What Happens Today

As the Father Loved Me As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love. ( John 15:9 ESV) Your mission, your calling, does not disqualify you from the love of Christ, not matter how rocky or rough. The low estate you find yourself in does not break the great pact of His faithful love for you. Your level is suffering is not inversely proportionate to the level of His love for you. Christ’s love is just as passionate and eternal as the Father’s love is for Him. Love, like joy, is not circumstantial. It finds not its source in current conditions or lack of emotional turmoil. The joy of the Lord is your strength; a joy that is not sourced in the temporal but finds it’s rich flow and lavished abundance in the eternal- in the Eternal One. And so is the love of Christ towards you who have received Him. This great love has been shared between the Father and the Son for all eternity, and when Jesus says He loves us as the Father loves Him, He is speaking not of a fair weather f

Who’s In Charge? And he put all things under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church (Ephesians 1:22 ESV) He is the head over every power and authority. (Colossians 2:10 NIV) Not everyone is a good person. Not everyone is looking out for your best interests. In fact, there are those around us with malicious intentions and who may even act to bring harm. It’s the world we live in today. It’s been this way since the beginning actually. In a garden we read of an evil creature who had mal-intent towards the perfect and good Creator and sought to brought harm to Him by harming those the Creator cared about. This event has found its way into our classic stories of revenge - harm me and I’ll harm what you care about. And this evil creature (Satan, the devil) continues his work through people. Cain kills Abel, Jacob’s sons exact revenge on men who harmed their sister, religious leaders conspire to kill the Son of God, and there are many other such stories of revenge and ha

Rejoice Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice! (Philippians 4:4 NASB) God’s grace is truly amazing. When I think back to His mercy and the patience He has shown me even when I should have known better, my heart is fills with joy and praise. The word in Greek for rejoice is χαίρω (chairo) and comes from the same root as the words in Greek for grace and joy. Not surprising. God’s grace gives us a license to be joyful, outside of ourselves, in spite of our failings; we can, as Paul commands, rejoice. You have permission. We might even say, delight in God’s grace! Rest in it. Lean on it. I’ll say it again, delight in God’s grace. Augustine did. Over sixteen hundred years ago he wrote his “Confessions”, an uber-honest and transparent narrative on God’s amazing work in his wandering life. Raised by and prayed for a Christian mother, Augustine went his own way into the world of education and philosophy. This world was not all it promised to be, and eventually he would leav

Think On These Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. (‭‭Philippians‬ ‭4:8‬ ‭NIV‬‬) This morning the Lord awakened me to three things to think on that align with Paul’s “finally brethren” exhortation in his letter to the Philippians. In the past I’ve tried to find things that are true, and noble, and right, and pure, and lovely, and admirable to think on but have honestly come up with little to nothing. My mind struggles to find such things in our world today. But this morning, I’m grateful to God for giving me three things that are lovely and right, pure and true, and noble and admirable. The morning birdsongs The sound of the birds singing in the morning together and individually is lovely to listen to. Each bird with its own call, giving turns to one another and then in excited ensemble singing together are lik