And Still, we Be Praisin'!

 Pastor preached about the father who carried his demon possessed child to the disciples and they couldn't!

They couldn't!  But Jesus could and Jesus did!

How many times do we think about the tools that Jesus uses for our benefit and we lean on them as though they were the Lord? ie.  Means of Grace... preaching...praying...oil...service and prayer meeting, etc.,etc., etc.

HE is greater than our hearts and even greater than the means of Grace that he uses to encourage our hearts that he is with us.

How long has he been like this? Jesus asked.  It was a legitimate question and yet He needn't have asked it unless it was necessary.  However long we have suffered under the oppression of the enemy, it will seem like a "momentary affliction" when the Lord reaches his hand to lift us from the dung of our own unbelief.

He carries us from glory to glory.   We trusted him and we thought we were getting up, but God breaks through the glass bottoms of our boats to reach our floundering faith!

We get so high on our horses, believing that our faith or our consistency has saved or delivered and God has to put us in our places.  We better come to grips with what God calls us to do and to be.

It amazes me that CS. Lewis was able to personify the faith of Satan himself and it is all too fearfully true that when we are teachers we are closer to Satan than we are cognizant of.  The great fall of Screwtape may indeed be that we are syphoning off the glory of God unto ourselves and sealing our own demise, when we think we are doing God service.  Are we serving God or are we serving ourselves.

The only one who went to hell from the pearly gates in Pilgrim's Progress was Christian's companion.  He "Talked" himself into a deception that led him straight to hell.  Is it not so with all of us who take on the Word of God to instruct...Be not many teachers...stricter judgment?

God is greater than our hearts, but we must be diligent to study the scriptures for the healing of our own fallibility.  Preach to my own heart, Dear Jesus!  Holy Spirit minister to me in my study and in my delivery.  Holy Spirit help me see myself as the one in the need of prayer!

Not my mother or my father, but its me oh Lord!

Standing in the need of prayer!

Catechism continued:

Question number 10000:

What does the bible teach us in I Corinthians 13:4?

I Corinthians 13:4

As an expansion of the explanation of the fruit of the Spirit, I Corinthians 13 stands as a monument to the truth that Love is God and God is love.

God lends us a bit of himself in His attribute and more than an attribute being the essence of love!  God truly is the essence of love.   He has, throughout scripture revealed himself as targetted and true in his being the essence of love.

Examples of His expression of his unmerited and yet very targetted love toward all of his creation, but especially to mankind.

Many groups of people have used the documentation of ICor. 13 as a lofty symbolic ascent to the theory of love.

Love does something...

Suffer

God suffers with us and he shows throughout scripture that his great intention for all people groups is to call them his own.  He intends to save us individually and He intends to save us as a culture.  He yearns and condescends and goes to great lengths to show Himself as the greatest lover!

We imitate him when we are truly targeted in our love of others to make them better.  We are limited and we cannot love or save anyone, the way God can.

But Corinthians arrow of examples of how we can imitate God in love is a tiny flashlight to our true significance as people, made in the image of God!.

We Be Praisin' Him!

 "I don't know how many times I have been through Malachi, but today's reading made me so hopeful... Who will praise you more; the first son or the second?"

Malachi chapter 1

In my mind, I hear the prayers of dear and earnest Pastor Martin, that nearly made me gag, some mornings, when my morning sickness kicked in and he would pray about the dead dog sacrifices that we would be bringing to God in worship.  Oh dear, I had to puke!  Pastor Loran said something like that this past Sunday,  but southern people never try to make people puke in worship, no matter how much it might be appropriate.  We do not deserve anything that God has given us.  Not only are we neither Jacob, loved, nor Esau, hated,  we are of the third category, the ignored of the Lord, just gentiles.  Dead and ignorant dogs, to the chosen Israel.  Still, God promises not to ultimately forget us.  

Our promise is,  of the rocks I will raise up children of Abraham to praise me.  Hasn't he?  Ought we not out praise any of the other categories of praisers?

I must say that I have always wondered how they knew which of the flock was worthy of God's sacrifice and the answer is in Malachi.  God knows our hearts and what we cherish more and more with each sacrifice that we bring.  Do we bring the sacrifice of praise?  Do we cherish decorum?  Do we cherish our convenience?  Do we cherish our effort?  Do we bring them to Christ in worship?  Our college-educated intellect, do we bring it to Jesus, or do we check it at the door?  God says in Malachi, that he sees what we are bringing to worship.  He knows our hearts and He intends to shame the Old Testament saints with our worship.  Will it do?

We belong to Jesus!  We have been bought with a price! How can we but worship, with spirit, body and mind?  

Be attentive in worship!  Be present!

PRAYING AGAINST THE PURPOSES OF SATAN IN MY LIFE!

 In every season of life, but especially in seasons of grief, the temptation to bitterness looms large!  There are certain peculiar temptations that seem like the mouth of bitterness herself is engulfing.  Like being swallowed by a huge anaconda.  Your soul's body is enveloped by the situation.

I met a woman who showed me a particular understanding of just such a moment in the soul.  I must say that I have never been blessed by one prayer so much as that of this woman's one prayer.  Her posture was diminutive and she was clearly a caretaker of her family.  I was somewhat surprised that she was called on to pray for this situation at a church that we were visiting.  She rose from her seat and gave her "middle-school" child something to play with and then rose to the platform.  I was not prepared for the vision of spiritual brutality that I was about to observe.  Small in stature she was huge in voice and presence.  I immediately judged her as too powerful to be submissive to her husband who was behind her on the keyboard. (that later proved to be a wrong estimation). God was showing me, as he has been since I have come to NC, the amazing power of women's perspective in spiritual warfare.  It is clear that feminism hasn't blunted the power of womanly dominion in prayer down here, by any means.  But it has become a brooding of mine.   Greater understanding and use of the power of womanly perspective in prayer.

Her prayer wasn't full of language that impresses, but perspectives that are and were distinctly feminine.  Awareness that the subtlety of the enemy to women is a sensitivity that scripture addresses, she didn't at all seem overwhelmed by this knowledge of being the weaker vessel.  

She, as it were, put all of the confidence in her heavenly father and gave him all of her senses to ponder and enjoy.  Praise and an exalted view of His magnificence was most definitely first.  Part of the reason that it has taken me so long to write about it, was a confession of my diminished view of the power of God to understand my sensitivities as a woman.

Paying lipservice to an exalted view of God is one thing.  Trusting Him to translate your feeble, lisping stammering prayer into a battering rod against the enemy of our souls is another thing.  Is my rising to my prayer potential a competitive gesture against my husband or my pastor?  That is on them if they think that.  I am not praying to or for the fear of men!  She personified this intensely!

The power of God on earth is the reality of men and women access to the throne of grace in their full potential as warriors for His glory!  The mystery of "She shall be saved through the childbearing"  will reveal itself if and when we accept the distinction that childbirth and childrearing gives to women in the battle against the enemy of our souls.

He first comes to us in the conception and tries to convince us all to abort the mission!  Aborting her mission to raise a downsyndrom child made her a giant in prayer and I will always be in her debt to remind me of the exalted position for being victorious in that battle!  

He who has spared not His own son, shall he not also give us all things?

Walker Family Catechism questions in meditation?

" What is the chief end of man?"

"What is He ain't that he won't already is?"

The mystery of the trinitarian perception of God and how can it be encompassed in our finite language is amazing to me.  We are climbing Jacobs ladder and every round goes higher and higher.  Every generation grows upon the findings and excavations of the earlier generations.  It is always amazing to me that the more progressive we become, the lesser the spiritual hunger seems to be expressed. 

I catechised my children and this seems to have given them a sieve of faith in God's word that is sometimes baffling to me.  The catechism's that we employed included orthodox expressions of understanding God's Word boiled down to simple truths.  It is a way to look at your life in a prism of faith that can't be stolen from you.  When some "so-called" truth tries to parade itself into your soul, your youthful teachings guard your soul {to some extent}.

Why did God make us?  Isn't God good?  Amen and Amen!  He wants us to love Him and enjoy Him forever!  There is no real truth that flies in the face of God's truth.  You needn't be afraid of studying.  All truth belongs to God.  

Learning about God is the mine of life!  We could look at Him from every angle and never find an imperfection.  The translation of our Ebonic traditions have so much to instruct us about the infinity of God and His TriUnity.  How our forefather's embraced a language and lived in subservience and developed a way to talk to one another, uninterpretable by the Master and yet our own English I find phenomenal.  God has an eternal purpose in our slave history and our growth out of that position.  

God is high and exalted and yet condescends to the lowest estate.

The African History of being the most magnificent empire and the most diminished empire and yet used by God in our exaltation and in our debasement.  That is God's way of expressing His image in our history and it is to our benefit to rejoice in the glory of what God has done instead of complaining about the providences and the steepness of the climb and the swiftness of the slide.  We must trust His purposes in the personal and in the corporate cultural and the corporate national and the corporate church and the corporate age that we live in.   Where we are in time is where we are. 

Keep reading the book of revelation and pray for God's true purpose for the time God has appointed you for.  He will use you for His glory wherever you are.

Did Daniel perceive that his story would endure the times of history?   He was a very young man determined to live for God in a wicked world.   We live in a time that is infected with the Gospel along all lines and cultures but equally infected with deceptions.  Vigilance and study of God's word is the new Kosher.  Will you eat the king's philosophies?  Will you truly imbibe the deceptions as true? Daniel purposed in his heart.  

Will I guard my heart as diligently as I guard my tummy?  To us belongs confusion of face, but righteousness belongs to YOU!  I am confused.  I don't get it.  Only You own the righteousness.  I see Daniel looking around at the things that all the nations regard and seeing how off center it was compared to God's standard.   We have sinned and that is why we are here, but they are also confused who are our captors.  We are not here to emulate their standards but to represent God in the confusion that is around us.  Yes, we mess up, but there is forgiveness and straightening power in the God of the universe.  He doesn't just leave us to ourselves.  They have no standard.  They have accountability to lesser standards.  The kingdoms of the world will one day bow to Christ, but until that day...We pray for God's standard in our own lives because that is the only safety.

Your testimony is God's resume for you and for your children.  God has been faithful in pain and in joys.  Some answers to prayer we have seen and some things we await.  But HE IS!

Forty and Ravenous!

 Where is the Candlestick maker in Genesis 40?

 

 

 

The Butcher (butler) the Baker and the Candlestick maker, were a trio that we learned in nursery rhymes from my earliest remembrances.  This morning, I rise from a 3 day sick hibernation to embrace the Lord’s Prayer, We shall behold him in Thess 4 and The Baker’s Demise in Genesis 40, before the comforts of Psalm 23 and Proverbs 8 put a setting cast on my soul.  It is as though my soul was broken by this sickness.  Cough and cold, low grade fever, but nothing that seems to threaten the life, it seems.  Still, God providentially made me wait for the weekend to swim in this dear and well trodden meditation.  

 

I am often Joseph in my imaginations, because he was the believer in the story of the butcher and the baker.  Sometimes, I am the capricious Pharoah or the butler,  but never the baker…. I do bake and I was baking when I was reading this time.  My bread is healing and comfort to me.  Tested negative for Omicron, but it seems that I just as easily could have tested positive and had only 3 days to prepare my soul for eternity.

 

Not a fear of death, but a seasoned and consistent knowledge that preparations are in order, everytime we endure sickness and even in the best of times.   The Butler was the server of the wines to the Pharoah and the memory of the gladness that he often gave the despot was probably what gave him his reprieve.  We will never know.

 

The Baker’s bread though ever so tasty was not enough to save his body and yet perhaps repentance and faith were granted in the 3 days that he was afforded to make his peace with God and that was a greater healing through out eternity.

 

As if, one of the ravens, dastardly tasting of the flesh of this sad tale, lessons are most numerous.  

 

I.                God is not capricious like a Pharoah.  He doesn’t flip a coin, as it were to determine the fates of his servants.   My times are in His hands and He alone holds the time piece of my moments.

II.            All servants of God have something to minister unto him in worship and praise as well as service and prayer!

III.          Mene mene was later on the walls of a kingdom, who had forgotten the air that they breathe was lent to them.  You are weighed in the balance and found wanting.  We certainly don’t want that as an epitaph of our life, of our country of our earth time.  Globalists seem to forget this.  It is God’s earth and not ours.

IV.          Never Again, should we forget that ministering to god in worship and praise is highly a great use of the air that we breathe…