The White Stone Zone

3 Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. (Ephesians 1) The believer in the gospel of Jesus Christ has much to be thankful for even if circumstantially everything seems to be falling apart. Ephesians says that we have already been blessed with every spiritual blessing in Christ, and then he goes on to outline these blessings. Let's take a look: 1. We have been made holy and blameless We have been made holy and blameless in God's sight: " 4 For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight." We all have an idea in our minds of what it means to act holy, but what does it mean that we have been made holy? Hebrews 10 tells us that "we have been made holy through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all." It would not be a spiritual blessing if we were told we have to act holy, but i

When I was growing up, being a man was very important to me. I remember as a very young boy hearing my parents’ Four Seasons record singing, “"Walk Like a Man",” and thinking, “I want to be a man...I am going to be tough.” I grew up around football, booze, war heroes and a dad that worked hard labor every day. Dad was my first hero. I thought he could do anything. He was athletic, hard working, and clean cut. My earliest memory is my dad crawling on his knees to play with me. Sometimes we would play football, and I would have to run around him. He would grab me with one hand and lift me off the ground. We would laugh, and I knew I was loved. I remember my mom had to pick him up somewhere, and the street was deserted, and he took off running, like he was racing the car, and I thought he ran so fast, almost superhuman. General George Patton was my next hero, the first man I imitated. I remember walking the beach with my cousins, quoting Old Blood and Guts by cussing up

24 "Then the man who had received the one talent came. 'Master,' he said, 'I knew that you are a hard man, harvesting where you have not sown and gathering where you have not scattered seed. 25 So I was afraid and went out and hid your talent in the ground. See, here is what belongs to you.' Jesus tells a parable in chapter 25 of Matthew about the talents. A leader gives three men talents and tells them to put it to use. After a long time, the leader comes back and wants to see what the men do with the talent. The first two put the talents to use and got a return. The third came with the following report. "I was afraid....." Fear. If you read the verse, the servant believed something about the master that was not true. There is nothing in the parable that says the master was a hard man. He actually accused the Master of stealing, and again, there is nothing in the parable that says the Master was the way the servant portrayed him. In fact, he wa