Category: What do you think?

The lasting legacy a mother can leave through passing on faith to her children

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JEFF TURNER

One of the most powerful things a mother can do is pass on a living faith. Timothy’s grandmother Lois, his mother Eunice, planted the word of God in him from his earliest years. This spiritual investment does not require a woman to step outside the proper order of the home; it is a divine calling that fits beautifully within it. The intimate bond between mother and child creates a sacred space where truth about God and salvation can take deep, enduring root.

Paul also wrote that women are saved through childbearing, a statement sometimes misread as suggesting motherhood earns heaven. What Paul meant reaches far deeper. The shame connected to Eve’s role in the fall is reversed, redeemed, when a woman pours herself into raising a godly generation. When she continues in faith, in love, in purity, she becomes part of something that pushes back against the long shadow of sin in the world.

Consider the mathematics of influence. Lois poured into Eunice. Eunice poured into Timothy. Timothy carried the gospel across the ancient world. One faithful mother. Generations transformed.

For I am mindful of the sincere faith within you, which first dwelled in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice, and I am sure that it is in you as well.

2 Timothy 1:5

What Jesus meant by “you will know them by their fruit” in Matthew 7

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JEFF TURNER

Matthew 7’s well-known phrase about knowing people by their fruit is frequently applied to believers as a way of testing whether someone’s faith is genuine, but I believe that reading misses the actual point Jesus was making. Rather than a not a tool for sizing up fellow Christians, isn’t this a warning about false prophets who are skilled at looking like the real thing while leading people astray? I believe Jesus was telling his listeners how to spot a deceiver, not how to audit a believer.

The fruit he was pointing to includes things like moral character, lifestyle choices, and the kind of people who follow and surround the teacher in question.

A false prophet may sound convincing, but a close look at how he lives and who he attracts will reveal the truth.

So then, you will know them by their fruits.

Matthew 7:20


The weight that grows heavier and the fellowship that must notice

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JEFF TURNER

The longer you walk through the tunnel, the heavier the weight becomes, not lighter. Suffering does not diminish simply because you have endured it faithfully. It compounds. It settles into the bones. And this is precisely why the fellowship of believers is not a luxury but a necessity. We are called to carry one another’s burdens when the load grows too heavy for one set of shoulders.

All of us face trials. This is not the experience of the spiritually weak or the theologically deficient. It is the common inheritance of every soul who draws breath in a broken world. And because all of us face them, all of us need the discerning spirit that can look across the room at a brother or sister and perceive that something has shifted, that the weight has quietly grown heavier than it appears.

Where the love of God is genuinely at work, that discernment is not merely a social grace. It is a gift of the Spirit, and it carries with it a solemn responsibility to move toward the one who is sinking rather than past them.

 Bear one another’s burdens, and thereby fulfill the law of Christ.

Galatians 6:2

Responding correctly is the key that opens everything

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JEFF TURNER

There is a key to growing in the Christian life, and it is the same key that unlocks the trial, and it is this: responding correctly. Not enduring correctly, not simply surviving the season with your theology intact, but responding in a way that opens you to what God intends to do through the suffering.

Consider this when you are tested. Could God be testing your faith, wherever it is right now, however small or however uncertain, with the goal of increasing it? Would he test your faith if he wanted to leave it where he found it?

The believer who responds correctly to trials in life, that is, the one who goes to bended knee in the middle of the trial, will find not only that their faith has been strengthened by what they survived but that they have been purified by it.

Consider it all joy, my brothers and sisters, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance.

James 1:2-3

What 2 Peter 3:9 actually means when it says God is not willing for any to perish

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JEFF TURNER

Second Peter 3:9 says that God is not willing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance, and on the surface that verse seems to create a tension with the idea that God is all-powerful and always accomplishes what he wills. If God wants everyone to be saved and he has the power to make it happen, why is not everyone saved? The answer lies in paying close attention to who Peter is actually addressing in that passage.

Peter is writing to believers, referring to them as “beloved” in the verses surrounding that statement. When he says God is not willing for any to perish, the “any” and “all” he refers to are the same people he has been calling “us” throughout the passage. He is saying that God will not allow any of his people to be lost. Every person he has set his love on will come to repentance.

Isn’t this a promise that God will bring all of his elect safely home?

Everything that the Father gives Me will come to Me, and the one who comes to Me I certainly will not cast out.

John 6:37