Our Lighted Path

I didn't think I would regain strength of faith after true hell this Christmas season. But this Sunday morning, following Christmas day, I've gotten up again to hear faith. And while I feel unwell, I'm not destroyed. I feel set back, but not lost; unsure, but somewhat prepared for tomorrow. I can do all things within God's will. With God , all things He intends, are possible. This morning, partly before dawn, I was able to listen to three messages. Each message was not perfect, but breathed a kind of revival into my heart. The same goes for New Years Eve morning. In each message, I've also heard bits of what MEN err in feeling, right in the midst of God speaking! So while this day has yielded revival, I want to correct, in gentleness, two errors - while others care enough to correct me. The following are two of three revival messages, joy in the morning sermons I'm thanking the God of Heaven for holding in store as medicine; but also simple corrections, from my ...

  For anyone Jesus saves, newness in Spirit is born from within. (2 Corinthians 5:17, paraphrase) Elders used to say, "God sits high and looks low." It's true, His insight is in every place, light and dark, all over this world (Proverbs 15:3; Psalm 139:8). So it shouldn't be surprising to have found this cry of heart from a pastor in modern Bethlehem, which he may wrongly feel is an oppressive ghetto today instead of seeing the little town as the modern tourist site it is. Also different from how the pastor feels, we don't have anyway if knowing what ancient people group was most closely related to Mary as the Savior's birth mother. We only know that in believing Jesus, we each are saved. *** Although I feel differently than this author and his illustrator when it comes to cattle and even mice (Mice could perhaps have been warded off with strong herbs in ancient times!); although I'm weary of us today trying to paint Jesus' birth as dirty and even dis...

    I can agree with one thing I've seen this morning: that God's "sovereign will" takes into account men's mistakes and uses both those evils and any good for our good in Jesus. I believe a lot in our walk of faith is learning from mankind's mistakes. God allows some people to do the evil they want to do - and to believe the lies they want to believe. But through even the gravest of problems, some of us want to learn and overcome. And in learning, it's not about, "Well, God willed that this happen and so it is." No, instead, it's God allowed this evil that His children may stand corrected. God disciplines (diciples) who He loves, while allowing others to deal destructively in matters of eternal life and death. Often, He allows who He loves, who He foreknew as destined to live in Him, to make godless mistakes - but not to reach a point of no return.

Transliteration happens when someone looks at a foreign text  and pronounces words using phonetics from his or her own mother language. Early Latin (old Spanish) speakers are who probably began using their "hey" J sound in place of the "yay" Y sound in sacred texts. Then we, speaking English, turned the "hey" to "jeh." But the wonderful thing about that is that God knows who we all mean. God knows every heart, which is one reason we don't need to worry about the fate of Ya-AH-kohv (Jacob), who was favored, versus Ay-sow (Esau), who only understood in the flesh (Romans 10:6). Instead, all we need do is trust in the same God who used the old English, and to some extent the French, to break bonds of slavery by defying unjust prison and death in translating the sacred texts that eventully were stood upon in breaking the sin of slavery off of countless backs. ... While some scholars may look at Esau as an early example of eternal doom, ignoring th...

  We do not have any way to know what ethnic roots the Bible's Rahab (Raah-hob) carried. We only know she was a Caananite : living in a multicultural part of the ancient Middle East . Her Caanan was similar to Egypt in being a cultural crossroads and steeped in sin, but, geographically, was close to today's  Turkey , which was the  Asia Minor of ancient times. ...  We also know her to have been redeemed by  believing God , and redeemed by t he fact that God  weaved her ancient faithfulness into the unfolding of Jesus' adoptive birth . (Illustration a product at Etsy ) It's Advent, the season when we anticipate Christmas, the celebration of Jesus' birth. It's an odd time for a sermon that reminds us of some of ancient Israel's gruesome history; but some pastors - past and present - have turned to the story of Rahab, the Caananite, to remind us that the family history leading up to Jesus' earthly adoption was not an easy history. Rahab, in ancient Caanan,...