{"id":11144,"date":"2017-07-03T00:10:37","date_gmt":"2017-07-03T07:10:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lccredding.com\/lcc\/?p=11144"},"modified":"2017-07-03T00:10:37","modified_gmt":"2017-07-03T07:10:37","slug":"july-3-2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lccredding.org\/church\/2017\/07\/03\/july-3-2017\/","title":{"rendered":"July 3, 2017"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"backgrounder: transparent url('http:\/\/lccredding.com\/lcc\/wp-content\/uploads\/newest2017-july_edited-2.jpg'); backgrounder-size: 600px 300px; left top repeat 0 100% width: 600px; margin: 10px auto; padding: 10px 80px 10px 85px; width: 90%,;\">\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\"><em>\u201cNow when the people saw what Paul had done, they raised their voices, saying in the Lycaonian language, \u2018The gods have come down to us in the likeness of men!\u2019 And Barnabas they called Zeus, and Paul, Hermes, because he was the chief speaker.\u201d<\/em> Acts 14:11-12<\/span><\/p>\n<h2><strong><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Worldview<\/span><\/strong><\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">When we hold a belief that something is true, we will act accordingly. For instance, in childhood I believed my stepfather had taken the place of my father, and since I was miserable, I acted as if everything my stepfather did was to make my formerly happy family miserable. This intruder could do nothing right in my eyes. I\u2019m sure he wondered if he would ever break through to me.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">In our passage today, God healed a lame man through Paul and Barnabas, and those who believed in other gods assumed Paul and Barnabas were those very gods. The priests of Zeus in that city brought garlands and intended to make sacrifices to them. The worldview of these people was that other gods were real. They had been living in this \u201creality\u201d or belief system, and thus interpreted every event according to what they assumed to be true. Since they already believed in other gods, it wasn\u2019t a big leap to conclude Paul and Barnabas were Zeus and Hermes.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">When we deeply believe something, we can easily jump to conclusions. If we deeply believe life is dangerous, then we will fear whatever is around the corner. If we deeply believe life is unfair, we will usually feel everyone and everything is against us.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">We assume that what we see with our eyes confirms our beliefs, when in fact Scripture tells us that our beliefs should be conformed to the Word of God. We are to live by the truths of the Bible. These should shape our thinking, our worldview. If we are alienated from the life of God, we will misinterpret events and likely miss seeing His orchestration of circumstances. We won\u2019t recognize His work in our lives.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">It is so important to be immersed in what God says and knows. What does HE say about your life, about the enemy, about the world? It isn\u2019t enough to just tell ourselves what to think about, although that is a good start. What we all need is a completely changed mindset (worldview). We need a new way of seeing life\u2014to see it as He sees it.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Let\u2019s not just dip our toes in the streams of Living Water\u2014let\u2019s jump in and be buried in Him. Let\u2019s make His Words the most important words of every day. Let\u2019s make His thoughts about us rule over what we think about ourselves. This is how we will gain His worldview. Then we can interpret events with His perspective.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><em><span style=\"color: #000000;\">\u201cGod, may our thoughts align with Yours, so that we do not live by what we see or feel, and thus jump to wrong conclusions. May our worldview come by the wisdom of Your Word. In Jesus\u2019 Name, Amen.\u201d<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cNow when the people saw what Paul had done, they raised their voices, saying in the Lycaonian language, \u2018The gods <a href=\"https:\/\/www.lccredding.org\/church\/2017\/07\/03\/july-3-2017\/\"> [&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11144","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-women"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p92wjD-2TK","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lccredding.org\/church\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11144","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lccredding.org\/church\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lccredding.org\/church\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lccredding.org\/church\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lccredding.org\/church\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11144"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lccredding.org\/church\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11144\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lccredding.org\/church\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lccredding.org\/church\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lccredding.org\/church\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}