ellauri159.html on line 1161: You do your best writing when they feel personally invested in the topic. Use your wrong sense of empathy to immerse yourself in the subject, much as actors immerse themselves in a character. (Choose a subject you really fancy to immerse yourself in.) To stay inspired, look for ways to connect the writing to your ideals. If you’re a technical writer, create a human mental avatar of your technology and use your writer’s voice to “speak” to it.
ellauri164.html on line 825: How then do we obtain the mercy of His sacrifice? Is it not by confession and repentance? We must “speak to the Rock.”
ellauri164.html on line 935: When God said Moses “failed to sanctify me in the eyes of the people,” He did not specify exactly what this failure was. God had told Moses to “speak to the rock,” but the account stated that “Moses lifted up his hand, and smote the rock with his rod twice.” Clearly, in that act, Moses went beyond what God had commanded him to do. God had told Moses to take the staff, but not use it. He was directly commanded only to speak to the rock. He went beyond what was written when struck that rock. It was similar to Nadab and Abihu who offered “strange fire which He had not commanded them.” At that time Moses saw that such behavior did not “treat God as holy or glorify him among the people” (Lev. 10:1-3). Yet Moses, in anger, failed to hallow God when he struck that rock instead of speaking to it. He had failed to learn “not to go beyond what is written,” (1Cor. 4:6). He was told to speak to the rock (and he did not do that), but struck the rock (which he had no authority to do). God later charged Moses with this sin: “you rebelled against my word at the waters of Meribah” (Num 20:24; 27:13).
ellauri171.html on line 635: Now we learn that the Levite and the concubine are husband and wife because the Levite is described as “her husband,” and the woman’s father is the Levite’s “father-in-law.” We also learn that the Levite travelled to Bethlehem to speak kindly to her and return home together. Because we are told that he planned to “speak tenderly to her,” this once again suggests that they may have argued after she played the prostitute, and as a result she left.
ellauri171.html on line 678: Our second lesson is that our sins affect others and potentially lead others to sin. The first sin in this account occurred in the home of the Levite and concubine. The fact that the Levite planned to “speak tenderly to her” (Judges 19:3) in order to win her back, seems to imply that they had quarreled. The most obvious sin is that she committed adultery when she became a prostitute. The initial sin cascaded into the horrific evils in Gibeah and subsequently to the 400 virgins who were taken alive in Jabesh-gilead to be given as wives to the remaining men of Benjamin. Judges 21:25 says, “. . . everyone did what was right in his own eyes.”
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