Showing results by narrator "Matt Wahl" in All Categories

17th century Puritan Richard Baxter explains that fully understanding sin is as impossible as fully understanding God. So how can we develop a shield against sin and learn to hate it? Baxter lists the many glories as experiences by true Christians; God’s love and mercy, Christ’s sacrifice, an eternal soul which in itself is pure, to then explain that sin is that which robs us from these glories and clutters our soul with misguided notions.

We very often fall victim to our own minds and once our mind becomes our cage, escape is very difficult. Richard Baxter offers this treatise as a warning against the powerful denial the world can lay upon us in the form of trying to further yourself by secular standards. Ultimate freedom, he states, can only be gained with a mind free of such interference and fully devoted to the word of God.

Even though ministers set out to speak for God, they are human like all of us and so they can fall victim to the same sins. The worst sin a minister can possess, Baxter states, is pride. He warns that pride invites us all to seek out ourselves while the mission of every minister is to seek out nothing but God.

A widow and a deacon seem to be getting awfully close to one another. At the sewing circle, gossip is of course had by the "sisters". All in all, a race is won and to the winner go the spoils.