Something Greater

12 Steps to Identifying Your Functional Saviors In The Bookends of the Christian Life , Jerry Bridges offers twelve "questions" to help us identify our functional saviors. These are great questions to ask yourself to gain insight to the direction our inner attitudes and desires are pointing us. 1. I am preoccupied with ________. 2. If only ________, then I would be happy. 3. I get my sense of significance from ________. 4. I would protect and preserve ________ at any cost. 5. I fear losing ________. 6. The thing that gives me greatest pleasure is ________. 7. When I lose ________, I get angry, resentful, frustrated, anxious, or depressed. 8. For me, life depends on ________. 9. The thing I value more than anything in the world is ________. 10. When I daydream, my mind goes to________. 11. The best thing I can think of is ________. 12. The thing that makes me want to get out of bed in the morning is ________. Source: http://thinklings.org/posts/12-steps-t

Broken, Wounded, and Hopeful | Psalm 119:166 Jeremy B lives in Israel and has a unique opportunity to explore the roots of Christianity while living in the reality of modern Jewish society. I appreciated a recent devotional he wrote. Jeremy has given me permission to reprint it here. Being in Israel on the Day of Atonement this year for the very first time left a deep impression on me, and caused me to give a lot of thought to the sacrificial system - especially its less appealing aspects. Watching some of the Orthodox slaughter chickens to provide some sort of atonement reminded me that salvation has always been a messy business and that looking deeply into it can be a shock for the faint of heart. This realization came at a time of interesting findings in the final stages of writing my thesis. Indeed, the sights and sounds of sacrifices took on a new and deeper meaning in light of a discovery I made a couple of weeks ago. This all may sound rather technical, but I wi