I am the man without any sense

In Proverbs 7 starting in verse 7, we hear of a foolish young man. A young man with no sense. He's easily lured into something he knows that he should not do. He is weak.

It's easy to stand outside of the story and judge him, until I realize that I am that senseless, foolish young man.

How many times have I done something even though I knew that it was wrong? I'd rather not answer that question, to be honest. And how many times have I drug my feet when I knew that I should do something? Again, I'd prefer to plead the fifth.

God does not provide this scripture to make us feel down about ourselves, or to shame us into using our own power to be better about these things. He provides us with this truth about our weakness to remind us then we need Him, that we need His mercy in grace.

I am reminded of my own failure. But this reality does not make me sad anymore. It gives me joy. It reminds me that I am not some self made man who can pull himself up by his own bootstraps. It reminds me that I need my Savior.

I settle in the reality that this is who I am: someone who very much needs God's grace and mercy. And this increases my appreciation and love for Him who has so selflessly given it to me.

Marriage is hard: we’re prideful

Have you ever seen the sappy Ryan O’Neal/Ali MacGraw movie romance entitled "Love Story"? MacGraw played a character who was dying, and at her bedside O’Neal, choking and tearful, said he was sorry. MacGraw then unloaded a line that has done a lot of damage to relationships and marriages everywhere: “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”

Apologizing is hard work. Apologizing and changing your behaviors is even harder, and what makes it so hard is pride. Dating and marriage always to some degree involve each person’s struggling for control. When your behaviors are driven by pride, you want to win every argument, always be right, see difficulties as your partner’s fault, bring up your partner’s admitted failures of the past, and explain away or deny your own sins and weaknesses.

You need other people’s input and critique to know how you sound, how you look, how your actions affect other people. In humility realize that you aren’t quite as brilliant and infallible as you think you are: “Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the faith God has distributed to each of you” (Romans 12:3).

When your spouse has an issue with something you’ve said or done, listen twice and think three times before you say anything. It may just be that the best thing you can say is, “I’m sorry.”

(From the Bible app)

If the theory of evolution is true, would that fact even undermine the design argument for the existence of God?

Sidenote:  The Theory of Evolution is still just a theory, even if many remove the words "Theory of" in academia, museums, etc. They will say that this is because the evidence is "undeniable" (Bill Nye), but it's still just a theory. By the way, God and creation and Christ are "undeniable", too, using the same measure.  Neither can be proven or disproven irrefutably.

From Dr. Scott Sullivan:

"The famous atheist Richard Dawkins once quipped that Darwinian evolution has made him an "intellectually fulfilled atheist". And it's no secret that atheists and skeptics often appeal to evolution as a sort of "refutation" of the existence of God, or at least, to support their view that God is not needed to explain the fascinating complexity we see at the biological level.

But is this true? Is it the case that evolution, even if it really happened, is a good reason to not believe in God?

Or, to ask a related question, if the theory of evolution is true, would that fact even undermine the design argument for the existence of God?

My answer is "no" to both questions.

My thesis is this: that even if we grant that evolution is true (and that may well be debatable) still, no harm is done to either belief in God or to the design argument itself.

In other words, my claim is that the truth of the evolutionary hypothesis is irrelevant to the rationality of believing in God and even irrelevant to the design argument itself."

Dr. Scott Sullivan grabs this subject by the horns in his latest podcast:
http://classicaltheist.s3.amazonaws.com/WhyEvolutionDoesNotShowThereIsNoGod.mp3