Bible Gateway Blog

This is the one-hundred-twenty-second lesson in author and pastor Mel Lawrenz’ How to Live the Bible series. If you know someone or a group who would like to follow along on this journey through Scripture, they can get more info and sign up to receive these essays via email here.

“Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.” (Hebrews 11:1)

When my daughter was a baby and my wife would put her in my arms and leave the room, the baby’s head would shift, eyes would scan back and forth, brow would wrinkle, and then—most certainly—came that cry of distress. A cry that cut to the quick. I knew that she was thinking, “Mom has disappeared. She is gone. She has ceased to exist. And I will never ever see her again.” A baby does not have the cognitive ability to know that someone continues to exist even when the physical evidence is withdrawn. Babies cannot be “certain of what we do not see.”

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This is the one-hundred-twenty-first lesson in author and pastor Mel Lawrenz’ How to Live the Bible series. If you know someone or a group who would like to follow along on this journey through Scripture, they can get more info and sign up to receive these essays via email here.

I love watching the sunrise on the horizon of Lake Michigan, and it always reminds me of the dawning of the new life of faith. The black-painted sky gradually thins and stars lose their sparkle against the graying morning. On the horizon, where the sun hides low like a lion in tall grass, the darkness melts before the advancing, red-tinged light. A fire is coming. And then it shoots out across the landscape—just a small ray—but the darkness has no chance against it. Then the brilliant arch advances. By the time the full orb rides on the horizon, its radiant heat is already drying the night air and warming my face.

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This is the one-hundred-twentieth lesson in author and pastor Mel Lawrenz’ How to Live the Bible series. If you know someone or a group who would like to follow along on this journey through Scripture, they can get more info and sign up to receive these essays via email here.

In recent lessons we’ve looked at a biblical view of work, how it comes from the nature of God, and what happens if we work too little or too much. And what the biblical view of rest is.

Whatever corrective we need for our attitudes toward work or the way we go about it, there is one biblical principle that defines and shapes work in such a way that it becomes a noble and rich part of our experience: We work for Christ.

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