Hot Tea and the Holy Spirit

While I am not a very techy person and only recently discovered how to pause a Facebook story long enough to read it before it crosses over to the Internet abyss, I do enjoy me some social media from time to time. Facebook is my favorite. I have two Facebook friends we shall call Cindy. While they do in fact share the same first name, it has been changed for the purposes of this post to protect the innocent (and lend cadence to my Dickensian title).  One Cindy is the most vocally liberal Facebook friend I have and the other the most vocally conservative.  I often giggle at "the two Cindies" in my Facebook story feed and how their shared name seems to be their only similarity.  But in truth, the politically charged posts of both Cindies are full of passion, conviction, love, and hate. They are two sides of the same coin.  Sometimes I admire their boldness. Sometimes I agree wholeheartedly with what they have to say. Sometimes their posts make me want to throw my phon...

Who do you listen to? There have never been more voices vying for your attention and allegiance, and the number increases every day.  For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.   2 Timothy 4:3 I think about this verse ALL. THE. TIME.  This is our present reality. We can hit up the interwebs at any moment to find support for nearly any idea we might have. We can find "experts" who agree with or refute any view. We leave this experience feeling justified and bolstered by the congruent opinions and feeling justifiably superior to and irked by incongruent ones.  I think it would be very easy for any Christian (young, old, conservative, progressive, mainline, evangelical, Catholic, Orthodox, you name it) to use 2 Timothy 4:3 to condemn another. Surely we all believe our doctrine is sound, but how do we k...