one of the best ways to tell…