This is absolutely beautiful from Glen:
I preached again on Christmas in dark places. Afterwards a woman told me she’d buried her husband that week. Another man told me his daughter had just lost her child in labour. Another spoke of a divorce this year. Everyone agreed Christmas was hard.
At the end I spoke to Barry. I took his hand and he grasped it hard. He whispered a phrase. I pulled in even closer: “Say again Barry?” He said it again. I thought I caught it but I wanted to make sure. Now my ear is right by his lips. “One more time Barry?”
“He shines in the dark.”
Oh, what glorious news this is!
I love this from Scott Oliphint:
Even before the entrance of sin, God condescended, in His Son, to speak to Adam and Eve, and to walk in the Garden. This condescension of God, in the person of His Son, was a constant pledge of the relationship to man, the covenant, that God had unilaterally established.
But then the sin of man ruined everything. Left to itself, the world would be a place where it was “always winter.” Yet the LORD God refused to let creation languish. Even with the devastating effects of sin, this now man-mangled habitat would not be “always winter.” In His grace, the Lord determined, according to His own redemptive time-table, to fight against and conquer the sin that we brought upon ourselves and on the rest of His creation.
Steve Collier and I have never met, but each blog entry he writes makes me hope we will soon! In this entry (click on the title to get to the original) he responds to David Cameron’s view of the Bible:
Have you ever felt burdened by something? I know I certainly have! And for many of us, maybe we have had times in our lives as followers of Jesus that we’ve felt burdened. If so, I wonder what those burdens were? I have an inkling that for many of us, those burdens may be to do with that word that Cameron uses: morals. Are we doing the right thing? Are we acting in the right way?
If we take Cameron’s understanding of the Bible, then what we have is a book of morals. And if we adopt his understanding of faith, then what we are left with is the slavish burden of attempting to live up to those moral standards. You see, by reducing the Bible to a book of morals, what we really do is impose the law upon ourselves – that very thing that Jesus died to set us free from.
Glad to see you’re blogging again Steve!