The UmBlog

i am struggling to write on this part. i don't feel i understand it well enough. the harder you meditate on the things of God the less you know. hAGIATHETW TO ONOMA SOU: let it be exalted, the name of yours the verb is the first word. its tense is aorist (kind of like a past tense but also the typical tense to write in), its a command, but a passive one, in the 3rd person singular. we are telling God, don't hold back the exaltation of your name, phrased in the active tense. we translate derivatives of this word into "holy" and "saints" and "set apart" and "sanctify." This is another facet of not taking His name in vain. His name is set apart. It's the name of the only being in the universe worthy of worship. Devotion and adoration to any other deity is not acceptable. Only His name is set apart. His name is found in His words to us, in His Scripture, proclaimed by His Son who claimed that those who see him have seen the Father. What i...

the Boundless blog asks if kissing is sinfu l? my wife and i also refrained from kissing... OK, that's perhaps a needlessly inciting headline. But it does get us to focus like a laser beam on the morality of kissing someone you're not married to. The point in Scott Croft's article, published this morning on Boundless , is that kissing as typically practiced within modern dating relationships is sexual in nature, and that there's no place for sexual activity outside of marriage: God's design of sex doesn't merely include the act of sexual intercourse. It's also everything that leads up to that act, and everything on the sexual continuum is meant to end in that act. It's called foreplay, and it's a fundamental part of God's design for sex. To borrow (and embellish) an analogy from Michael Lawrence , sexual activity is like a down-hill on-ramp to a highway. It's one way, you gather momentum the second you enter it, and according to the Great E...