Book Review: It Will Cost You Everything

Book Review: It Will Cost You Everything

by Roger E. BayramianNo Comments
When I was in seminary many years ago, there was often a critique of churches that taught "cheap grace" or "easy believism." The claim was that some were teaching that the only thing people had to do was to make a "profession of faith," ignoring a life of discipleship which included obedience and holiness. Although God's grace is freely given to the one who trusts Jesus, Christians are called to respond to a life of obedience and holiness. Is there a cost in following Jesus? Steve Lawson attempts to answer this question in his book "It Will Cost You Everything: What it Takes to Follow Jesus." The primary focus of this book is to walk through Luke 14:25-35 which he calls a "hard saying of Christ." In this text, Lawson wants to distinguish between true and false believers. Lawson began this book with an analogy of his life when he received an offer of a scholarship to play college football. The scholarship...
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Do you consider yourself an influencer?

by Roger E. BayramianNo Comments
One of the most well-known influencers is Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla. He is widely known for creating a successful electric car company and then becoming one of the world’s richest people in the world. He is not only known because of Tesla, but also for his viral tweets. In December 2020 he tweeted “One word: Doge.” Have you ever heard of Dogecoin? Dogecoin was a cryptocurrency created in 2013 as a joke. The cryptocurrency was trading for less than a penny last year. Dogecoin jumped after his tweet and at one point was up over 700%. The joke turned into a market cap today of over $6 billion dollars! His influence fascinates me, and it made me think about how we influence each other. Most of us do not have that type of influence on social media, but we all influence people through normal everyday conversations. This began all the way back in the Garden of Adam and Eve. In...
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Facing the Unexpected

by Roger E. BayramianNo Comments
James 4:13-15 13 Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”— 14 yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. 15 Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.”  The verses above have often come to my mind over the last year. Life in a fallen world is full of joys and disappointment, fulfilled expectations and unmet expectations, dreams fulfilled and dashed dreams. Life in a fallen world during a pandemic adds another dynamic, the constant reminder that life is short, and we have limited control of our circumstances.   How can these verses bring perspective back into our lives? One truth that we should remember is that the Bible does not always explain the circumstances of life, but the Bible...
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Where is your hope?

by Roger E. BayramianNo Comments
The events over the past year have changed lives around the world. A novel coronavirus (COVID-19) began in Wuhan, China in December 2019 and has spread across multiple countries. At the time of this writing, there have been over 29 million cases in the United States with over 500,000 deaths. Worldwide the number of cases is over 120 million and over 2.5 million deaths. There have also been many people who have recovered from COVID, over 22 million in the United States, and 96 million worldwide. We interpret numbers and they can tell different stories. Often in the United States, the number that is most emphasized is the number of new cases and deaths, rarely do you hear about the number who have recovered. This also leads to how we react to the news since there is a constant minute-by-minute news cycle about the Coronavirus. News, social media, and even elementary school children are talking about the coronavirus. The coronavirus...
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