Tim Boyd's Blog

If your hope never comes to a realization than your hope was not only useless, it was harmful.  If you really place your hope in something or someone and it does not work out - that is a harmful sense of hope.  It's setting you up for a colossal failure or pain or frustration or hurt. So, where is your hope?  You live with a sense of hope.  Probably.  Actually, you may not.  The CDC estimates that 1 in 10 Americans lives with clinical depression (yes, clinical).  That means if you are in a group of only 20 people, 2 of them are clinically depressed.  Doesn't that break your heart?  I wonder how many people I talk to each day who are suffering from severe depression.  Do I realize it? There are so many reasons in our world to lose hope; unemployment, divorce, affairs, gossip, unwanted pregnancies, racism, child-molestation, mortgages going under, sex-trafficking, porn addicted dads, alcoholic mothers, and more.  We are all affected...

In his commentary on Luke, theologian N.T. Wright pens this: "The Kingdom that Jesus preached and lived was all about a glorious, uproarious, absurd generosity.  Think of the best thing you can do for the worst person, and go ahead and do it.  Think of the people to who you are tempted to be nasty, and lavish generosity on them instead.  These instructions have a fresh, springlike quality.  They are all about new life bursting out energetically, like flowers growing through concrete and startling everyone with their color and vigor." As we approach Christmas we see a short view of the life of Christ: 1) He had to leave Heaven and the presence of the Father in order to come to a corrupt and painful world marked with hate and greed. 2) When he was born the King wanted to kill him 3) He was born outside to an unmarried poor couple. 4) He came preaching a message of forgiveness of sins and then people wanted to kill him 5) During much of his ministry there is a...

I have met many, many people who live with the false sense that they are supposed to forsake their families for the Kingdom of Heaven.  Some of these people understand this outright and some don't even see it but are driven by this principle from somewhere deep in their soul from somewhere they may not even know.  Their is this sense that they should only pursue God and His Kingdom work in order to please God.  It's as if their family is more of a hindrance to the pursuit of DOING God's work (which of course, humans can never really do God's work, God is actually quite capable Himself). People see verses where Jesus seemingly shuns his family and says that his real family is the brothers and sisters in Christ.  He tells a young man not to say goodbye to his family because the Kingdom is of more value than his stupid family anyways (maybe not a a good interpretation of those verses hmmm?)  They read that Paul said we shouldn't really get married unless we are s...

I used to be encouraged by very popular verses in the Bible.  Verses like “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me” and “For to me to live is Christ and to die is Gain!”  which are both found in Philippians.  Those verses are still wonderful but they don’t encourage me like they used to.  I have to find new verses to inspire me.  The following verses have been like food for my soul the past few months. “Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.”  Galatians 6:9 “The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God stands forever.”  Isaiah 40:8 I put those verses by my desk because they give me strength.  I don’t mean that they make me feel nicer.  I mean that those verses encourage me to do my best, to work hard, and to try to continually become the person that God has made me to be. A few years ago I was going through a particularly rough patch in my lif...