End times sermon???

 Toxic Masculinity Unleashed!  In the pulpit…

The Lord is high and lifted up and He is lowly to condescend to men of low estate.  What an impossible balance maintain,perhaps?

As a sensitive soul, I must say that I am strengthened in my spiritual walk by the preaching of many an overzealously pounding ministerial style.  It is my preference, I would say.  Still, the whispering, whimpering slow speaking terrorists, who use the scripture to bludgeon God’s defenseless sheep into oblivion always, always stuns me.   They hide behind supposed scripture knowledge and a heady professorial gait; behind which they conversationally batter their hearers with present sins and future events of Jesus’ second coming to gain a control and lordship that I don’t believe God intended.  Religion intends it!  Religion seeks to control the masses through the gnostic expressions of knowing more about what God intends in the future.   Jesus doesn’t do that!

He said search the scriptures.  Do we preach Christ and Him crucified and seeking to save?  Or make we fearmongering and cowering minions to our subjection?

There are so many who love to watch the women clutch their pearls as though at a horror film at the future of the earth’s demise, because they hate the green movements and political pundits.  Is that your calling?  Did the Holy Spirit inspire this?

Jesus is Lord and he spoke to the woman at the well with no single threat in his mouth.  He didn’t seem as though he would giggle in the judgment when he sees her burning and begging the rocks to fall upon her.  He didn’t.  “He loved at her”.  The cursedness of self exaltation and fearmongering is everywhere in scripture, but it nearly never finds its way into the sermons of the towering!

Oh, You are so great and you are so versed and you are so beautiful in language and form, but is your message prayed over and spoken to your people, of whom you will give an account or to the untold unknown who you think, are eavesdropping.   What has God called you to do?  Set a trap to ensnare the outside world or preach the gospel?

Jesus is Lord of His Church and not you and not me.   We must pray not to enter into temptation of sowing fear and torment.   Jesus came that men might have life not that Christians would leave church saying “he told those sinners today!”

The meditation of Rev 10

"Lord, show us the reality of the victory that you have attained for us"

Pastor Loran prayed in this way, on the second Sunday of this new year, 2025.  It is January 12th.  It was a sunny Sunday and freezing cold.  We had a sense of accomplishment for having braved the frigid temperatures after the expected blizzard that turned out to be just a dusting.  North Carolina has weakened us.   What started out as an admirable quality of Charlotteans that they are "so submissive to the providence of God that they shut down the city for storms, has become in us an excuse for a limp and weak lack of perserverance to do the will of God.  Shame on us for taking an attribute learned and using it to excess.

Nevertheless, we laid aside our limp laziness, both of the holiday vacation and of the region we abide in and we pressed our way to the house of the Lord, which was certainly not as full as it usually is.  Pastor Baker commented on it in his welcome...  We must all be Northerners, who have braved the elements, he said.  Our Northern pride that we don't consider the elements as "providential hinderances" to the privilege of worship make us feel good at such times.  We have something admirable, coming from New York and the northern regions of our country.  These things we couldn't appreciate when we migrated here.  We could only see the beauty of the culture of common graces that had been so affected by Christianity that there was more sky to look at than sultry billboards.  We are Charlotteans now.  We have been adopted and we have adopted them.  We use their language and we follow some of the mores of the natives.

The worship was more sober than usual.  Four of our sisters are travelling to Italy for a missions trip to contend with the trafficking industry that we support and pray for.  That is a dark trip to contend with principalities and powers that project worldwide.

Jesus paid it all and Jesus has won it all and Jesus still has work for us to accomplish was the gist of the music.  They sang, Take Me to the King, which I haven't heard in quite awhile.

And then Pastor prayed for the preaching.  I always wish I could be taking notes on the prayer.  There are always gems of truths that Pastor just tosses out in prayer that make me need to chew more and more on, but because my eyes are closed, I never get the whole thing when I try to write it down after we say amen.

Jesus does something and we do something, but we have the victory, whether we can sense it in our part of the battle right now!  Lord help us see it.  

He started with Psalm 16:8.   My paraphrase is when we "set" the Lord (like my volleyball) always before our eyes that is the reason that we won't be moved.  Imagine that?   If I take the Lord as a practice and place him as dear to myself as the skill of setting with the silent skill, he stablizes us and improves our skill in the spiritual battle.  He gives us some of himself as a result.   

I had been meditating on God setting us,  because I know he is a much more skillful setter than I am.  But this word picture was far more challenging to me.   I love to have a moment to practice 100 sets to myself just because I like the part of my mind that is engaged and the memories of tremendous spikes that have  won us games so many years ago.  

At present the setting is God before my eyes.  God has the game mapped out and he has his team working against the principalities and powers.  I see that He loves to be engaged in the warfare of the spirit and to show off how his people notice the nuances of his presence in worship and in ministry.  Do we really seek His face to do for us what we have asked?   Do we really notice His pleasure and His displeasure in our service?

The consequences Pastor inferred about "Sin always makes you feel empty" Righteousness has rewards.  We seek those rewards of righteousness.  The protections of His presence.  The angels encamped around those who fear Him.  God's adding blessings without sorrow, etc.,etc.,etc.

Then, on the way home we discovered David Jennings song.  It is my new prayer for our nation!  God grant that we may get home to heaven and see that we are dancing around his throne because of the righteousness that has exalted our whole nation.  Use your word to draw our politicians to You and living for Your glory and not their own.  After Jimmy Carters funeral, it made me imagine all of us as the young people singing for Jesus and rejoicing in the Victory in Jesus.   This is truly God's Country.  I believe it and I pray you would set it before your eyes and be glorified in Your people for the sake of the Church. In Jesus' wondrous name,  AMEN

Zechariah, Coming alive in 2025

 

Matthew 23:35 

• "So that upon you will fall the guilt of all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah, the son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar."   

Waking up to our condition in and under judgment and making our confession before God to undergo the changes that need to take place in our hearts is essential.   How shall we not escape if we neglect so great a salvation?  Jesus paid it all and we need to access the health and redemption and restoration that is available through grace, by faith!   Halleluia, What a Savior.

God is satisfied in His wrath, by the blood of Jesus and we are able to access that redemption. 

There is no greater resolution than to access redemption not just for a couple of days, into the new year but for eternity.   Accessing fellowship with God's people in the local church and letting God work through your personal life out into the culture in your work-life, the Church of Jesus is working and changing the world around it, one soul at a time.   

I used to be lost, now I know where I am going.  I am now running headlong into Heaven and into a Heavenly mindset.   The lostness is dissipating into the fog of yesterday and our culture is growing to reflect the new inhabitants and their new mindset!  Halleluia that God exalts His word above all His name!   Create a new spirit in me, Lord.  

Bring us alive and breathe upon the dead bones to raise them to new life for Your glory!!!

Abide with me, Lord

 Ezekiel 37  

 was, by God’s providence, part of my devotional reading today.   Tuesday, December 10, 2024.  It has the cornerstone providence of being a tremendously enigmatic passage for many reasons and I simply can’t say how many times I have referred to it, without knowing its address or context, too specifically and when I have read it I had no time to unpack it with any real profit to my soul. 

I love imagining the prophetic power of raising dead bones to life.  The relationship between the drybones arising and the life of the tribe of Judah combining with Ephraim in the renewal and restoration, struck me deeply this morning.   Somewhat, because of the turbulence and unrest in that region at present and somewhat because of the birthday of my dear Grandma being today and the remembrance of the things she suffered in cancer and early death has been a grief in my soul all these 41 years.  Couldn’t you have let her live just a couple more days to see her grandchild wed?  I ask the Lord, with no answer.  I know that “Whate'er’ My God Ordains Is Right!”  I know that God knows all and sees the beginning from the end, but it has been a haunting question, nevertheless.   Her death drove me to devour the hymnal, nearly in its entirety.

That was the last hymn that we sang together.  God didn’t let me sing to her, in her suffering to exalt her as the “wind beneath my wings”.   We were a sentimental family and her life ending was an enormous blow.  God had said a declarative NO.  She wasn’t there, at the wedding in the flesh.  I couldn’t sing to her in private after that moment and my last encounter with her was her frown of disdain that someone could consider themselves a real Christian who had no knowledge of the words of any hymn to comfort the dying soul.  I had indeed disappointed her in multiple ways.   And I would rise to the occasion and never let that be said of me again, with many friends who coached and assisted me swimming that deep channel of my soul, through a lifetime.

As friends, we sat in the pew together and sang in congregational singing and talked about the blessing of that hymn in our life situations.  As we traversed the winding paths of young married life and mothering, with numerous trials of health and finance, etc. we found comfort in the hymns and committing them to memory.  

One dear friend had an infirmity that was affecting her sight and she was finding comfort that she would be able to sing the hymns, just the same, if it were God’s good pleasure to render her blind.   That was just one example of the faith that we enjoyed and the unity of the Spirit, to feel God knitting our hearts through a common love of the historic hymns of the Church.

Today’s devotions showed me my place in those dry bones being raised to life by the breath of God being blown into them, to glorify God in this short sojourn.

Thank you God, for your entering into my grief walk and growing my soul’s resolve to be strengthened to know You in the vicissitudes. Amen! 

Book reading. the Life of John Flavel

 41 minutes of the book The life of John Flavel.

John Flavel

God sees

 Borrowed Breath

Borrowed Sight

I Sing the mighty power of God…

Mountains rise by his power

All of the people who borrow breath from the Lord has been my meditation, but the borrowed other portions of life have illuded my meditation in that hymn until this morning when it sounded like the Apelridge group sounded like they said sight instead of breath.

We do borrow sight from you Lord.

Breath seems so essential and it most certainly is but sight and the other senses are also borrowed from God.

Ezekiel reading today was God taking him into the secretest of places.  A hole in a tree and a door behind that, that he had to use effort to open to see the reasons for the very drastic measures it seemed that God had taken and was about to take against his beloved children of Israel.   He loves them and it looked like a very public rebuffing of their relationship.   Look at the walls, Ezekiel.  God told him.  God never does anything without clearly relating his reasons to his people.  God does not cast off his dearest forever, but he does take very strict measures to reprove and correct the errors. 

This was Ezekiels discovery and he had to find the words to express God’s intention to correct very drastically, but also to reconcile.   Amazing grace of God for his covenants that he takes very seriously.  He sees that which is above the lines of vision and that which is behind closed doors and inside a tree, under the ground and deep in a cave.   My heart and mind carry crevices of despicable thoughts and intentions and Jesus paid the price for my sins, but my behaviors will be reproved and God is always reconcilable, in our souls dirtiest state.  He is reaching for us to clean us up!  Hallelujah, what a Savior.