Enough
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.
Sacrifice
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.
Irrevocable
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.
Order
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.
Ouch
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.
Contradiction
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!’
Then/Now
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.
Settled
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.
Pleasure
God says to this, “I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked but that the wicked turn back from your evil ways….” God takes pleasure in the weight loss of new obedience- In the gravity-defying switch.
Labor
This weekend we honor laborers. Those whose efforts produce fruit that benefit us all. Seems like a good time also to define labor for those who follow Jesus.