Hello friends, I'm back again with some more good news! This time I'm posting an excerpt from our latest Shovel Audio, where Adam and I jumped back into Hebrews 5 and connecting the matter of obedience back into the passage about Jesus having learned obedience.

Now, I'm not saying that we can't find some needed encouragement and help through single Bible verses, but haven't we gotten ourselves into a habit that's more like searching through the drug store for the best product for our symptoms? In this mentality, we believed that if we could avail ourselves of the appropriate Bible verse, we could keep ourselves pure. I won't try to tell you that I didn't find much encouragement in the process, but in many ways the obedience I was hoping for didn't always work out as well as I had imagined. I mean, I was hiding the word in my heart, but I was more and more convinced of having sinned against God ... which convinced me that I was not obedient.

Because we've been ingrained to view ourselves according to sin, we can't see the simplicity by which our obedience is not earned but learned by the hardships we experience. What if we knew that God wasn't throwing things at us to expose our disobedience, but that he has been causing us to learn what the true obedience that we've been brought into really is ... and it happens through whatever sufferings we go through?

Shovel Audio

As mentioned above, Adam and I have moved back into Hebrews with an audio entitled... Hebrews 5: Assuming the Position. What is the position we refer to? It is the attitude that many may have considered humility but is little more than a guilt and fear fostered assumption of our lowly position before God. In other words, despite what Christ has accomplished on our behalf, we still consider ourselves unworthy before God so that we start out acknowledging our sinfulness and disobedience. But as Paul asked the Corinthians: What? Don't you know who you are?

As always, it is downloadable for use with most devices, as well as keeping handy on your PC.

AOL users

Those of you with an AOL email address will not have received the last Spoonful because of some unknown issue with my web host that according to them should now be fixed. Of course, if it's not fixed then you won't see this notice ... but I'll get all the bounced messages instead. Hopefully, I won't see that.