I will share about Christian books I have read or listened to.
I will be sharing about my life before and after Christ. I will include stories about my pet and other pets I have encountered.
Set Apart
In modern language, "holy" often means something religious or spiritual. But in the Bible, “holy” simply means “set apart.” It means something (or someone) different and distinct from everything else.
God is unlike any other gods the nations knew. The Lord is holy and called His people to be distinct—or holy—too.
Some of the distinctions that set the Israelite practices apart were religious and spiritual. They offered sacrifices in a certain way and had specific instructions for how priests, worship, and the temple operated. Other practices that set Israel apart involved everyday things, like food, clothing, and their weekly calendars. These habits and customs were meant to reflect and reinforce that they were truly different—or holy—because they belonged to God.
The fourth commandment given to Israel is to "remember the Sabbath day" and keep it holy—a reminder to Israel of the blessed pattern God laid out in Creation. Just as our Holy Creator worked for six days and rested on a seventh, He calls His holy people to do the same.
What's holy about the Sabbath? It's a day set apart to be different from all the other days of the week. God intends for one day a week to look and feel different. As people who belong to Him, we can delight in His designation of some days as productive days for work and then other days set apart for reflection and refreshment.
Remember, God created special times for rest—keep those times set apart.
Look at the Fruit
Imagine you have two seeds in your hand, but you can only plant one...
One seed grows easily, but it produces ugly, terrible tasting fruit. Cultivating the other seed takes time and consistent attention—but the fruit it produces is beautiful and delicious.
Which seed would you choose to plant, water, and grow?
In Galatians 5, the apostle Paul talks about two types of fruit that our lives can produce: fruit of the flesh and fruit of the Spirit.
“The flesh” refers to our unchecked desires that pull us away from God’s Spirit. Those desires produce hate, impatience, bitterness, selfishness, chaos, anxiety, and self-indulgence—and God has no association with such things.
But when we commit our lives to Jesus, He gives us His own Spirit. The power of the Holy Spirit helps us “crucify” the desires of our flesh and put them to death. And when we crucify those desires, we create room for the Holy Spirit to produce good fruit in our lives—fruit that leads to positive ...
