A few years ago, while evaluating my Christian life, I concluded that I wasn’t able to love like Jesus wanted me to. I realized that I needed a change in my life, so I prayed. I asked God for help.

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I’ve written about this already, you can check out this post. God first showed me what I needed to do, which was to act with love towards people. But what I didn’t expect was how He would change my life in the process.

The first seed that God planted in my heart was the love for the less fortunate ones. It took more than two years for this seed to start growing. And it is still a seed, but it has already changed a lot inside of me.

Have you ever thought about what you consider a sign of love?

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The other day I was going through some photos from one of my trips to North Carolina, and I remembered an interesting scene that I observed while I was having lunch at a restaurant facing the ocean in Wilmington.

While I was eating and enjoying the beautiful scenery, a couple approached one of the tables in my line of vision. The man had white hair and he was in a wheelchair. I couldn’t tell the age of the woman. Maybe she was his wife or daughter, or someone else.

I got distracted, and when I looked back at them, their food had already been served, and the woman was feeding the man. Apparently, he couldn’t move his arms either.

When she finished feeding him, she took a napkin and cleaned the corners of his mouth. I thought that whoever she was, she was taking good care of him.

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. (Psalm 23:1 – KJV)

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This is the first sentence of the most known Psalm in the Bible, Psalm 23. That is such a powerful affirmation! However, the second part of the sentence is sometimes misunderstood.

Most often, people think that it says that the Lord will give them everything they want. They assume that if the psalmist says that they don’t want anything else, that is because they have everything they do want.

Notice that the subject of the second part of the sentence is “I”. “I” is the person doing the action, and the action is “not want”.

When we talk about the adversaries of God, everyone thinks about Satan and his demons. But the painful reality is that, sometimes, the ones that claim to follow God put themselves in a position that creates opposition to His plans.

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One of the most painful experiences I had in the church was facing opposition inside the church against something that I was positive that God had instructed me to do.

The Bible gives us several examples of people who had good intentions, they never meant to oppose God’s will, but in fact they did.

I love sports, and I enjoy the Olympic Games very much. I like to watch all sports matches whenever I can, even if I don’t have a favorite to root for.

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One thing that has always fascinated me is my behavior towards a match where two athletes or two teams that I don’t root for compete. As soon as I know that one of them is the favorite, I start rooting for the other one. Actually, I think most people do the same thing.

In fact, one of the most special moments of sports is, in my opinion, when the underdog beat the favorite one.

But we don’t like it to be unfair. We want the underdog to rise to the occasion and beat the favorite, and do it fairly so.

“If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer.” (Matthew 21:22)

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There are many verses that talk about prayer in the Bible. And some of them, when taken out of context, may give us the idea that God is like a genie: He is there listening to our requests in order to grant them. And it obviously isn’t true.

Praying is not telling God what you want Him to do. It is listening to God to know what He wants you to do. (Click to tweet this quote)

The Easton’s Bible Dictionary has a beautiful definition for the word “prayer” (you can check the entire article here):

Prayer is converse with God; the intercourse of the soul with God, not in contemplation or meditation, but in direct address to him.

Prayer is a conversation, a direct talk between you and God. You talk and you listen, God talks and God listens. He does his part, every single time. Now we need to do ours. We need to talk to Him instead of sending a list of demands, and most of all we need to listen.

When we talk about liking and loving, most people think that the difference between them is the intensity of the feeling, but it actually isn’t. They are quite different in fact, but still most people get them mixed all the time.

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I’m not talking only about romantic relationships, this applies to all relationships in our life.

When you like someone, it is all about how that person makes you feel. You are proud of them, you like being near them, talking to them, spending time with them, etc, because they make you feel good.

However, if something happens and that person disappoints you, the feeling you have for them starts vanishing. Why? Because this feeling is based upon what you get from that person, it is conditional.

Liking is about you.

On the other hand, when you love someone, it makes you put that person’s interests before yours. No matter what the person does, even if they disappoint you, you still love them. True ove is unconditional.

Solomon is known in the Bible as a very wise man. He received wisdom and everything else he needed from God, wrote many proverbs, and in his time he became widely known by his wisdom. However, he didn’t please neither God (1 Kings 11:9) nor the people (1 Kings 12:4).

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He had everything any king would ever want: wisdom, peace throughout the land, riches, the respect of his people and of other nations, and most of all, the favor of God. What did he do with all that?

• he married many (I mean, many!) women from other nations (1 Kings 11:1-3), in spite of the warning that God had already given through the Law (Deuteronomy 17:16-17);
• he allowed his wives to bring idolatry to Israel (1 Kings 11:4);
• even tough God appeared to him twice (1 Kings 3:5 and 1 Kings 9:1-2), he built altars and followed other gods, in total disobedience to God (1 Kings 11:5-8);
• he put a heavy burden on the people in order to keep his expensive way of life, so much that they eventually rebelled against his son (1 Kings 12);
• at the end of his life, he tried to kill the man to whom God had promised part of the kingdom (1 Kings 11:40), putting himself against the will of God.

Solomon was so wise. Why did he behave like a fool? Why didn’t he use his wisdom to help him be a good king and a man of God, like his father David was?