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What Does it Mean to Be A Shepherd?

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  Have you ever heard about the things that a shepherd has to do in order to keep his sheep safe and healthy? Over the years, I have heard different things about the amount of work that it is to have sheep. Sheep are very foolish animals and are prone to causing their own death if it weren't for the intervention of the shepherds. Nowadays, sheep are often kept in fenced in areas that have had the dangers removed or otherwise alleviated, so someone who is raising sheep can let them out into the pasture and almost leave them alone. This was not the case in Bible times. Sheep were let out onto open fields to graze, so whatever dangers the sheep may face as they were moved from one area to another in order to find suitable pasture were left as danger spots. This is where the shepherd came into play. We know that King David started out as a shepherd boy. I presume that each of David's brothers had to spend some time as the shepherd as they were growing up. I imagine that as each boy...
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Tolerance is Not a Christian Virtue

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  Tolerance is a buzz word in modern western society. On the surface, the use of the word 'tolerance' is intended to expand and maintain peace among people of varying religions, beliefs and practices who live in the same communities. The idea of tolerance is rooted in the ideology of love for everyone, which is, in turn, rooted in the non-christian belief that because God is the God of love, then He cannot also be the God of judgment and wrath that the Christians are warning people about. After all, how can a God of love destroy people whom He supposedly made to be gay or lesbian or trans, etcetera? It is this misunderstanding of God's love that has opened society up to it's own usurpation by those of compassionate hearts. I stated that the surface purpose of the use of the word 'tolerance' is to maintain peace, but I believe that the deeper purpose is to undermine the deep, fundamentally Christian roots of western society. Merriam Webster defines 'tolerance...
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Where a Deep Dive Into the Scriptures Can Take You

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  Some time ago I was reading in Leviticus and I came across something that caught my attention, but I didn't know what to do with it at the time. I had a strong suspicion that, though this was something that could be easily read over and forgotten, there may be more of a meaning to it. I have chosen the New American Standard Bible from 1995 (NASB95) as the main version of the Bible that I read, but when I come across something like this, often my first move is to check with another version of the Bible to see if I see the same thing there, and my go-to first alternative version to check is the King James or the New King James version. This may be because this was the version of the Bible that I grew up with and most of the verses that I memorized as a child were from the King James Bible. From there, I will check other versions as well to see how the different versions handle what I have found. The verse that I was reading was Leviticus 17:7, which says this; ""They shal...
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Fly-in Fishing and Enjoying God's Creation

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   I recently had the opportunity to join a couple of men from my church on a fly-in fishing trip. I am not someone who has ever been able to spare the finances to take such a trip, and while I enjoy fishing, it is not a passion or even a hobby for me. So in my mind, this was a once in a lifetime opportunity for me, especially since virtually all of the costs were already covered. I just had to supply my portion of the food that we would eat and my own fishing license. The one catch was that this was a work week; that is, the men that invited me to go are related to the owner of the outpost cabin and they go up and do some work on the cabin and the site once or twice a year in exchange for free use of and flights to the cabin. The planned project for this year was to build a shed. As things turned out, we did not build a shed. I think the materials did not come together in time, so instead, we did some repairs and maintenance on boat motors, a propane fridge and some general c...
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God Hears Us; Do You Hear Him?

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  There is an aspect of the Christian walk that too many believers are unaware of. I spent most of my own life thus far unaware of this myself even though I have been a believer for my entire life. It isn't like what I am about to talk about isn't written about in the Scriptures, it's just that it isn't stated explicitly, so most Christians don't actually consider it, and the lack of even the consideration of this leaves us missing out in our relationship with God to a degree that we cannot even comprehend. This is definitely a case of 'you don't know what you don't know'. This aspect is the practice of listening prayer. I have learned ever since I was a child that we are to take all of our cares and our fears to God in prayer and that He will guide us in how we are to deal with things. Never once in all of my years attending Sunday school and church did it occur to me that not only did God want me to talk to Him, but He also wanted to talk to me. No...
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GCD Short - The World Appears to be Descending Into Violence

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  It seems as if the world is beginning to come apart at the seams. There are protests and wars and violence everywhere. It could just be due to our western obsession with the news, but it just seems like everywhere I look these days there is violence and destruction. Whereas people used to go to work, now it seems like there are those who are either paid to protest, or perhaps the protests are a convenient cover for their theft and looting which is how they really pay the bills. Like I said in " Confusion as a Tool of Anarchy and Tyranny ", it is so hard to determine the truth of a matter these days. As much information as we have available to us, it may actually be getting harder to determine truth. Take, for example, the riots that have plagued Paris, Marseille and some other French cities as of late. If you look for information online, what you see is that virtually every single legacy media outlet has these riots labelled as the "PSG Riots", referring to a Euro...
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Biblical Support for Greek/Roman "gods" and Mythological Creatures?

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   Humanity has long been fascinated by creatures that are different than us. I'm not only talking about animals being different from humans, but there has always been an almost obscene interest in creatures that are different from humans and that at least appear to be more powerful than humans. This will have begun with angels and demons, but it has evolved to other areas of interest such as extraterrestrials as well. There have even been cults and religions that have been built around these creatures. Some of the most well known of these creatures stem from Greek and Roman mythology. My family has the Narnia series of movies in which several of these creatures play prominent roles, in particular the faun, the centaur, the minotaur and the mermaid. These four will be my focus today, but this does not mean that the premise of this article cannot extend to other mythological creatures as well. The use of these creatures by C.S. Lewis adds a mythological feel to the story line...
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