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November 4 - December 10, 2024
“For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever. Amen” (Rom. 11:36).
Looking for my own good and fixating on my obvious and frequent bad is a crippling pastime. All good is from God. All good is to God. We just need to be the sheep.
But, MAN, do I get to enjoy a lot of beauty when my main focus is noticing, just witnessing, God’s goodness to my family. His work is wonderful. What a Shepherd we have.
He was able to communicate the truth with people who didn’t believe it because 1) he knows the Word of God he claims to believe, and 2) he walks with the God he claims to believe. The rest just comes out as he goes.
When your life is about worshiping and enjoying God, you don’t have to be worried about how you’ll talk about Him. You’ll just talk about Him, because He’s your friend and He’s real and alive and active in your life.
Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, with my mind I myself am serving the law of God, but with my flesh, the law of sin. Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus. (Rom. 7:25–8:1)
Who will save us from these bodies of death? Not us. The pressure is off, you guys. God wants us to love Him. He wants us to love others as we’ve been so loved. But it’s not up to us to conjure up the right words and systems and ways. It takes a miracle, but it isn’t our miracle. It’s God’s. It’s God’s work. It’s God’s power. It’s God’s pressure. It’s God’s Son.
If we want to glorify the Lord in how we serve people, then we need to prioritize enjoying the Lord. We need to come before Him and let Him love us. Shape us. Fill us. Strengthen us. God gives us grace in p...
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Despite all my phases of immaturity and floundering and backtracking and forgetting, despite myself, Jesus has proven, time and again in my life, that He really is the way.
Even as a Christ-follower, even as someone who has the Spirit of God living inside of my soul, I am unreliable and unpredictable, and I fail at alarming rates. But not Jesus. He is the true way.
Jesus said again, “Truly I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. All who came before me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep didn’t listen to them. I am the gate. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved and will come in and go out and find pasture. A thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I have come so that they may have life and have it in abundance.” (vv. 7–10)
He is saying we are like actual, real sheep who are terrible at staying alive on our own and we are in danger. But He is also saying that He is the gate for the sheep. He is the door to the fold.
Jesus isn’t pitting the pleasure of the pasture up against the protection of the fold. Jesus gives both.
“Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the worst” (1 Tim. 1:15b niv).
To write the love of God above Would drain the ocean dry;Nor could the scroll contain the whole Though stretched from sky to sky. —Frederick Martin Lehman, “The Love of God” (1917)
