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.

Meditations

 Waking up to the new aggressiveness of Satan to plan out our thinking.

Who tells me to do what I do?   God’s word is my authority, but the world is directing me to maximize time constraints.

Is efficiency the constant connection to information?

Is your thinking impeded by 16 seconds or a whole day apart from the media, whether right or left leaning?

Can you take thoughts captive if you are always engaged?  Wake up to your own captivity.  Wake up to your sleeping at the wheel.   You are a robovehicle, directed by the great unseen “ISH”.  SqueemISH, are you about your attachment?  Try to disconnect and see what happens.

WHo is the Nebby, pulling the strings of your anticipations and of your heart throbs?   Are you submitting to God in your knowledge?  Do you start your day in His care?  Is your computer and your social media posts your first thought?   Who is hearing me?   Who am I needing to hear from?   What do “they” think about what I am in my profession, etc.?

Is that my earliest thought in the morning?  It is so hard to get away from it.   I must chase the carrot that is everybody’s agreed priority.   I must teach myself to follow what is acceptable.  I say these things to myself to fit in.   God lets us fit in and then he takes us off the beaten path in front of our friends to test us.  Who cracks the whip over our souls?  Do we even know?

He is mighty to deliver us from our own predispositions to conformity.  If we are not conforming to Christ it is easy to slip into the conformity of the world without even recognizing it.  There are acceptable Christian paths that are not even Biblically based.  Many online stores and social media paths that are building the coffers of who knows who?  God is shaking us so that we know who we are attached to.  In Jeremiah, I can see how the worldly takeover of the children of God in the captivity was so very confusing.  God was judging and showing them that He will not share his allegiance.  It is Him or you?  If you are connected to Christ and His people, he is guiding you.   When Nebuchadnezzar came in, God gave some people their own lives as their ransom in the midst of complete devastation.  They couldn’t stay where they were, God was turning things upside down and showing Himself as the Sovereign.  Not human reasoning.  Some prophets thought God was going to deliver them, some thought it was time to go back to Egypt, some thought it was stand and deliver.  God said prepare to live in captivity to the Babylonians.   What? The Babylonians?  They were the lowest of the low to everybody,  they weren’t like Egypt.   They weren’t pretty?  They weren’t part of the history.  They were a new commodity and they almost killed Jeremiah for suggesting that God was going to do such a thing. 

Can we set up shop and live in a new season?  Can we find godliness and use technology for God’s glory?  It is indeed a new land and a new thinking pattern.  It is a new boss over our conscious thought.  Do we need to communicate in that way? 24/7 accessibility to our own minds and thinking?  Do we have limits that we have set on our communications?   Do we have places in cyberspace that we won’t go?  Do we ever take a break or is it completely controlling us?

I love God that He knows our frame and he remembers that we get tangled in the barbwire of our own making.  He knows we don’t have self control.

How?

Why?

What step comes first?

Obedience is! sermon from Pastor Walden

https://www.sermonaudio.com/sermons/915241620461167?autoplay=1

https://www.sermonaudio.com/sermons/915241620461167?autoplay=1

AW Pink

Holy Spirit Rain Down

This was one of the first series we enjoyed at Trinity. It is still as poignant and relevant today!

Pastor Martin's sermon- God's Word to Our Nation. 

Blessed Redeemer

 

The Old Rugged Cross

 2 Corinthians 5:21.   He who knew no sin…

https://centralchurchcharlotte.subspla.sh/gk66xxn   https://centralchurchcharlotte.subspla.sh/gk66xxn

No Fear of God?

No Fear of God!

Call the Sabbath a Delight?

Love obeys.

ancient words

Samuel Eyles Pierce from an earlier generation

CS Lewis Christmas in May

 

A New Season of Devotional Learning about God. Drawing near to God in his Word more avidly. Thompson Chain Bible

 Today is Monday May 13, 2024.  It is a dark morning that is supposed to grow into a sunny day.

What a brisk morning it was when I woke up.  That is part of what woke me up early this morning, although I haven’t work today.  My children showered me with gifts for Mothers Day.   I am basking on the morning after.   I received a Thompson Chain Bible among the other treasures.   I had my devotions using it this morning instead of my several bible “apps”.   My voice memo app was malfunctioning so I didn't record my readings, but I am so intent upon starting a new season of reading and study with the new tool.

God is certainly funny, how he ushers my spiritual journey, when I think that I am comfortable in my swimming through the exercises of getting to know him, He turns the page and calls for a study adjustment.   I didn’t know He was up to something.  

I felt his nudging, but the receiving of a tremendous trust of a “TCB” {Thompson Chain Bible} reminds me of the earliest moments of crying out for knowledge of God’s word in my spiritual infancy.   Now that I know Him and have searched His word for many years, a new, tool that I am very familiar with delights me and challenges me to be more decisive and committed in my new excursions into God’s Word.

Of course my first day’s reading included “We hold a treasure…” providentially, of course.  We do hold the treasure of the knowledge of God and his ways in these earthen vessels of ours.  Making sure that our growth and our journey is shared with our loved ones and that others can benefit and grow in their knowledge of God through our communications is the task of this season of life.   I wish to grow in grace and knowledge and as a newborn babe, desire the sincere milk of the Word of God.

I am a greedy guzzler, as my father would always remind me, when he would show me how greedily I guzzled from birth.  He would have to act it out to show me.   Still I guzzle from God, as much milk and meat as he will allow me to receive.  He is not as stingy as a young mother, whose pain and lack of knowledge keeps her always holding back a little.  He lavishly fills the breasts of milk for the filling of the tummy and the growth for health and well being.  He has clear plans for us to find the real healing and health of the things that he has sent us into this world to enjoy and live lavishly.   He isn’t at all stingy.  Not even the pain of sending his own son kept him from pouring grace upon grace for our nurture and endearment.   

I am his and he is mine, forever and forever.

Today Yes, Maam!

 

Had it not been for the Goodness of the Lord!

 The Goodness of the Lord in the Land of the Living

God’s sit in in my life these past three years of an antilegalistic stance on the issue of Sabbath keeping has been learning to see the mercy and truth in the promises of God in Isaiah “If you turn your foot from the Sabbath…” promises.  I believe God’s word and I believe to see the answer of the Lord in the land of the living on this regard.

Am I remembering the Sabbath on the Sundays that I work?

Was I keeping the Sabbath on the Sundays that I haven’t worked?

Is God a promise keeper, more than we imagine?

I will take these questions individually.

God has established a “sit-in” on my life in quite the way that I would never have expected him to.  In our history of America, the racist injustices that my people have endured have evoked a personal response of “Sit ins” to attempt to call attention to the reality of hypocrisy that has certainly been a part of our National Life.   My relationship with God began in my mid teen years where I turned my life over to him and attempted to become more acquainted with him by searching His word for answers as to who He is and what he requires of us.  My family didn’t share my understanding of the importance of Sabbath keeping through out my life and I gained many an intellectual and spiritual debate about the importance or lack of importance of evangelical Sabbath keeping.  This was piled on many a disagreement of spiritual priorities.  I will only address the question of Sabbath keeping because of limits of attention in this season and it’s application to my personal “Sit In” experience.

“I see the Lord’s train fill the temple…”  was a song that we sang as a family and crowned our personal and familial experience from the time of Grandma Ruth’s passing until this day.  The vision of God’s train expanding outside of the temple of the Lord to invade such unwelcoming places as higher education was beyond my imagination until lately.  We have so many god-fearing people who have by necessity had to make their Sabbath rest a part of their sacrifice to feed their families.  The warfare of culture against the godly had come to this and I saw that I am not the only one who has experienced this financial dearth and coverage dearth, etc.

Lord, I believe, help my unbelief!  I believe that you are concerned about your glory on the earth and I believe that you intend to break in on the godlessness of our culture, but I don’t necessarily want to be the vehicle of bringing you into the higher education realm, for sure!  

I am not the only Christian struggling with this argument in my job expectations on Sundays.  It seems that God has chosen many a very intent praying person to spend their Sundays praying and praising and putting their convictions aside to simply pay for shelter and food.  Jobs are less and less accepting your convictions for Spiritual things as an influence and yet they will make accommodations for other things, like furthering your education, and other things.   I am concerned about this.  How I got into this mess is not applicable as much as what God has shown me there.   

His train is overflowing the temple, even in a hostile time of antichurch sentiment in our country.   God is discriminated against and He is staging a sit in in my life and in higher education! 

God grant me strength to see and to amend.   And may His great mercy bring us to the other side without having completely ejected Him from our borders!

Thank you God for a season of an intact heart! "Praising with an intact heart"

 God’s worship is an expression of the heart!

The busily pumping heart is regular and consistent, but not very loud, because the work it does puts it in a place where only the technical devices and the closest proximity can allow it to be heard.  This is the air I breathe, this is the pump of our souls, true worship.

Let us, as it were, take the stethoscope to our loudness and to our silence and see if the reality of the pumping heart is truly doing the work, or is the noise we are hearing or the silence we are invoking is allowing the circulation of our life in Christ to continue to exist.  

Remember the Sabbath Day…

The regularity of our consistency in remembering our Savior and all that he has done is one of our.

Everyday I will bless thee…

Is there a daily time, set aside for the reality of recognition of His greatness?

Lord, you have been my dwelling place in all generations…

Is the remembrance of His greatness, where you live?

Is it a coaxing or a chore to remember his holiness?

Is your praise and worship waxing or waning?

Growing or fading

Do you enjoy a sense of His presence in your prayer and praise?

Are you utilizing the tools God has given to grow your faith and worship, ie  God’s Word and the Hymns?

Is your mind engaged in the process of growth or are you on autopilot?

Is your motivation other’s gaze or the eye of the Lord?

He's an on time God

 I woke to a delightful surprise of a white suit jacket, bought for me by my Benjamin.

It was very cold when we finally got outside.  It wasn't surprising that the haste had cost us the battery of his car.  It had died because the lights were left on all night.   After having gotten Ezra from his friend's house they were rushing inside and the oversight was costing us time.   We had to take my car.  My car needs a fresh gallon of water to make it that distance, But what an amazing providence to have a spare car to get to church.   We haven't always had such a precious alternative.  We did this morning.   One of those mornings that the pressing our way was a precursor to the expectation that God would meet us in our worship.  He did meet us.   God was there the fellowship was delightful and the worship was refreshing, but God's word was the salve and the motivation to take us through the week.   We were instructed and encouraged to expect more from God than we do from the devil.

Genesis 48!

Not fiction.  Jacob blessed both of his grandsons from Joseph.

This was a verse that was my meditation when I was working at Allstate.   I remember sitting on the bench on my lunch hour and it was as though Jacob was sitting right there telling me jokes in my sad moments there.   I missed my children.   Ethan and Christina were most in my minds, although Ezra was just a toddler.  I wanted to bring them with me and show them what I was learning, but there were other things for them and for me.  All of the children are grown now and my meditation of that moment when I realized that Jacob had learned from God that there was more than one blessing from God for his children and that God intended to use his life to bless each and everyone of them in His own way.  

I see God's blessings.  I see God's weaving my prayers and expectations into his answers to my prayers and overruling my shortcomings in his omnipotence.   His word is a light and a lamp and our prayers are the threads in his hand, combining and making one new man out of broken pieces and nuanced threads.  He has been faithful and continues to be faithful.  Halleluia!

Are we following his plans like the geese were, this morning?

Worship is More Than Words!

Worship is More Than Words! God is beyond words and words are needed, but there are some experiences with God which are beyond the expression of words. God’s worship in sobriety is sometimes very quiet and sometimes it is very loud. Scripture gives us examples of both circumstances. By the grace of God, He gives us catchable glimpses of His glory. Some of them we can explain and express their magnitude and some of them our calibration of words haven't caught. Jesus is magnificent and His work in our lives is beyond belief, to have delivered us from death, hell and the grave, is beyond our comprehension. We haven’t experienced enough to truly describe it! Jesus paid His entire life into our empty vessels. Halleluia! I am indeed speechless about it!

Seeping into the "Ish"!

 Seeing the Train of the Lord Fill the Temple.

Praise and worship are the clouds with which the Lord of Glory has said that his presence would inhabit and dwell among his people.  I find it no wonder that God would answer prayer and be so present in the midst of His people, and that worship and praise would be the most spontaneous in some places and so controversial in other places.

Worship is often quiet.   Sometimes I miss the sobriety of silent worship.  Not so much that I would move to the “Be Quiet” Church,  but the entreaties to prepare your hearts for worship to those, so many people whose wagging tongues are the entry and exit of the sanctuary, sometimes, just sometimes mind you are the vehicle of Satan to distract and disturb the sobriety of the Worship of God.   I would love to hear reminders before worship that God is present and let us prepare our hearts to meet and to receive HIm.  It is woefully absent in the delight that we have come back to nearly full attendance after COVID.   I am praying for restoration of the sacred sense of worship that comes in the silence.   

We have a very disciplined and very skillful choir, which usher us from our gregarious entrance into the presence of the sacred worship of God, without us even noticing the transition.  Not every church has this convenience.  Our very skilled choir helps us prepare our hearts and minds, without the need of many exhortations and reproofs.  They, as it were, grab our attention and drag it into the presence of God without our having to learn the importance of it.

Still, I miss the exhortation and am offended by the gregariousness of the preworship season.

It is my aging that makes me so sensitive.  I love worship.  I love silent worship and I love loud worship and my silent season of using my words, very sparingly has made me more observant of the need for exhortations to worship in silence and worship in loudness.   God is the God of exuberance and the God of sobriety and silence.   We need a balance.

Goodbye to Psi year Hello to "'More' from God'" in 24"{

 2023

“Goodbye to the Psi in the Sky year”

We started the year, so much anticipating good things.  God didn’t leave us hanging, of course.  He had planned many new acquaintances and many new discoveries as we walk with him into the lands of Glad Adoration.   I do realize that Glad Adoration was just a figment of my imagination for so many years.  It is hard to write about an amazing discovery with so many facets.   The adoration of God’s inhabiting the praises of his people is something that makes you want to stop and just observe in silence.  His praise is always glorious!   He is far more glorious than his praise, but to see him allowing his train to spill outside of his sanctuary into the most uncanny places.  Perhaps that is the folly of the uninvitedness of his presence in so many places today.  The fact that he isn’t accepted or wanted in the same way that so many kinds of people were uninvited in days of yore.  Signs that say for any other kind of person but God.  We don’t want him here.  Yet, to be working on a Sabbath and sense that he ignores the imperatives of exclusivity people place on some establishments and stages a sit in, right in front of his own enemies.  The Elitists,  The Exclusivists, The amazing educated “Ish”, simply step over his amazing provisions for them, as though he were a leper, when he is the one who gave them such lavish.  What does God do?  He lends them more breath, more stuff, more opportunity to praise him?

It is an enigma to me!  Three years of sacrificing some Sabbaths to the “ish” has blessed my soul in a couple of ways that I have seen in the land of Glad Adoration.

1. Seeing the Train of God’s Glory seep into the ish

2. Seeing my growth in worship and praise in a wordless season.

3. Seeing the truth of “if You turn your foot from the Sabbath…”

4. Seeing the mercy of God in the Land of the Living

5.  Seeing God resisting the pride in me

6.  Seeing God exalting the humility in me

    

Dec 30, 2023......4:48am