MATTHEW 5:43-46 Love God. Love one another. Love your neighbor. Love your enemy. That about covers it. In Christ’s meticulous census, the community exempt from the love of Christians has a population of exactly zero.
We all want to feel like the most beautiful girl in the room, to be chosen and loved forever. The Cinderella story gives us hope of our impossible dreams becoming true.
The world promises you so much... and leaves you empty. God’s promises are for real and forever.
If the Word of God is about anything at all, it is about God’s will rather than ours. Our liberty is paradoxically discovered through the will of God rather than our own.
I’ve spent much of my ministry apologizing to people for what appears to be a rather odd show of taste on the part of the One who called me. I have no idea why in this world God has risked His name on someone like me. I will never comprehend such grace and stubbornness of will to teach a woman with a penchant for ditches how to walk a higher path.
We’re all looking for a quick fix, but God is after lasting change – a lifestyle of Christianity.
Jesus is the only outsider who truly knows the insider our skin keeps veiled.
Even of marriage, the Lord said the two shall become one flesh. He did not say we’d become one heart. He did not say we’d become one mind.
The trick to dealing with criticism is letting it do it’s good work but forbidding it to demoralize and destroy or to embitter.
But for those who resist insisting on idyllic circumstances and faultless people, new beginnings can be had.
I’ve become increasingly convinced that those we need to forgive most often grasp the least how much they’ve hurt us. If they understood and took responsibility, it wouldn’t have taken the Cross to forgive them. It could have just happened over coffee.
A seed needs planting in order to grow. It needs patience. If the seed was cast from the hand of God, he will surely sprout it, in his time, in his way. If it came from good human intentions, consider it no waste. It was a mortal’s vocalized belief that you have something to offer, and while that person may prove mistaken about the precise form, that faith can act as fertilizer to the soil.
Gethsemane is all the things we fear most except one. We fear we are unheard. We’re sure of it, but it is not true. It was in that original Gethsemane that Jesus, in the words of Hebrews 5:7, “offered prayers and appeals with loud cries and tears to the one who was able to save him from death, and he was heard... And we are heard.
I was about to get to start over. Mind you, for those who have lived past third grade, there’s no real starting over from scratch. There’s just starting over scratched – and if the hurts clawed deep enough, scarred. But for those who resist insisting on idyllic circumstances and faultless people, new beginnings can be had. Our family had been reduced to so few in a community of so many, even once we settled into a house and a neighborhood, that we no longer had any notion of who we were.
The eight most spectacular words falling on the ear of a lonely kid clutching a tray: “You can sit with us if you want.
Texans didn’t have the vocabulary God gave a groundhog.
All my knotted-up life I’ve longed for the sanity and simplicity of knowing who’s good and who’s bad. I’ve wanted to know this about myself as much as anyone. I needed God to clean up the mess, divide the room, sort the mail so all of us can just get on with it and be who we are. Go where we’re bent.
No other human can climb down our throats like a spelunker and hack through our trachea and try on our hearts and see how they feel. One mortal cannot fully comprehend how another operates from within.
The thing about life is that, for most folks, it hurts from the start.
We’re too flawed and too challenged by history, circumstance, and chemistry to hoard grace for long.
All this time, I’d accepted the rampant sexism because I thought it was about Scripture. What I was watching in the wake of the report, however, did not appear to be a whit about Scripture, nor did it evidence fruit of the Holy Spirit, as far as I could discern. In my estimation, this thing playing out in front of the world was about power. This was about control. This was about the boys’ club.