books

The Bait of Satan

Your response to offense will determine your future, temporally and eternally.

Last year I listened to a sermon preached in a little church in Texas. I was so impacted by it, I shared it with a friend. The message is “The Bait of Offenses” (preached by the now-late Mervin Graber).

Not long after, my friend was in the book section of a thrift store and saw this book title: The Bait of Satan (by John Bevere). Curious by its similarity to the sermon title, he pulled it off the shelf and saw it addressed the same subject. So he bought it. And read it. And loaned it to me.

I was so impressed by the message that I read the book. Wow! Before long, my friend’s wife found another copy of the book in a thrift store. She bought it and my friend gave it to me for Christmas or my birthday.

You can listen to the sermon version “The Bait of Offenses” at my Anabaptists website. I urge you to do so. Please.

The rest of this post is more about the book as well as some excerpts from it. Read it all

Berwynn: Still the Candle Burns

No one asked me if I were willing to...

Our daughter Michayla writes stuff. Including a book I reviewed on Amazon. Alas, Amazon rejected my review. Because parents just aren’t objective, apparently. 😯

Here’s my little review:

Sex slave? Trafficked girl?

This book drew me in. Unexpectedly, it lifted my spirit several times along the way. It renewed my vision for the redemptive, victorious work of the Most High in our breaking, darkening, corrupting world.

At a couple places later in the book, my eyes welled up at the grace of Jesus to the “least” among us. One of those times was when Berwynn recognized the true identity of…eh, I better not be a spoiler!

Berwynn — is she a blend of Rahab, Deborah, and Mary Magdalene? Perhaps. But Casimir, one of the heroes all the way through the tale, early on declared in her defense, “She is a creation of the Most High. And I’ll not have her referred to as anything less than such.”

Well, it took me a few pages of reading to get “into” this book (since this genre generally isn’t my type of reading). But after that, I was hooked.

Thanks for the great read, Michayla!

I easily give Read it all

Do You Pressure Your Friends?

Do you condition your friendship on their compliance?
“If you make your friends do things to please you,
you are loving your own reflection through them.”
-Pete Martens

If you start feeling like I’m conditioning our friendship on your 100% compliance with my wishes, please let me know.

In fact, let me know if such conditioning reaches even 20%.

I don’t want to be that kind of friend. Read it all

Above all, love God!