A Unique Believers Manual. For those who want to learn the TRUTH of God's Word

  There is something almost ironic about that old song, “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In,” from the musical Hair . The music was written by Galt MacDermot, with lyrics by James Rado and Gerome Ragni, and the famous recording by The 5th Dimension was released in 1969 . The song looked toward an imagined coming age of harmony and understanding, as though Mankind were moving into a brighter and more enlightened future. But if that song were rewritten for the world in which we are living today, I think its opening would have to say something very different: “Harmony and understanding have been thrown under the bus for ignorance and hatred.” That may sound humorous, but there is something very serious underneath it. The peaceful age that Mankind imagined it could create for itself has not arrived. Instead, we are watching a world that is increasingly divided, anxious, angry, uncertain, and perplexed about where everything is going. The strange thing is that this is happening at a tim...

  For my 3rd ❤️ When we hear the word “discernment,” we often think of knowing when something is not quite right. We may say, “I just discerned something about that person,” or “I had a feeling about that situation.” But when we come to Scripture, discernment is much deeper than just a feeling. The Bible does not present discernment as suspicion, natural cleverness, or simply being good at reading people. Discernment is the ability to understand, distinguish, examine, and recognize according to what is true. When we follow that idea through the Torah, the Books of the Prophets, and the New Testament, we discover that discernment is something God wants His people to learn. One of the important Hebrew roots behind this idea is בִּין , bin . It is used for understanding, perceiving, and discerning, and its related forms describe insight and understanding. But we need to let the context show us what the word means rather than trying to make one Hebrew word carry every shade of t...

Have you ever been overwhelmed? I mean really overwhelmed, where there is so much coming at you that you do not even know which thing to deal with first. One problem is enough to keep you busy, but then another one shows up, and before you have had time to get your head around that one, something else happens. Add family concerns, responsibilities, financial worries, things happening in the world, people who are difficult, things you cannot change, and things you cannot even understand, and suddenly your mind feels like somebody dumped the contents of a junk drawer onto the kitchen table and told you to sort it all out before supper. Sometimes it is not even one particular thing that overwhelms us. It is the accumulation of everything. Then there is the world. Oi Vey! Sometimes you can turn on the news for less than five minutes and feel as though you have just been handed a hundred more things to worry about. Crime, violence, corruption, hatred, suffering, political foolishness, peo...