Category: So That the World May Believe

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Light in the Darkness

Through Advent, every day gets darker until we arrive at the cusp of Christmas. Winter solstice—December 21st– is the longest night of the year. Light increases each day following.

Christmas comes during the time of year pagans marked the winter solstice, the shortest day–but the end of encroaching darkness. It’s a feast to celebrate light overcoming darkness.

Christmas comes in the same month as Hanukkah–the Jewish festival of lights—commemorating victory over an effort to eradicate Jewish civilization. It’s a feast to memorialize one day’s worth of sanctified oil fueling a lamp for eight days. Eight days to celebrate light overcoming darkness.

We Christians celebrate this season with lights and music.

The radio plays “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas. The line “Next year all our troubles will be far away” reminds us of last year problems we’ve overcome and this coming year’s that we’ve yet to see.

I imagine people singing that song in 1944—the year Judy Garland first sang it in Meet Me in Saint Louis. The movie opened in November of that year.

Think of going to the theater to see a light musical—and to watch newsreels. People got their information from newspapers, radio, and movie newsreels—the precursor to television news.

What you would have seen in newsreels around then may have included a race riot among US military personnel at Guam. Bandleader Glenn Miller’s plane disappearing over the English Channel. A typhoon hitting Admiral Halsey’s fleet in the South Pacific, costing America almost 800 souls. And Axis forces surrounding US troops at Bastogne.

Much of the news was grim. But Allied forces were pushing back. General Anthony McAuliffe, the American commander at Bastogne, responded to a German demand for surrender with one word:

“Nuts.”

Patton’s Third Army prevailed, relieving McAuliffe and his troops.

In dark days, light emerged.

It’s hard to perceive the depth of darkness people felt when we know now how the story ended. Allied forces converged; McAuliffe’s rebuttal stands as a rebuke to defeat.

But it’s harder to see the light when we sit immersed in the darkness of our own days with little hint of light ahead.

Was it a dark and starless night before the angels came to the shepherds? They were shepherds who’d been waiting for the coming of Messiah. They didn’t expect a blast of light and music with angels singing news of His coming.

The shepherds outside Bethlehem that night were Levitical shepherds. Ironically, they were ritualistically unclean. They walked through feces. They touched dead things.

The angel told them to find a baby lying in a manger and wrapped in swaddling cloths. To shepherds raising sheep for Levitical sacrifice, swaddling cloths would be vastly significant. For a lamb to qualify for sacrifice it had to be perfect, without blemish.

The shepherds swaddled lambs intended for sacrifice–they wrapped them in cloths to protect them. The angel saying that they would find the infant wrapped in swaddling cloths indicated the baby would be a sacrifice. That baby was the Messiah.

Many would have expected a Jewish king to be born in Jerusalem–the city of the king–not Bethlehem. But Bethlehem was the City of David–a keeper of sheep.

God’s choice of a birthplace for his son wasn’t just a fulfillment of prophecy–which it was. It was also a symbol that Christ the King would be the fulfillment of sacrifice on our behalf.

Christ was the sinless Son of God, the perfect Lamb to be sacrificed for the shepherds’ sins–for our sins—for the things we walk through and touch that make us unclean.

God invited the unclean to see His Son. Those who reject Him today are among the invited.

People seek purpose and meaning today. But they cannot find it without Christ. He brings peace on earth–within our hearts. He is the perfect sacrifice for us.

Christmas proclaims the coming of a King who is the light who overcomes darkness.

“Jesus spoke to them again, saying, ‘I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life,’” John 8:12.

There is a Christmas light to light the world–Christ Himself.

“And the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us, and we saw his glory, the glory as of the Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth,” John 1:14.

Emmanuel—God with us. Let His light shine.

Photo Credit: Pixabay

Our new website milicomathersreads.com is accepting reviews for middle reader books–especially those written by middle school students. Message me at readgoodbooks@milicomathersreads.com or in the comments below.

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Disclosure of Material Connection:  I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the entities I have mentioned. Restoring the Shattered is published through Morgan James Publishing with whom I do share a material connection. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

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Practicing for Motherhood

“Mary was bigger than Laura, and she had a rag doll named Nettie. Laura had only a corncob wrapped in a handkerchief, but it was a good doll. It was named Susan. It wasn’t Susan’s fault that she was only a corncob.

“Sometimes Mary let Laura hold Nettie, but she only did it when Susan couldn’t see.” 
Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House in the Big Woods

I remember receiving a baby doll the Christmas I was three. She was dressed all in pink and white. And she came with her own bed.

Somewhere there exists a snapshot of me, mouth agape, delighting in the magic that Santa had come and brought me the pretense of motherhood.

When I was not much older, I received the hot new toy that year–Chatty Cathy. I don’t remember wanting her because any of my friends already had her. I wanted her because I had seen her on television. I wanted her because she was the closest thing to a real baby a doll could be.

Dolls have been universal gifts for little girls. So, it came to be that my own daughter received Mary one Christmas–a gift from a special aunt–the kind of aunt who makes the gift even better–just because it came from her. Mary was well beloved. She wasn’t memorable from a marketing standpoint. She was a symbol of connection to someone we loved.

A few years later, 1983 was the year of Cabbage Patch dolls. There were long lines of mothers waiting, waiting, waiting for a shot at making their daughters’ dreams come true. I remember seeing (again, on television) the crowds standing in the dark and cold waiting for the toy of the year.

The dolls were expensive and in short supply. I had four children, ages eight and under, two boys and two girls. Child number five was on the way. To engage in the Cabbage Patch craze seemed impossible.

We waited.

My girls’ dreams came true the next year. By then there were no lines and no craziness. I gave them dresses they had worn as infants to adorn supplement the dolls’ wardrobes.

Fast forward to 2017, two wrapped dolls waited for our family’s new little ones–one of them not yet born. A grand and a great-grand, the third and fourth generations from me.

This year, four dolls wait to receive love. One for the youngest granddaughter. The other three for great-grand-sisters.

What dolls did my mother hold?

And her mother?

Life’s highest calling is to speak love into a child’s life. We begin to practice the love of mothering while we are still small. 

Others loved us when we could not love them in return.

A child with a doll loves something that cannot love her back.

Our times at play shape us.

A doll is a plaything, but so much more.

Our new website milicomathersreads.com is accepting reviews for middle reader books–especially those written by middle school students. Message me at readgoodbooks@milicomathersreads.com or in the comments below.

Permissions: You are permitted and encouraged to reproduce and distribute this material in any format provided that you do not alter the wording in any way, do not charge a fee beyond the cost of reproduction, and you credit the author.

Disclosure of Material Connection:  I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the entities I have mentioned. Restoring the Shattered is published through Morgan James Publishing with whom I do share a material connection. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

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Preparing to Prepare Our Hearts

Scientists are saying that putting your Christmas decorations up early can make you feel happier.

The lights and decorations take us back to a simpler time. Even if that time wasn’t so simple, we remember the warmth of a season of celebration rather than the challenges of those times.

In dark days, through lack of sun or dimmed hope, thinking of Christmas lightens our spirits.

The lights encourage us. But God’s Word challenges us to find true light in the darkness.

Jessica Brodie’s Preparing Our Hears: An Advent Devotional to Draw Closer to God at Christmas is a devotional that leads us toward the light of Christ.

A passage for every day encourages us to see God’s touch in our trials as well as our triumphs. Every day begins with scripture and ends with ample space for reader reflection.

Jessica’s anecdotes remind me of my own past Christmas seasons. Her “Have you ever … questions bring to mind common experiences that help us answer spiritual questions designed to help us grow in our faith.

Hope, peace, joy, love, the four weeks of Advent, preparing hearts to let our celebrations move beyond decorations to better understanding of, and better connection to, our sovereign Lord.

“This is the point of Advent; the full message of Christ: God loves us so much that he sent his son, Jesus, to pay our sin debt and help us follow him so we too can live in God’s kingdom for eternity.”

Get ready to get ready. Jessica’s work is a great start.

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. John 1:14, ESV

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Our new website milicomathersreads.com is accepting reviews for middle reader books–especially those written by middle school students. Message me at readgoodbooks@milicomathersreads.com or in the comments below.

Permissions: You are permitted and encouraged to reproduce and distribute this material in any format provided that you do not alter the wording in any way, do not charge a fee beyond the cost of reproduction, and you credit the author.

Disclosure of Material Connection:  I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the entities I have mentioned. Restoring the Shattered is published through Morgan James Publishing with whom I do share a material connection. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

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Ashes, Ashes, We All Fall Down

But evil men and impostors will grow worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived. II Timothy 3:13 NKJV

“So the final conclusion would surely be that whereas other civilisations have been brought down by attacks of barbarians from without, ours had the unique distinction of training its own destroyers at its own educational institutions, and then providing them with facilities for propagating their destructive ideology far and wide, all at the public expense. Thus did Western Man decide to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, himself blowing the trumpet that brought the walls of his own city tumbling down, and having convinced himself that he was too numerous, laboured with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer. Until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keeled over — a weary, battered old brontosaurus – and became extinct,” Malcolm Muggeridge, (1985).

In a recent print newsletter, Dannah Gresh quotes a SCOTUS decision from 1979:

“The statist notion that governmental power should supersede parental authority in all cases because some parents abuse and neglect children is repugnant to American tradition.”

That the US Supreme Court felt the need to make such a statement in 1979 means that we’ve been having a custody battle of sorts over our own children at least since then.

Gresh comments: “What we are witnessing in our culture is the rise of an ideology, a mindset that actually believes teachers and other agents of the state can make better decisions for your child than you can.”

I remember a parent-conference teacher in the early 1990s when I was the parent. The teacher had required students, including my daughter, to write an essay discussing the most difficult situation they had faced.

When I asked this teacher how my daughter answered this question, she refused to tell me. That was between her and my daughter.

My minor child.

The teacher had attempted to search my child’s heart, and told me I had no right to know what she’d found.

My daughter later told me she dramatized a minor challenge. In other words, she gave the teacher an answer to satisfy the requirement, without giving up heart and soul in the process.

The nosy assignment failed to measure learning unless the purpose was to teach students to equivocate.

But there must have been a trend.

Across the street at the junior high, one of my sons felt compelled to answer a similar question because a grade was on the line. When I took my complaint to the top of the administration, that teacher apologized. No doubt she had not yet achieved tenure.

I instructed my children then as I do my own students now: You are never required to tell more than you are comfortable telling.

All schools should provide the same refuge. Parents should not be out of the loop.

For many years, some in the institution of education have felt entitled to take over the role of parent. For some years, many parents have abdicated their authority. Such coins are always two-sided.

We in the West have done all to ourselves, as Muggeridge predicted we would.

Last week, the Biden Administration appealed to the US Supreme Court to strike down state laws banning gender transition surgeries for minor children.

One federal US court has already ruled that parents may not challenge schools’ transgender policies.

In Canada, citizens no longer have to ask for assisted suicide. Medical professionals are now supposed to offer death to a wider audience of subjects. Our northern neighbor has expanded Medical Aid in Dying so much that they now face a “crisis”–a lack of “willing” doctors to provide the “service.”

There’s a push to expand the “right” to MAID to “mature minors,” those under 18.

Also last week, the United Kingdom ordered that yet another child should die from withdrawn care. Over her parents’ objections, the UK court denied Indi Gregory the chance to travel to Italy, a nation friendlier to a foreigner in need than England is to its own citizens.

Tara Isabella Burton: “Ultimately, however, [a similar, earlier] case was about who gets to decide what the best interest of a child really is. When the view of the state and the view of a child’s parents are at odds, who gets to have the final say?”

In England, the answer to that question has reared its horned head multiple times, always under the government’s premise that the “best interests” of the child must be death.

God gave parents a mandate to raise children in the way they should go. He told us to care for the weak.

Schools and government are secondary institutions to the family. Schools exist to edify. Government exists to protect. Neither is here to overrule, tear apart, destroy, or murder.

We will all, parents, educators, medical personnel, judges, stand before a sovereign Judge who will remember the harm done to the little ones entrusted to us.

Kyrie eleison. Lord, have mercy.

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Our new website milicomathersreads.com is accepting reviews for middle reader books–especially those written by middle school students. Message me at readgoodbooks@milicomathersreads.com or in the comments below.

Permissions: You are permitted and encouraged to reproduce and distribute this material in any format provided that you do not alter the wording in any way, do not charge a fee beyond the cost of reproduction, and you credit the author.

Disclosure of Material Connection:  I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the entities I have mentioned. Restoring the Shattered is published through Morgan James Publishing with whom I do share a material connection. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

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Chance or the Dance

I came that they might have life and have it abundantly. John 10:10b ESV

“The myth sovereign in the old age was that everything means everything. The myth sovereign in the new is that nothing means anything. Thomas Howard~

Chance or the Dance: A Critique of Modern Secularism by Thomas Howard
is a book for those searching for meaning in life–for an alternative to the secular view that we are here by chance and live without lasting significance.

It is also a book for those of us who already believe in God. We know His presence. And we see His work in the world around us. We ponder His ways and see in them the meaning that infuses every moment of our lives. 

Howard explains this way of looking at the world:

“It is a way of looking at things that goes farther than saying this is like that: it says that both this and that are instances of the way things are. The sun pours energy into the earth and the man pours energy into the woman because that is how fruit begins–by the union of one thing and the other” (Howard’s emphasis).

Howard points out that, in spite of the world’s acceptance of the new myth, deep within ourselves, the old myth lives on. It is part of us–and we can only pretend to deny it. 

Everything has meaning.

Howard analyzes our partiality for poetry and art, the rhythms and patterns of language and image. The new myth presents a common experience in “order and harmony and serenity, and hence joy [as] a most rewarding fiction” without meaning. The old myth presents the “supreme reality: the way things are.” And that way is full of meaning.

We act out the old myth through a ceremony of meals that we mark by setting the table and arranging the food on the plate in an orderly way.

And we embrace freedom, which is more than “mere self-determination . . . [which would be] tragically limiting.” “Your freedom in the Dance is to be able to execute your steps with power and grace, not to decide what you feel like doing.”

Howard’s book is a delight. It was originally published in 1969–at the height of the sexual revolution. Yet it comes to us in this second edition with a foreword by Eric Metaxas. Metaxas read the book as a new Christian in 1988 and calls it “a kind of prose symphony” and a “rambling yet manicured and sweeping lawn” full of things “you will simply never forget.” 

It’s a book you’ll want to read slowly–to savor the ideas–since such beauty is not to be rushed–as in fruit taken too soon from a vine. 

And through your savoring, may you come to the Dance–to the idea that all we do has meaning now and into eternity.

“In this view, there is no hiatus between what we are given to do in life and what life is ‘really about.’ There . . . a synonymity. All this commonplace stuff is what life is really about.”

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Our new website milicomathersreads.com is accepting reviews for middle reader books–especially those written by middle school students. Message me at readgoodbooks@milicomathersreads.com or in the comments below.

Permissions: You are permitted and encouraged to reproduce and distribute this material in any format provided that you do not alter the wording in any way, do not charge a fee beyond the cost of reproduction, and you credit the author.

Disclosure of Material Connection:  I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the entities I have mentioned. Restoring the Shattered is published through Morgan James Publishing with whom I do share a material connection. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

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Truth, Goodness, and Beauty

But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that. I Timothy 6:8, NIV

“The closer men came to perfecting for themselves a paradise, the more impatient they became with it, and with themselves as well. They made a garden of pleasure, and became progressively more miserable with it as it grew in richness and power and beauty; for then, perhaps, it was easier to see something was missing in the garden, some tree or shrub that would not grow. When the world was in darkness and wretchedness, it could believe in perfection and yearn for it. But when the world became bright with reason and riches, it began to sense the narrowness of the needle’s eye, and that rankled for a world no longer willing to believe or yearn.” Walter M. Miller Jr.

History moves in cycles.

Civilization moves from darkness to light.

Under good conditions, food grows, people survive, subsist, succeed. Communities grow.

Such a life brings a hunger for knowledge. With faith, comes a pursuit of truth and goodness. Truth and goodness propel us to beauty.

Knowledge with truth and goodness also lead to prosperity, which leads to pleasure, which we confuse with happiness. Happiness brings satisfaction. Pleasure provides only a desire for more, a distorted yearning for something else, something next.

Constantly seeking happiness, we pursue pleasure and perceive we’ve found it in ease. But knowledge, truth, goodness, and beauty are all hard. They demand our sweat and toil.

We prefer ease. So we trade truth for ease, and in that swap, we lose the yearning to find beauty.

History moves in cycles.

Civilization moves from light to darkness.

Only His light gives us the right yearnings.

Only through truth do we find beauty.

Photo Credit: Pixabay

Nancy E. Head’s Restoring the Shattered is out in paperback! Get your copy here!

Our new website milicomathersreads.com is accepting reviews for middle reader books–especially those written by middle school students. Message me at readgoodbooks@milicomathersreads.com or in the comments below.

Permissions: You are permitted and encouraged to reproduce and distribute this material in any format provided that you do not alter the wording in any way, do not charge a fee beyond the cost of reproduction, and you credit the author.

Disclosure of Material Connection:  I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the entities I have mentioned. Restoring the Shattered is published through Morgan James Publishing with whom I do share a material connection. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

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The Telos of Technology

“What is the goal of our technologies? What should be our goal? What is off limits and why? What is our operating definition of the good that we are pursuing through technology? Where is the uncrossable line between healing and enhancement, and what are the other proper limits of our technologies? What are people?” Maria Baer and John Stonestreet

Telos: Greek, (noun) the end term of a goal-directed process; esp. the Aristotelian final cause (the end result/purpose).

When my father was born in 1916, the first radio broadcast was still a dim hope, still four years off. KDKA in Pittsburgh wouldn’t transmit the first radio signals ever until 1920. Home ownership of telephones was still uncommon.

Now we carry devices that contain phones, radios, televisions, cameras, clocks, calculators, flashlights, information resources, and social media outlets.

Technology has come a long way since sliced bread and the assembly line.

During the 1990s, I took a college class called Science, Technology, and Society. The professor led multiple discussions of the telos of technology by asking the question, “Will people invent a technology they won’t use?”

Along with others, I asserted that our production of nuclear warheads was fulfilling its telos as a deterrent to nuclear war. We didn’t build bombs so we could use them. We built bombs hoping no one else would feel brazen enough to use theirs against us.

We didn’t think of the self-destructive “bombs” we were developing to finish ourselves off one at a time and with no beneficial result.

Take embryonic stem cell research, for example.

From Baer and Stonestreet:

“Historically, President Bush’s position on embryo-destructive research has been thoroughly vindicated. The additional funding committed to research into adult and induced pluripotent stem cells produced amazing medical breakthroughs. But none of the promises of embryonic stem cell therapies ever materialized, even after his Oval Office successor reversed Bush’s policies, rebuilt the Council around only scientists and medical researchers, and released enormous funding for embryo-destructive research,”

Additional funding. On and off over the years. But not a single benefit.

Harvesting humans. Reaping no benefits. Continuing to take lives and money to repeat the process.

Even if there were a benefit, I would still argue against this barbarity. How can we “benefit” from the death and destruction of innocents? We hope to gain healing for a physical body but harm eternal souls. We become less than we were, less than we can be, when we engage in such practices.

Technologies have good and bad ends. Even a bread slicer can produce a more usable and uniform product or a wounded worker. It’s all in how we use it and what the telos is.

We are letting the end we hope for overcome the meaning every human life always Contains. That purpose never involves becoming spare parts for someone else, directly by transplant or indirectly through research.

God created man in his own image,
    in the image of God he created him;
    male and female he created them. Genesis 1:27, ESV

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Nancy E. Head’s Restoring the Shattered is out in paperback! Get your copy here!

Our new website milicomathersreads.com is accepting reviews for middle reader books–especially those written by middle school students. Message me at readgoodbooks@milicomathersreads.com or in the comments below.

Permissions: You are permitted and encouraged to reproduce and distribute this material in any format provided that you do not alter the wording in any way, do not charge a fee beyond the cost of reproduction, and you credit the author.

Disclosure of Material Connection:  I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the entities I have mentioned. Restoring the Shattered is published through Morgan James Publishing with whom I do share a material connection. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.

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Forgotten Dream

Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care. Matthew 10:29, NIV

One of my favorite aspects of fall is watching flocks of birds dance through the sky in synchronized motion.

So I offer this from the work of a grandson and former student, Aaron Hildebrand. You or someone you know could be like the bird in this poem. Recognizing the broken-winged among us shows grace and shines the light of Christ in a darkened world.

Almost too easy to pass by,

Save for when it gives a cry,

Is the gentle presence of a bird.

Planted lightly in the ground,

It makes a faint yet shrill sound,

In hopes that it will be heard.

In the wind high above,

Sparrow, jay, quail, dove,

Soaring through the sky.

As if by chance or fate

This one bird must forever wait

Till eternity may pass by.

From the sadistic hand of nature

Has this poor bird been injured,

With wings so frail and delicate.

In vain attempt it tries to fly,

Not wanting to leave the sky

Now one bird more desolate.

To the surface it quickly returns,

So far away from what it yearns,

As close as it may seem.

Distant remain the fields of blue and white,

Henceforth destined to believe that flight

Was but a forgotten dream.

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Nancy E. Head’s Restoring the Shattered is out in paperback! Get your copy here!

Our new website milicomathersreads.com is accepting reviews for middle reader books–especially those written by middle school students. Message me at readgoodbooks@milicomathersreads.com or in the comments below.

Permissions: You are permitted and encouraged to reproduce and distribute this material in any format provided that you do not alter the wording in any way, do not charge a fee beyond the cost of reproduction, and you credit the author.

Disclosure of Material Connection:  I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the entities I have mentioned. Restoring the Shattered is published through Morgan James Publishing with whom I do share a material connection. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

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Showing the Better Way of Freedom

So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed. John 8:36, ESV

“The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained liberation from the self.” Einstein

The questions of our times: Do we look within and decide for ourselves who we are? Or do we look outside ourselves and rise to become more than we are?

The first question leads people to what they believe is freedom, but their lives become a new kind of bondage. The second leads to a life we could not have imagined on our own, yet a life that may at times be more challenging.

Do you decide or let God decide?

“There are two freedoms – the false, where a man is free to do what he likes; the true, where he is free to do what he ought.” Charles Kingsley

Many choose the false way. The true way is harder, at first. It is harder to do what we ought to do, but the reward comes later.

Having made the right choices makes life better.

We see the results of people choosing their own way, lives broken by irrevocable choices. You can’t restore the marred bodies of children and babies, of men and women.

Suicide and drug overdose deaths are at all-time highs.

In choosing the harder way, we can show others the better way.

By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another. John 13:35 ESV

True worship makes life better and helps us find freedom from ourselves, freedom in Christ.

Joe Carter writes for the Gospel Coalition: “Frequent churchgoers aren’t merely benefiting from a useful delusion or a sense of community. They are finding the relief—the psychological and spiritual relief—that comes from aligning oneself with the true and ultimate reality. What we find in frequent worship services is helping us fulfill the purpose of life, what we could call biblical happiness: to glorify God and enjoy him forever. “

Even so, choosing the harder way means more than loving those like ourselves.

But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. Matthew 5:44-45, ESV

Choose true freedom. Walk in the harder way. Show that way to others.

Reap the joy of living out truth.

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Our new website milicomathersreads.com is accepting reviews for middle reader books–especially those written by middle school students. Message me at readgoodbooks@milicomathersreads.com or in the comments below.

Nancy E. Head’s Restoring the Shattered is out in paperback! Get your copy here!

Permissions: You are permitted and encouraged to reproduce and distribute this material in any format provided that you do not alter the wording in any way, do not charge a fee beyond the cost of reproduction, and you credit the author.

Disclosure of Material Connection:  I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the entities I have mentioned. Restoring the Shattered is published through Morgan James Publishing with whom I do share a material connection. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

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One Name for Three Persons

In Making Sense of Your World: A Biblical Worldview, W. Gary Phillips and William E. Brown discuss a point of faith that has perplexed Christians through the ages: the Trinity.

“The Bible is clear that there is only one God … yet this unity does not preclude statements that allow three persons–the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit–to be called ‘God’ or ‘Lord.'”

It’s a doctrine that’s clear from the beginning in the Hebrew words of Genesis.

“Then God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness.'” Genesis 1:26a, NIV

Three persons referring to themselves as ‘us’ but called God–a singular term.

And this doctrine continues through the New Testament.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.” John 1:1-2, NI’V

Something I’d not considered before: Phillips and Brown explain that when Jesus issued the Great Commission, He commanded us to make disciples and “‘baptize’ new converts in the ‘name’ (singular)” of each member of the Trinity.

“Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” Matthew 28: 19, NIV

A singular “name” for the three persons of one God.

They further state: “The respective roles and relationships within the Trinity present God as a dynamic fellowship rather than a static unity. God has exercised an eternal relationship of love and communication within His own nature.”

Singular names for one God comprised of three persons so unified they can correctly be called One.

We cannot fully appreciate the sacrifice the crucifixion caused, the division of persons who had never been separated for all of eternity past–and never will be again for all of eternity to come.

Our God, so big as to contain Three in One, so loving as to separate the indivisible–for us.

“See what great love the Father has lavished on us that we should be called the children of God.” I John 3:1a, NIV

Photo Credit: Pixabay

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