Thinking about God, Jesus and The Big Questions

It often seems so easy to fall into making a bad decision. Even if we know it's something we shouldn't do (e.g. having extra helpings of dessert when we're not truly hungry), it seems so tempting to say yes. I know I struggle with this sort of thing, and it seems easy to justify falling into temptation, especially with the dessert example ("I'm not hurting anyone, after all", I'd tell myself.) Finally, I heard something at church that made sense to me. The pastor said something which I'll paraphrase here: "Better not to fall into the temptation. You'll wind up with a bit of regret at not doing the tempting activity, but it's at least better than to fall into the temptation and wind up with regret at doing it - plus guilt." This is true: it's a small amount of regret on one hand, weighed against a larger amount of regret PLUS guilt on the other hand. When I phrase it like that, it makes it much easier for me to say no to ...

Many people have a fear of missing out. They are insecure and don't want to be left out of something that's going on. Yet, I've noticed that fear of missing out is almost always applied to things like parties and get-togethers, but almost never to anything crucially important. For example, what about being saved? You'd think many people would have a huge fear of missing out on that. You'd think the people who were worried about missing out on something as minor (in the long term) as parties would all flock to churches so as not to miss out on the good news of Jesus. You would expect they'd all want to be saved. Of course, fear of missing out is not a good reason in and of itself to want to be saved by Jesus. We should want to be saved because we truly believe in Jesus, not just out of a fear of missing out. Missing out on a party only affects us in the here-and-now. But if we miss out on salvation, it affects us for eternity. This is something that w...