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Receiving God’s Love

February 18, 2013

When my husband proposed to me so many years ago, I didn’t say, “Wait a minute, John.  Do you have any idea what you’re getting into?”  I didn’t pull out a list of reasons why he couldn’t possibly love me or a rap sheet detailing my inadequacies to prove why he shouldn’t—although there were and are many.

No way! I just threw my arms open wide and accepted his love.  I would have been a fool to turn down an offer like that.

I wonder what would happen in our lives if we stopped resisting God’s love and started receiving it.  What if we stopped trying to do the math, stopped striving to earn His favor? What if we just accepted the altogether-too-good-to-be-true news that the yardstick has been broken and the Cross has opened a door to intimacy with [ … ]

SNEAK PEEK: Fearless by Eric Blehm (Paperback Edition)

February 15, 2013

Fearless takes you deep into SEAL Team SIX, straight to the heart of one of its most legendary operators.

Click here to download chapter one of Fearless.

When Navy SEAL Adam Brown woke up on March 17, 2010, he didn’t know he would die that night in the Hind Kush Mountains of Afghanistan—but he was ready. In a letter to his children, not meant to be seen unless the worst happened, he wrote, “I’m not afraid of anything that might happen to me on this earth, because I know no matter what, nothing can take my spirit from me.”

Click here to download chapter one of Fearless.

Quotes on Love

February 13, 2013

My beloved friends, let us continue to love each other since love comes from God. Everyone who loves is born of God and experiences a relationship with God. The person who refuses to love doesn’t know the first thing about God, because God is love—so you can’t know him if you don’t love. This is how God showed his love for us: God sent his only Son into the world so we might live through him. This is the kind of love we are talking about—not that we once upon a time loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to clear away our sins and the damage they’ve done to our relationship with God.

My dear, dear friends, if God loved us like this, we certainly ought to love each other. No one [ … ]

Free to Love

February 12, 2013

“We would love others without first demanding that they conform to our requirements or somehow become acceptable to us. We would not be in competition with anyone else, feeling pressure to look better than we are or hurrying so we’ll be first in line to get a reward. God has plenty of blessings for all his children, and he will still have blessings left to give away whenever we get there. God’s being good to someone else doesn’t mean he will have nothing left to give us later on.

When we learn this, we can love God with everything we are; we can love ourselves and love our neighbors the way we love God. When this happens, we keep the Great Commandments. We are then living in the “yes” of Christ, and we can freely share his “yes” with everyone [ … ]

Fear & Hope

February 4, 2013

From the pages of Embrace Grace…

From the moment we’re born, we’re afraid: of loud noises, of cold air, of falling. While trust begins to build as the months go by, new fears surface: of dark rooms, of meeting strangers, of being alone.

We conquer those fears as we mature, but at the deepest level we never forget them. Old fears continue to color our emotional responses and produce feelings of doubt and uncertainty.

For all those dark times, here’s a word of hope: God meets us where we are. Even if we aren’t looking in his direction, he is always looking in ours.

“From his dwelling place he watches all who live on earth—he who forms the hearts of all, who considers everything they do.” Psalm 33:14-15

Daily Reflection: How might it comfort and encourage you today [ … ]