What we are left to wonder in the final analysis is, was this man’s infirmity ever actually in his limbs or was it always in his attitude? From Jesus’ lips to this man’s life, wholeness is born. Isn’t the same available to us?
The collected wisdom of innumerable men and women for millennia is that only God is enough! When we envelope ourselves in God’s enough-ness, God brings the beauty out of our inherently human inadequacies and we find growth and rest.
The collected wisdom of innumerable men and women for millennia is that only God is enough! When we envelope ourselves in God’s enough-ness, God brings the beauty out of our inherently human inadequacies and we find growth and rest.
The devil wanted to choose Jesus’ sacrifices for him but he was clear his sacrifice was Calvary. Rooting our sacrifice in pleasing God is an act of trust in God.
If God can create all the worlds, certainly God can hold together God’s first things and God’s newest things. And if God can do that, then God must be weeping for the Jewish and Palestinian people, for Israel and Gaza.
The order we share is not meant to oppress but to help maximize wisdom and joy and minimize pain and grief. Love is a system of order.
The Jesus-produced ouch isn’t about shame or guilt, not at all. Jesus’ love, delivered through story, is interested in truth; truth that dances on our lips and is proved by how we live.
Spiritual maturity has an answer for the question, “is God among us?, even when God’s timeline challenges us. It would’ve been great that day if someone in the crowd would have blurted out, ‘If God was able to defeat an empire, surely God can provide bread and water!’
Sometimes even rocks that refuse God’s opening acts. Ironic, considering the thirst-quenching won’t come until the rock opens. God can refresh us in ways that will astound us if we will let God’s gracious acts open us.
The Bible doesn’t give us a sense of Joseph’s interior journey to this moment. We just know in that moment he directed his pain to use his power for restoration and not a recitation of injuries. For Joseph, the matter was settled.