#truth is powerful

[awesomecooperlove]

LIES, LIES, LIES ENDLESS LIES… TIME TO WAKE UP HUMANITY

👩🏼‍🔬🤥👨🏻‍🔬

[monk-of-figaro]

Random FF6 Headcanons

I love reading peoples' posts about FF6 headcanons, and I've been thinking about what my own HCs are. The thing is, I can't roll them out like a list because I don't write them down and then I forget what they are. Sometimes they just pop into my brain.

So instead of writing a single post with a list, I'm going to start a post that I'll keep adding into as HCs pop into my head.

This particular HC came to me when I was driving home from work, and it struck my inner truth so hard I felt compelled to write it out.

So the HC that prompted me to rush home, haphazardly park my car, throw open my front door, run to the laptop, and immediately start this post is:

Relm thinks burps are funny, but Gau thinks farts are funnier

[quotesincolors]

[gabeflopez-blog]

Good & Evil : Clinging & Hating

If 26 years of being alive and 16 years of being a follower of Jesus Christ has taught me anything, it's that I don’t hate sin like I should.

It wasn't until I read Romans 12:9 recently that I was able to address this sad truth.

I am an excellent justifier of sin. We all are. In fact, we’re great at it. History has shown us we've used scripture to justify some pretty horrible things.

We’ve even marginalized the severity of sin in the last place you’d ever expect — the local church. We’ve tried to convince God himself that what he called absolute truth before time and space even existed is no longer relevant thanks to progressive culture. 

We’ve allowed gradual shifts in our societal norms to fog up the lens through which we interpret God’s teaching. We live in a time where your religion is not your religion, your worldview is your religion.

So if Romans is telling us to hate what is evil, affectionately known as sin, why haven’t we done so?

As a people, we naturally don’t hate evil at all. We slow-dance with evil. We invite evil over for dinner. We spend our money on evil. We even google evil late at night when no one's around.

In a culture where morality is as useless as last year's iPhone, words have lost their meaning. No doesn’t mean no, it means come back tomorrow and we’ll see. But hate is still a strong word is it not? Surely that part couldn’t have changed. The dictionary describes it as an intense dislike or an extreme aversion to. But among the various definitions, this is my favorite: an unwillingness toward.

That word unwilling is pretty self-explanatory. If your unwilling to do something, you just simply won’t do it.

Imagine if we possessed that same unwillingness to sin. If we absolutely refused to go there. If we thought it so repulsive that we’d accept death to avoid it. Radical.

I believe with all my heart that that’s the kind of response the scripture calls for when it says to hate what is evil.

The second half of that sentence is just as powerful: cling to what is good. That word cling paints a vivid picture as well. I see a finger-nail tearing grip. I see an unwillingness to let go of that ledge.

If we’re clinging to good, by virtue of simple science, evil could never be present because the two are opposing states. Just as light and darkness cannot co-exist nor can sin immerse us when good is our life line.

The scriptures tell us a lot of things but let’s hone in on 2 definites to close up this thought:

1.) God hates sin so much that he sacrificed his only son for the sake of getting rid of its permanent sting and grasp on our lives. 2.) God never changes. He is the same yesterday, today and forever.

So what does that tell us about how God feels about sin today? Right now. In THIS present culture far removed from the “old days”? In the same culture where Hollywood has made sex outside of marriage a thing of conquest and adventure. In the same culture where drugs and alcohol are a glamorous experiment. In the day and age where the strong, healthy family is an anomaly.

My guess is, he’s got the same opinion he’s always had.

[gabeflopez-blog]

Truth Is Powerful

Truth is powerful.

It's a river rapid with no wane. 

It has freed many'a wrongfully condemned men.

It wields the potential to drastically affect the course of your life or the course of your day.

When declared out loud, it's an instant mood-changer.

If it was true 2,000 years ago, it's still true now. And if it wasn't true back then, ain't nothing changed.

So here's some truth: God created us in his likeness to ultimately point all our accomplishments back to him and give him the glory he's due as the Creator of everything. 

Of course, we fell off track into selfishness and into debt. Consequently, the only payment valuable enough to clear our outstanding balance was the death of a sinless man, the son of God, named Jesus.  

His death broke the rigid legalism of the old law and introduced this radical new element into our faith called grace.

To sum it up. It's like going to dinner with a friend and being told that, unbeknownst to you, you're meal has been covered. You have no idea who or why and there's nothing you can do about it.

Grace has paid the bill.

You didn't deserve it but God is generous and a gentleman and paid the price regardless.

All of this is so important because right now, on this early Tuesday morning at 12:25am, I stand forgiven of all the wretched filth my mind and hands have committed. All the angry moments, the disrespect, the deceit, the greed and pride — clean. All thanks to an atonement that I had nothing to do with and couldn't earn in a million lifetimes.

It's pretty humbling right? I think that's the idea. That we humble our hearts in the presence of a man's man who gave up something incredibly valuable to him, in fact, the MOST valuable thing to him, all so that he could redeem his fallen creation that he still loved furiously. 

That's truth.

And that truth is powerful.