Readings: Hebrews 11
Video: All Saints Day vs. All Souls Day
Article: Who is Boko Haram?
Quotes:
From a recent article in Relevant Magazine:
“[Mary] watched as militants tied her sister to a tree and shot her to death—her punishment for declining to slit the throat of an elderly man who refused to renounce his Christian faith. [Mary] also watched as her friend—abducted on her wedding day—and her friend’s sister were married to Boko Haram commanders. [Mary] was set to marry the man who killed her sister. This same solider was one of the numerous fighters who repeatedly raped her. ‘Sometimes five men at the same time,’ she says. ‘After this one, this one.’”
From the ESV Bible Study Notes on Hebrews 11:1:
“[A] vague hope grounded in imaginary, wishful thinking. Instead, faith is a settled confidence that something in the future—something that is not yet seen but that been promised by God—will actually come to pass because God will bring it about. Thus biblical faith in not blind trust in the face of contrary evidence, not an unknowable ‘leap in the dark’; rather, biblical faith is a confident trust in the eternal God who is all-powerful, infinitely wise, eternally trustworthy—the God who has revealed himself in his word and in the person of Jesus Christ, whose promises have proven true from generation to generation, and who will ‘never leave nor forsake’ his own.”