revelife on Revelife

Weblog

Tuesday, 10 November 2009

Learning to Trust God, and My Husband

By Sharon at She Worships
This weekend marked 3 months since Ike and I got married. And an awesome 3 months it has been! We’ve had a ton of fun together, but we’ve also learned a lot about one another and ourselves in the process.

In particular, I’ve realized that I’m a bit of a control freak when it comes to driving. You see, I’m finding myself in the role of passenger more often than I ever have before. Ike almost always drives, and this is hard for me. We’ll be driving some place that I’ve been a million times, but then, horror of horrors, he decides to take a different route. He turns left where I would have turned right. He takes the interstate instead of the back roads. It starts to drizzle but he doesn’t turn on his windshield wipers because he “claims” he can still see out the windshield.

As a result of these decision-making discrepancies, I continually find myself asking gentle yet immasculatingly annoying questions like, “Love, don’t you think you need to turn your lights on at this point in the day?” or “Did you mean to take that turn? This route seems a little out of the way.” It usually bugs him when I ask questions like that so I’m trying to stop, but it’s really hard. Many times I would do things very differently from him. And as a passenger, I feel completely out of control. More Here...
God is For Us, But is He on Our Side?

Though I have often heard people confidently assert, or at least strongly imply that God was on ‘their’ side; Is He, really?!? My smug heart has secretly treasured such an attitude from time to time, especially when I felt pressure or opposition from other people.
Joshua, the loyal attendant of Moses during the wilderness wanderings of Israel, assumed the role of leader of this fledgling nation as they crossed into Canaan through the Jordan River. God had refused to permit Moses to enter the promised land, and so now Joshua took up the mantel of Moses as Israel anticipated the taking of this land. In preparing for Israel’s first siege:
...Joshua was there near Jericho. He looked up and saw right in front of him a man standing, holding his drawn sword. Joshua stepped up to him and said, "Whose side are you on—ours or our enemies'?"
He said, "Neither. I'm commander of God's army. I've just arrived." Joshua fell, face to the ground, and worshiped. He asked, "What orders does my Master have for his servant?"
God's army commander ordered Joshua, "Take your sandals off your feet. The place you are standing is holy."
Joshua did it.
-- Joshua 5:13-15 (The Message)

I think the assumption is that if we are believers then certainly (there can be no doubt); God is definitely for us and with us. But it just seems to me that this reading from Joshua negates that presumptive kind of thinking. More Here...
The Challenge of Applying Scripture

By Clayton King
In studying for my message this past week, I consulted Gordon Fee’s commentary on the letter to the Philippians. Fee always has a way of achieving a great blend of academic discovery and practical application. One comment I read stuck in my mind. Essentially, he said it would be a great tragedy to lose the heart and meaning of a text by over-analyzing it. His advice was to go back to the scripture and read it again. And again. And again.

I confess that as a preacher, evangelist, and pastor, one of my greatest struggles is reading the Word of God for spiritual nourishment and personal transformation. My tendency is to read it for sermon material. I see passages unfold as if I were preaching them to others. But the Holy Spirit wants to preach that passage to me first.

I would prefer to read the Bible for what it has to say to my audience. I forget that when I read it, I am an audience of one and must decided how I will respond to what God tells me to do; repent, rejoice, give a gift, intercede, or re-arrange priorities. When the message on the page is for everyone else, I escape the personal responsibility of obedience. When the message is for me, I have to give an account to God. More Here...
Death and Wal-Mart
By Sean at The Mockingbird Blog

Well, I have been MIA for the past few weeks due to moving, traveling, etc., but I stumbled across this article on MSNBC.com a week or so ago, and thought it worth mentioning. It turns out that Wal-Mart has begun to sell coffins online, that's right, coffins. Now it is truly your one-stop shopping destination. The best part is that you can find the caskets under the "health and beauty" section:)
A lot could be said about the new additions to the Wal-Mart inventory, but I found myself feeling very grateful for this development because it reminds us of our mortality. It is not unlike many of the old Episcopal churches in the South that have graveyards surrounding them. I was just down in South Carolina this past week visiting some friends of Mockingbird, and every church I visited sat amidst the gravestones of its parishoners. You don't see this very much any more with many of today's churches worshipping in converted shopping centers and athletic arenas, and I think we are worse off for it. But, those old graveyards remind us that we are not living for this world. They remind us that we are mortal, and ultimately they remind us that we are sinful. Death in this world is a direct result of sin. More Here...

1:43 PM
470 Views
18 eProps
9 Comments
email
The Triune God

The doctrine of the Trinity — that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit are each equally and eternally the one true God — is admittedly difficult to comprehend, and yet is the very foundation of Christian truth. Although skeptics may ridicule it as a mathematical impossibility, it is nevertheless a basic doctrine of Scripture as well as profoundly realistic in both universal experience and in the scientific understanding of the cosmos.

Both Old and New Testaments teach the Unity and the Trinity of the Godhead. The idea that there is only one God, who created all things, is repeatedly emphasized in such Scriptures as Isaiah 45:18:

“For thus saith the Lord that created the heavens; God himself that formed the earth and made it; …I am the Lord; and there is none else.”

A New Testament example is James 2:19:

“Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well; the devils also believe, and tremble.”

The three persons of the Godhead are, at the same time, noted in such Scriptures as Isaiah 48:16:

“I have not spoken in secret from the beginning; From the time that it was, there am I; and now the Lord God, and his Spirit, hath sent me.” More Here...