November 2017 Blog Posts (28)

This week, I had the honor of interviewing Pastor Jason McGee, Senior Pastor of One Family Church in Shrewsbury, MA, for His Inscriptions readers. My husband and I have known Jason for several years, and helped him plant his church in…

Let me be the first to admit that sometimes, my prayers don't get answered. It happens to everyone. We're all on a journey, growing in the knowledge of who God is and how He works. No one - not even the most "spiritual" believer you know - has his prayers answered all the time! 



But in 30+ years of growing in the Lord, I've discovered that…

When I last wrote in this blog I dealt with anxiety and depression from John 12:27 where Jesus said, “Now is my heart troubled.” While there is great encouragement for everyone in this prayer of Jesus, He was addressing something far more ominous than the anxieties that plague modern societies. Jesus stood face to face with His crucifixion where He would bear all the wickedness, selfishness, perversion, and cruelty of humankind. He was not just discouraged, He was…

“Pleasure is to happiness what candy is to nutrition.”

James 4:3 reads, “You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.” How do we justify this verse with verses like Matthew 7:7-8? “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who…

Recently, hurricanes, excessive flooding, earthquakes, and fires have drawn our attention to the many people who have been victims of these catastrophes. It's a time to remember the many victims in our prayers. As our country is facing many difficult issues, it is easy to get discouraged, especially when we thinking of the world our grandchildren are living. However, we have a big God bigger than the challenges and…

For the past few days I have been dealing with some severe anxiety and depression. Does the Bible say anything about this? It does indeed. In fact the Bible deals more comprehensively with depression than any other source I know. In places like Elijah in the cave in 1 Kings 19 and quite a number of Psalms God shows us that the cause depression can be physical, dietary, cultural, situational, psychological, moral, or spiritual. It is often…

This week a teenage boy who attends our church and six other young people were in a roll over car accident. Three of the children, including the boy from our church, are in critical condition. The father of that boy gathered the families of those kids and asked our pastor to come speak to them all. He shared this in our Sunday worship. He mentioned Job's friends sitting with Job in silence for seven days, and said there are some situations where no words are sufficient. He asked us to pray…

Prayer and More

Every time there is a mass shooting in a church, someone asks me if it causes me to re-live the emotions of September 15, 1999 at Wedgwood Baptist Church in Fort Worth – my home church – where a lone gunman entered a “See You at the Pole” Rally with two guns, two hundred rounds of ammunition, and a home-made pipe bomb. Before he took his own life, he killed seven people, wounded seven others, and traumatized…

Does your church have a prayer corner in the worship center? I Know a church that designates a back corner of their worship center as a place of special prayer. In every service they invite people to slip back at any time to pray. Members of a prayer team are there to pray with anyone who wishes.

They accomplish a number of important things with this. First, this helps to create an atmosphere of prayer in a church. Some might say, “We already…