Month December 2019

Come, and Be Strange With Me

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When Christians throw their lot in with Jesus, we lose the right to protect our reputation. When you love the strangers, you will become strange. – Rosaria Butterfield

“Gender identity”, “gay marriage”, “preferred pronouns”, “binary” these and other words flood us with different emotions and thoughts. But the connotations that are attached to them should not keep us from fulfilling Christ’s call to love and pray for all, even for those we may have trouble understanding.

I just finished watching a video of Rosaria Butterfield speaking at Harvest Church in California and that woman has a way of speaking to me that just makes me want to take her up on all the challenges she graciously gives Christians! It like all rational thinking goes out the window! She just hits me on a whole other level! She is just so genuine and I want to be her when I grow up!  After I stopped heaving and shouting “amen” at my computer screen, I called out to my introverted husband and told him,”You know how we opened our home after Sunday for lunch to our church?” He stood there immobile and silent, probably not wanting to remember. “Well, now I’m inviting the whole town!” He did what he usually does when I start going nuts, he looked deep into my eyes and then just walked away.

I have no idea how this is going to look. I don’t know how I am going to do this, but read this verse with me. It’s Mark 10:28-30:

Then Peter spoke up, “We have left everything to follow you!”. “Truly I tell you,” Jesus replied, “no one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age: homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and fields—along with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life.

Are you reading this?! Have the Christians in your church received mothers and  brothers and sisters a hundred times over from us?!? Has your community? Has  your neighbor? Has Kuttawa?  Jesus is not talking about how its going to be like this in Heaven, he said: THIS PRESENT AGE! That means right now! There should be no lonely Christians! Not if this verse is true. Why is inviting someone to live with us shocking? Why is having people over all the time weird? Why are our best friends the ones we least pray with and open up Scripture with? Why are we not strange in this way?

open doorI have failed in this. I have let my feelings and my respect for privacy dictate my behavior instead of God’s call for me. What if I believed the Bible was true? Help me God to believe Your Word is true! There are not many books I can think of that have impacted me more than the book: The Gospel Comes With a House Key by Rosaria. You can see my review of this book here or you can buy it here.

I leave you with the YouTube video I just watched and invite you to come and be strange with me!

 

 

The Forgotten Trinity – Book Review

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I know that I know nothing!trinty

The Trinity – what a beautiful doctrine, but such a difficult concept! In my ignorance to try and comprehend such a complex truth, I have fallen in and out of heresy. This make me thankful for His grace and gives a deeper appreciation for the profound vastness and mystery of our Creator. I will never completely know Him, but I can know Him.

This book was magnificent and just revealed to me just how much I do not know. That is our God – knowable but also not. This book helped clear out a lot of questions that regularly pop up for me regarding the Trinity. It strengthened my trust in His Word. Mr. White gives plenty of verses in Scripture to make his points and explain as best as humanly possible who the Father, Jesus and the Holy Spirit are. This book also elevated God to another level for me. It made Him bigger somehow. I couldn’t help but just marvel at how awesome (in the old definition of the word kinda way) God is. Full of awe!

All examples previously given to try to explain the Trinity like the egg, or the different states of water fall short of describing His true essence. Nothing on earth can describe Him and frankly, we lack the intelligence to fully understand it. And that is okay! He wouldn’t be God if we could completely understand him. God said in Isaiah 55:9 “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

The book is a bit academic, but what else would you expect from a book written by James White.  I truly appreciate men like him who devote themselves to reading and researching such deep truths and helping the layman discern such beautiful things. Mr. White has a YouTube channel where he discusses different Biblical topics. You can buy the book here. The book is 224.

The truths in this book bring the Believer to a deeper worship of such an intimidating God.  I leave you with this description of our Lord:

And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God ask of you but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in obedience to him, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul,  and to observe the Lord’s commands and decrees that I am giving you today for your own good?

 To the Lord your God belong the heavens, even the highest heavens, the earth and everything in it.  Yet the Lord set his affection on your ancestors and loved them, and he chose you, their descendants, above all the nations—as it is today.  Circumcise your hearts, therefore, and do not be stiff-necked any longer. For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who shows no partiality and accepts no bribes.  – Deut. 10:12-16

Vindicating the Vixens – Book Review

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It is hard to review a book that is a compilation of essays and that is what “Vindicating the Vixens: Revisiting Sexualized, Vilified, and Marginalized Women of the Bible” is. Some of the essays were good and I learned so much from them, some were things I already knew, and some didn’t really make a good case. vixen 3

I wanted this book to give me facts based on Scripture, on church history and to give a voice to these women in the Bible. It did that somewhat, but unfortunately in the background there was a lingering peal of feminism that didn’t sit well with me. I wanted it to exalt our Creator because He uses both men and women (both just as broken as the other) to go about His business in furthering His Kingdom and revealing more of Himself through us. And the book did this, but not as wholly as I think it could have. It exalted God, but also bashed very well known pastors. I feel it took them out of context and some seemed to have had a bone to pick with them.

 

And that’s the problem with today’s feminism. We, as women, create not because we are creative, but because we want to create better than men. We want to be the boss of an organization, not because it pays well and you can influence more people, but because a man has it, and we want what a man has.  And this book seemed to focus on women of the Bible, not because they all point to Jesus, but because the preachers who spoke about them didn’t give them enough credit. Granted, I believe some preachers don’t believe women characters in the Bible are as important as male characters. I also believe that some preachers treat their female sheep as a second-class group. But when you write a book to counter that by doing the exact same thing you hated done to you, you lose the validity of your work. You become whiny and petty.

There are countless of women Jesus loved, that God loved and used for His glory in the Bible. There are also many women who have been maligned just because of their sex. But correcting that by belittling men is not the way a Christian man or woman should write.

vixen 2

This book was good, but the echoes of past hurts were just a bit too loud for me. It was also very academic, something I did enjoy about the book. In the end, the book left me wanting to lick completely healed wounds and a Christian book should never make anyone feel that way (Philippians 3:13b). I, cautiously recommend this book if you want to know more about these women in the Bible, but there are plenty of other books that dignify these women just at much without abasing men.

You can buy the book here. It is 304 pages long.