Notes of Faith January 4, 2022

Stasi and I celebrated our thirty-fifth wedding anniversary with a trip to Kauai. We find it the most gorgeous of the Hawaiian Islands, maybe one of the most beautiful places on earth.

Volcanic cliffs covered with lush tropical forest spill right down to the water’s edge. Hibiscus blossoms fall onto the peaceful rivers that wind their way through the jungle. This isn’t your tourist Hawaii. Apart from Princeville, the North Shore is way laid back, and after you cross a couple one-lane bridges, you feel you really could be on the outskirts of Eden.

Sitting on a quiet beach there, with no one to our right or left for more than two hundred yards of pristine white sand, it was so luscious I expected Adam and Eve to go strolling by any moment. Now, you’d think this would be enough to delight, enchant, and soothe any soul, but as I took a stroll down the beach myself, I passed a guy sitting under a banyan tree — watching videos on his iPhone.

Wow. You can’t unplug from your technology even in paradise?

Now, to be fair, I bet this is what happened: He had his phone with him — because everybody always has their phone with them — and somebody texted him a funny YouTube video, and he couldn’t resist the urge, and that was that. He was glued to a little artificial screen watching some cat sit on a toilet, when all around him was beauty beyond description, the very beauty his soul needed, and filling that beauty and coming through it the presence of God.

And I saw myself in this guy.

Because I, too, had brought my phone with me to the beach, and I, too, responded when the little “chirp” alerted me to an incoming text. (We always have our excuses; every addict does. I was “keeping myself available to my children.”) Every notification got my attention, because it triggered the brain’s learned response to check out what news had just come in.  

Dopamine causes you to want, desire, seek out, and search… It is the opioid system (separate from dopamine) that makes us feel pleasure… The wanting system propels you to action and the liking system makes you feel satisfied and therefore pause your seeking. If your seeking isn’t turned off at least for a little while, then you start to run in an endless loop [Dopamine Loop].

The dopamine system is stronger than the opioid system. You tend to seek more than you are satisfied… Dopamine starts you seeking, then you get rewarded for the seeking which makes you seek more. It becomes harder and harder to stop looking at email, stop texting, or stop checking your cell phone to see if you have a message or a new text… The dopamine system doesn’t have satiety built in. It is possible for the dopamine system to keep saying “more more more,” causing you to keep seeking even when you have found the information.1 

Neo was never so totally and completely trapped in the Matrix.  

Since denial is one of the stages of addiction, let me ask you, dear reader, a couple questions: When your little Chime, Glass, or Swoosh sound alerts you to an incoming text, do you easily ignore it and go on with the conversation you are having, or reading what you are reading, or enjoying the back seat view as you drive through the desert? I’m serious — when that thing vibrates in your pocket, do you regularly ignore it? Or do you automatically reach to see? Can you shut your phone off when you get home in the evening and not turn it on again until morning? When you first wake, do you allow yourself a leisurely coffee and bagel before you look at your phone — or is your phone the very first thing you look at every morning?

Yeah, me too. Let’s be honest: we prefer distraction. The more distracted we are, the less present we are to our souls’ various hurts, needs, disappointments, boredom, and fears. It’s a short-term relief with long-term consequences. What blows my mind is how totally normal this has become; it’s the new socially acceptable addiction. I’ve got a friend who decided to break with his; he now turns his phone off over the weekend. I text him, and he doesn’t reply until Sunday night or Monday morning. I’m embarrassed by my irritation: C’mon, man — you know the protocol. Everybody agrees to be totally available, anywhere, anytime, 24/7. It’s what we do.

What does it say that you look like some sort of nut job when you turn your phone off?

The brother of Jesus was trying to offer some very simple guide- lines to a true life with God when, among other things, he said,  

Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world. — James 1:27

That unpolluted part — that’s what worries me, when the average American checks their phone eighty times a day (!), and 70 percent said they sleep with their phone within reach.2 

BUT WE HAVE A CHOICE

Finding more of God, growing strong in soul and spirit, requires creating space in your day for God — to intentionally put yourself in a place that allows you to draw upon and experience the healing power of the life of God filling you. Over the ages, serious followers of Jesus have used stillness and quiet, worship, fasting, prayer, beautiful places, and a number of other “exercises” to drink deeply of the presence of God. And untangle their souls from the world.

The ongoing deluge of intriguing facts and commentary, scandal and crisis, genuinely important guidance combined with the latest insider news from around the globe, and our friends’ personal lives gives the soul a medicated feeling of awareness, connection, and meaning. Really, it’s the new Tower of Babel — the immediate access to every form of “knowledge” and “groundbreaking” information right there on our phones, every waking moment. It confuses the soul into a state of artificial meaning and purpose, all the while preventing genuine soul care and life with God. Who has time to read a book? Plant a garden?

Let me say it again, because it’s so counter to the social air we breathe: what has become the normal daily consumption of input is numbing the soul with artificial meaning and purpose while in fact the soul grows thinner and thinner through neglect, harmed by the very madness that passes for a progressive life. We are literally being forced into the “shallows” of our life.

I’m not scolding; I’m tossing a lifeline.

Sincere followers of Jesus in every age have faced very difficult decisions — usually at that point of tension where their life with and for God ran straight against the prevailing cultural norm.

The new Tower of Babel is ours. We have always been “strangers and aliens” in the world, insofar as our values seemed so strange and bizarre to those around us. We are now faced with a series of decisions that are going to make us look like freaks — choices like fasting from social media, never bringing our smartphones to any meal, conversation, or Bible study, cutting off our media intake so we can practice stillness every day.

The good news is that we actually have a choice. Unlike persecution, the things currently assaulting us are things we can choose not to participate in.

GIVING IT A TRY

And you’re already doing it — you’re reading a book! Well done! As we go along, you’ll discover many wonderful ways to unplug and be whole. For now, a few thoughts on technology...  

Turn off notifications. You don’t need to know when your aunt posted another picture of her dog on Facebook; you can check when you have set aside time to do so. You don’t need to know about the snowstorm in Ohio or the embarrassing thing the president just said.

Fast from social media. Try cutting your use by 50 percent for one week and see what it does for you. (Many of our friends loved it so much they’ve decided to pretty much get off social media altogether.)

Turn your phone off at 8:00 p.m. Give yourself some evening time for real things. And banish all technology from your bedroom.

Don’t check your phone as soon as you wake up in the morning. Give your soul mercy to wake up; enjoy a few peaceful moments.

When your phone chirps or vibrates, don’t react. Make it wait till you pick it up. In these small ways I’m making my phone a tool again, something that serves me instead of the other way around.

Do real things. Chop vegetables, play cards, do a puzzle, go for a walk, learn an instrument.

If you create a little bit of sacred space every day, God will meet you there. And you will begin to love it.

1.Susan Weinschenk, “Why We’re All Addicted to Texts, Twitter and  Google,” Psychology Today, September 11, 2012 google.  

2.Asurion, “Tech-Tips,”

Excerpted from Get Your Life Back by John Eldredge, copyright John Eldredge. 

Are you overly attached to the technology that’s supposed to be a tool? Does your phone demand your constant attention? Let’s untangle our souls from the world and spend more time with God! 

TV can be just as bad, and maybe our computers the worst for taking our time and destroying our minds with junk.  Let’s fill our minds with the Word of God, thoughts of righteousness and be blessed by all that God is and does!

Pastor Dale

Notes of Faith January 3, 2022

Simon Peter's Defining Verse:

The Lord will perfect that which concerns me. 

— Psalm 138:8 NKJV 

You will easily recognize Peter when you get to Heaven,” the speaker said with a smile. “He’s the man with the foot-shaped mouth.” As the audience laughed, I groaned within. I didn’t think the speaker was worthy to carry Simon Peter’s sandals let alone joke about his sins. A foot-shaped mouth indeed!  

Jesus commanded us to forgive our brothers and sisters even if they sinned against us seven times a day, but let a great Bible personality commit the same sin twice (like Abraham), or three times (like Peter), and we can’t forgive them. Instead, we make that sin the key to their character, and this blinds us to the real person. To joke about sin is to minimize it, and sin is not a laughing matter. Sin put Jesus on the cross. Peter wept over his sins, but we who are more mature joke about them. As for our own sins, well, that’s another matter.  

The speaker had fallen into the same trap that has snared far too many Christians: they don’t know the true Bible personality, so they accept a cheap caricature instead. They enjoy emphasizing the occasional bad things. Peter had a big mouth and often put his foot into it. Noah got drunk, and Abraham told the same lie twice. David was a voyeur, Thomas was a doubter, and John Mark was a quitter. Forget all the good things these people did and ignore what the Lord said about them. No matter what the truth is, keep the congregations laughing. Stick to the caricature.  

The fact that Simon Peter had two names helps us get a better perspective on his character as well as our own. Simon was his given name — “the hearer”; Peter was his nickname — “a rock.”

Jesus had less than three years to transform this lump of clay into a rock — and He did it! All believers have two names: the old name, “child of Adam,” and the new name, “child of God.”

Years ago, many Christians wore colorful pins with PBP/ GINFWMY printed on them. If anybody asked what those letters stood for, the explanation was given:

“Please be patient, God is not finished with me yet.”  

Peter could have worn one of those pins without embarrassment. That’s why I selected Psalm 138:8 for Peter’s defining verse:

“The Lord will perfect that which concerns me” (NKJV).

It’s the Old Testament equivalent of Philippians 1:6:  

"Being confident of this, that He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus." 

Both verses have encouraged me when I have messed up my assignment and disappointed my Lord. The victorious Christian life is a series of new beginnings. Each time Peter stumbled, Jesus forgave him and Peter got up and made a new beginning.  

LOVING JESUS  

We usually associate love with the quiet and poetic apostle John and not with impetuous and manly Peter, “the big fisherman,” but Peter needed to grow in love as well as in knowledge and faith. In fact, Peter’s love for Jesus was the theme of our Lord’s breakfast meeting with seven of His disciples after the resurrection (John 21).

In the upper room, Peter had boasted of his love for Jesus.

Even if all fall away on account of You, I never will,” he said, and, “Even if I have to die with You, I will never disown You.” — Matthew 26:33, Matthew 26:35 

In all fairness, we should note that the other men echoed Peter’s words, but it seems that Peter was the most outspoken. So, after breakfast, Jesus asked Peter the most penetrating question He had ever asked him:  

Simon son of John, do you truly love Me more than these? — John 21:151 

Peter told the truth: he did love Jesus, and he wasn’t going to deny it. Yes, he had failed, but Jesus had forgiven him and was now about to restore him to his ministry. Peter was learning the lesson John wrote about years later:  

Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth. — 1 John 3:18 

Making a passionate speech and wielding a sword were not valid evidences of his love, but staying awake and praying with and for Jesus would have qualified.  

The better we know Jesus, the more we trust Him, and the more we trust Him, the more we learn to love Him. Peter wrote,  

Though you have not seen Him, you love Him. — 1 Peter 1:8 

We don’t need pictures or statues of Jesus in order to love Him, because we have the inspired portrait we need already written in Scripture. The old hymn expresses it perfectly:  

Break Thou the bread of life, Dear Lord, to me,  

As Thou didst break the loaves beside the sea;  

Beyond the sacred page I seek Thee, Lord; 
My spirit pants for Thee, O living Word.  

~Mary A. Lathbury  

Those who spend time daily in the Word, meditating on what it says about Jesus Christ, will grow in their love for Him and prove it by the way they live and serve.  

BECOMING LIKE JESUS  

Becoming like Jesus, after all, is the goal of the Christian life and the purpose behind God’s great plan of salvation, for we have been “predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son” (Romans 8:29). It isn’t enough for us to grow in the knowledge of Christ; we must also “grow in grace” (2 Peter 3:18) and become more like Christ. It is very easy to grow in “Bible knowledge” and yet never manifest the grace of Jesus Christ in our lives. It is easier to preach about humility than to practice it, or to study the Greek words for love than to love one another.  

If you want to see Simon, the clay, living like Peter, the rock, follow Peter’s ministry in the book of Acts. You will meet a man of prayer, a man obedient to the Word, a man who magnifies Christ in his preaching, and a man of compassion who cares for saints and lost sinners. He rejoices at the privilege of suffering for Jesus. He steps aside and allows James to lead the Jerusalem church. He makes sure the widows are cared for, and he opens doors of service for qualified believers in the church. He abandons his Jewish practices, goes to the home of Cornelius, and preaches the gospel to the Gentiles. He is called on the carpet by the legalists, but he doesn’t retreat. When the church leaders meet in Jerusalem to discuss the place of the Gentiles in the plan of God, Peter stands with Paul and Barnabas defending the freedom of the gospel (Acts 15:1–11). Praise God! A Gentile doesn’t have to become a Jew in order to become a Christian!  

The better we know Jesus, the more we trust and love Him. This combination of spiritual knowledge, faith, and love, combined with God’s grace, enables us to become more and more like Jesus! Peter called it growing in the grace and knowledge of Jesus (2 Peter 3:18), and Paul called it “perfecting holiness out of reverence for God” (2 Corinthians 7:1).  

How did the Simon of the Gospels become the “rock” of the book of Acts? Of course, the Lord had prayed for Peter, taught him, and given him many opportunities to learn and grow, but there were three events in Jerusalem that opened the door to Peter’s life of fullness and fruitfulness.  

Let’s begin with the crowing of the cock and remember that when it happened, Jesus “turned and looked straight at Peter” (Luke 22:61). It wasn’t the angry scowl of a judge but the pained look of a friend whose heart had been broken. At that moment, Peter saw himself and realized what he had done to Jesus, and then he went out and wept bitterly. For each of us, there must come an hour of honest confrontation with our true self and humble confession of our sins to the Lord.  

The second event was the crucifixion of the Savior. Peter saw a part of the official trial of Jesus, but he didn’t see it all, nor did he go to the cross as John and the women did. However, Peter knew what crucifixion was and the shame and suffering his Master would endure. Peter’s words must have seared his heart:  

I am ready to go with You to prison and to death. — Luke 22:33 

But it was Simon of Cyrene who carried the cross for Jesus, not Simon Peter. Christ died our death for us that we might live His life for Him.  

And He died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for Him who died for them and was raised again. — 2 Corinthians 5:15 

Event number three was the coming of the Holy Spirit. Jesus told the apostles to stay in Jerusalem until they had been “clothed with power from on high” (Luke 24:49), and on the day of Pentecost, that promise was fulfilled. In the power of the Spirit, Peter boldly preached the gospel and 3,000 people were saved. He performed miracles of healing, he exposed the works of the Devil, he confronted his opponents and shut their mouths, and he brought great glory to the name of Jesus. He gave direction to the church and strengthened the saints when persecution began. He was a different man.  

We, too, can become different people. God never gives up on us even though we may decide to give up on ourselves. The moment you were born again, Jesus said, “You are — you shall be!”  

We are nothing but lumps of clay, but Jesus can turn us into rocks.  

The eminent Greek scholar A. T. Robertson wrote about Peter: “It was slow in coming, but when the fruit was ripe, it was rich and gracious. He was a man worth the making and Jesus knew it. He loved Peter from the start, and to the end.”2  

Don’t wait for the crowing of the cock, but start right now to claim Peter’s defining verse: “The Lord will perfect that which concerns me.”  

1. The two Greek words for love —agape, God’s sacrificial love, and phileo, friendship love — are used interchangeably in the Gospels, and it is difficult to build a case for making a distinction in this passage.  

2. A. T. Robertson, Epochs in the Life of Peter (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker, 1974), 3. 

Excerpted from The Defining Verse by Warren W. Wiersbe, copyright Warren W. Wiersbe. 

Part of why so many of us love Peter is because he is so like us: fallible. He loved Jesus with all of his heart. He was brave. He stepped out on the water. And, he failed. He chickened out when it mattered. He was… human like us. And, Jesus chose him. Like He chooses us. As Jesus continued to perfect Peter, He continues to perfect us. PBP/GINFWMY!

Pastor Dale

Notes of Faith January 2, 2022

A major motion picture about prayer. Your sister starring in that movie. Neither of these things is what I would call normal. Seeing my sister, Priscilla, in War Room left me speechless, and you better believe I was praying for her and for the people watching her. But this got me thinking. Do I pray for my sister in the normal times too?

During The 28-Day Prayer challenge, we’re going to be praying for our families on Fridays. Just like some families and restaurants have Taco Tuesdays, Fridays are going to be Faith, Friends, and Family Fridays!

Sometimes we’ll notice that we’re praying for ourselves, but we’ve been slow to pray for others— especially those who are familiar to us, those whom we see every day and whose lives seem to be going fine.

If my sister is starring in a movie, am I praying for her? Sure.

But if my sister is sitting behind the wheel taking her kids to baseball practice, am I praying for her then? Does the normal in my life converge with the normal of my lips?

Because there doesn’t have to be a special crisis to force us into our prayer closets and motivate us to go to war for our lives and for the lives of others.

Prayer offers to God the stuff of our everyday lives. People are the stuff of our everyday lives! And those two should converge regularly.

This is the discipline of prayer. Your prayers, even the ones for everyday concerns and everyday people, matter. What normal people or circumstances do you want to bring to the Most High God?

He wants to hear about your normal.

Make it a point to pray about your normal every day.

And be sure to include your family members.

PRAYER PROMPT

God, today I pray for the family member whom you’ve laid on my heart: ________________ .

AFTERNOON REFLECTION

To win the fight, you have to have the right strategy and the right resources, because victories don’t come by accident.

— From War Room

Where does your family member need victory in his or her life? Have you been praying about it? Start praying or keep praying about it here.

PRAYER PROMPT

Dear God, my _________ (relative) needs victory in ______________ .

Your prayers, even the normal everyday ones, matter. In order to be victorious, you must recognize that Satan is a thief who comes to kill, steal, and destroy (John 10:10) and that he works nonstop to disable, discourage, and defeat believers every minute of every day.

You must realize that if he has a bold strategy to overpower you, you should use your fervent prayers as a bold, strategic weapon to overcome and have the victory through Christ Jesus. Be a fierce warrior by fighting for your family in prayer.

EVENING INSPIRATION

What audiences learned from War Room is that prayer changes things. Do you believe it?

My middle son suffered a birth injury following a difficult birth. I was as devastated as any young mother would be that her son has a physical challenge. I took my son to the altar at church every Sunday for seven Sundays in a row, begging God to heal and to make a miracle out of this son.

While my boy still has residual effects of that injury, because of the injury he has developed a perseverant spirit, and there is nothing that he wants to do that he cannot. While all of my children give me joy, I know all of the things the doctors said my son would not be able to do, and I’ve seen God answer my prayers over and over again that my son would accomplish over and above what medical science expected of him.

Tonight, I encourage you to be systematic in praying for your family. (That’s just a fancy way of saying, “Don’t leave anyone out!”) A great way to do that is to mentally picture your family tree.

Pray for your maternal and paternal grandparents, if you know them.

• Pray for your mother, your father, and any other adult who helped to raise you.

• Pray for aunts, uncles, and cousins.

• Pray for any siblings you have, and if they have spouses and kids, pray for them.

• Pray for your spouse, if you’re married.

• Pray for your future spouse, if you desire to be married.

• Pray for your children, if you have them.

• Pray for your children’s children, if you’ve got grandbabies!

If praying through your whole family tree tonight feels overwhelming, I get that. Consider asking God to lay one person on your heart this evening, and continue to pray for that person throughout the weekend. Maybe write her name someplace you’ll notice it or make his picture the background on your phone.

Throughout my book, The 28-Day Prayer Journey, we’ll have Friends and Family Fridays by choosing one person to pray for on Fridays. [And in the companion study, we go even deeper to learn about intercessory prayer.]

How are you feeling about the prayers you’re offering to God in this prayer journey? Sometimes we can be fooled into thinking that our prayers depend on finding the right words or having more faith than other people. But those are lies of the enemy. Are you praying based on who God is and what He can do? Or are you limiting your prayers based on what you can see or what you can make happen on your own?

If you are limiting your prayers, don’t. God is who He says He is.

Excerpted from The 28-Day Prayer Journey by Chrystal Evans Hurst, copyright Chrystal Evans Hurst.

I’m so in for this commitment? How about you? Recently, the enemy came after a close family member and I got a fresh awakening to how important warring for our loved ones in prayer is. The enemy has a bold strategy to overpower you, so we must use our bold, strategic weapon of prayer to overcome. We’ve got to be fierce in battle with Jesus fighting for our families! Are you in?

We can never communicate too much with God!  Pray without ceasing.  Try hard not to always pray for yourself but be in prayer for family, friends, acquaintances, even those you don’t know.  God loves them and wants all of them to come to Him with a repentant heart, depend on Him, trust Him not only for this life but forever more!  Pray, pray, pray!  The blessings are endless.

Pastor Dale

Notes of Faith January 1, 2022

Notes of Faith January 1, 2022

 Friends, as we enter this new year, you will be hearing from a lot of "experts" about how to set better goals and overall be a better version of yourself in 2022. But the problem with most new year’s resolutions is that they are flawed to begin with. Author Ruth Chou Simons has some perspective on this:

 “How we seek to fix ourselves reveals what we believe we really need... If we believe Jesus is all we need, then why do we live worn out, fearful, and anxious striving?” – Ruth Chou Simons

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. — 2 Corinthians 5:17

Striving for self-improvement is a dead-end street.

The temptation to fix yourself, better yourself, feel good about yourself by cleaning yourself up — that temptation is real.

We aren’t alone in this; there’s a long line of religious folks and self-help gurus selling the power of hard work and achievement. And truth is, hard work and achievement are commendable, but they lack power as sources for true change.

My goal has been to show you that striving in our own strength to attain any form of worth, approval, assurance, or comfort will never deliver on the promises it makes. But now that we agree — regardless of how similar or different our stories look — that we are by nature strivers and self-improvers, I want to show you this: that

self-righteous striving is more hopeless than you want to believe, but grace is more life-transforming than you realize.

There isn’t merely good news for our bad news; there’s a way forward and a way out of the cycle of anxious hustling, self-condemnation, and proving ourselves.

Here’s where I want to draw out our coffee date and ask you to stay awhile. Right here is where I believe so many well-meaning Christian women [and men] get stuck and feel powerless along the way to understanding the gift of grace. Too many of us hear the hard truth that we aren’t enough and don’t know what to do in response.

Do we, then, sit idly by and wait for the Lord to do whatever He will in His sovereignty?

Do we just read our Bibles and hope change will magically come about?

Do we give up on the idea of improvement altogether and accept our sinful patterns and habits?

Do we keep hustling anxiously but pray that we will do it with God’s strength?

Where does striving end and trusting begin?

I have asked all of these questions and, at times, defaulted to believing wrongly that the gospel is powerful enough to save me from hell but not powerful enough to save me to something greater than self-improvement.

I’m guessing you relate to one of the following:

• You’ve been worn out trying to be a better version of yourself.

• You’ve felt guilt or pressure about doing more, being more, accomplishing more.

• You’ve struggled to understand the place for good works if grace saves us.

• You’re tired of trying to measure up to other people’s standards.

• You can’t decide if God is pleased with you or disappointed in you.

• You want to grow and change but don’t know how it really happens.

I just want to voice these things out loud because I see you. I’m with you. And, listen, sometimes I wish change and becoming were a quick and easy formula too. Sometimes it’s easier to subscribe to a twelve-step program than to submit to a lifelong process known as sanctification. But God promises us:

I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put My Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in My statutes and be careful to obey My rules. You shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers, and you shall be My people, and I will be your God. — Ezekiel 36:26-28

The prophet Ezekiel voiced these words from God that wouldn’t be fully realized until the arrival of Christ, the Savior, but sometimes I wish our spiritual transformation truly happened like a heart transplant.

Some of you reading this may remember when our family walked the unknowns alongside Troy’s younger brother who needed a new heart. His had failed, and he was placed on the top of a heart transplant list. I’ll never forget receiving word that he had been matched and was due to go into surgery within the next day. Another family’s deep and painful loss made life possible for my brother-in-law.

Troy and I flew out to meet with the rest of the family and the doctors who would operate on his brother. The whole family was called into a stark hospital meeting room to hear from the surgeon after the lengthy, mind-blowing procedure. (I still cannot wrap my mind around it!) We watched as the doctor drew diagrams and labeled ventricles. We listened and held our breaths as he described what they removed and what they placed in an empty cavity in my brother-in-law’s chest.

His broken heart was literally removed, and a new and healthy one was put in its place.

And it was now beating. It was pumping his blood. It was giving him new life.

It’s no surprise that, as an artist, this visual is stunning, if not arresting, for me. How clear does God have to be about our utter need for new, not better — self-replacement, not self-betterment. The heart represents the center of a person’s soul, the control center of one’s desires, motives, spiritual being. God isn’t in the business of replacing qualities, giftings, and perspectives unique to you; He’s all about the lifesaving eviction of a diseased control center and replacing it with one that can make you operate and fulfill the purposes for which He created you.

That’s why the gospel isn’t a recipe for self-improvement.

It’s not a mix of working with what you’ve got, sprinkling in a little religious effort, adding in discipline, strategy, and a healthy dash of likability. But this formula isn’t entirely a recipe for disaster— if it were, we’d all have jumped ship like it was a bad fad diet we realized we’d taken up in a moment of weakness watching late-night television. No, unfortunately, this recipe sometimes yields results. It sometimes rewards those who keep on pushing, keep on hustling, keep on perfecting, keep on striving. But the fruit isn’t lasting because the control center that’s keeping us keeping on in this way was broken to begin with. It’ll only run for so long in its terminal condition.

So, it’s worth revisiting this key passage of Scripture that resets our operating system. I want you to know how important it is that you not miss what I’m about to say. This is what changes everything:

But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ — by grace you have been saved — and raised us up with Him and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages He might show the immeasurable riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. — Ephesians 2:4-10

This passage begins with two little words that become the hinge of history — the moment where all the impossible becomes possible in our longing to be enough:

But God.

In the same way that all that comes before Ephesians 2:4 declares our alienation from God, the first half of this book is about our inability to save ourselves. But in steps God. Paul didn’t tell us here in Ephesians that God fixes everything, makes us feel better, or gets rid of our deficiencies. In fact, Paul didn’t say much about us at all. Instead, he made sure we would know all about God…

• who is rich in mercy,

• who greatly loves us,

• who intercepted our waywardness,

• and made us alive with Christ,

• who raised us up,

• and shows us the immeasurable riches of His grace and kindness,

• who saves us by His grace,

• molds us,

• and makes us first to do good works.

If there’s one passage of Scripture that fully summarizes the benefits of grace, it’s this one. Paul succinctly declared all that is fundamentally changed because of the grace of God. The words but God are our reminder that

we can’t, but God can.

For all of history, man was unable to meet God’s standards, face the true consequences of sin, or answer for His lack of holiness before a righteous God. We were all found utterly and completely not enough. That nagging feeling we’ve had all along — that feeling of imperfection, ineptitude, or insufficiency? The world offers endless ways to stuff it down, cover it up, numb it out, compensate, and overcome our inadequacy, but Jesus offered — and still offers — the only true solution that wasn’t temporary but eternal.

No sacrifice could solve the problem.
No amount of right living could make us whole.
No religious effort was enough to save a sinful heart.

Both the messy and broken, the pious and pretty, were equally incapable of loving the Lord with all their hearts, minds, souls, and strength. The most foundational command to love God above all else was broken in the garden; how could we possibly fix ourselves and make ourselves fit for God’s approval if we aren’t even able to love God wholly as we were made to do?

You see, the gospel is the good news because the bad news is without hope. And I can’t help but wonder: If we really considered how bad the bad news is, and how good the good news of Jesus is, would we still feel as hopeless as we tend to feel when change doesn’t happen fast, easily, or in the way we expect? Would we turn to self-help and self-improvement if we fell wholly on God’s promise to sanctify us through grace?

Written for Devotionals Daily by Ruth Chou Simons, author of When Strivings Cease, copyright Ruth Chou Simons.

Trying to be a better person just won’t work.  Placing our change in God’s hands as we strive in His strength to be righteous and holy is a grace recipe that will work. Where we can’t. He can! Jesus is our hope!

Pastor Dale

Notes of Faith December 31, 2021

Peter is my favorite disciple because of how obviously flawed and human he is. (Man, can I relate to Peter!) After he denied knowing Jesus three times, he was completely (and pretty understandably) devastated. Believing his time as a disciple was over, he returned to his previous way of life as a fisherman. (Isn’t that like all of us? When we feel lost, we return so quickly to our old ways. But even when we do, God continues to come after us!)

As Peter sat in his boat, along with the other disciples, he felt lost. Not only had he failed to come to the aid of Jesus when He needed him most, now Peter couldn’t even catch fish! He’d been fishing all night and had nothing to show for it.

Then from the shore, a man tells them to cast their net to the other side of the boat. They did cast their net on the other side of the boat and caught 153 fish.

John, who was with Peter on the boat, announced it was the Lord on the shore, and Peter leapt into the water to find his way back to Jesus.

Peter didn’t stay stuck in his own failures on that boat. He wasn’t going to waste another minute finding his way back into Jesus’ arms.

By the time Peter reached Jesus on the shore, I’m sure he expected Jesus to let him have it. Instead, he found Jesus ready to receive him back into His grace — and with a hot breakfast to top it off!

How often do we do this in our own lives? We are so quick to replace the grace-filled words of Jesus with the condemnation we feel we should get for our mistakes. We forget that because of Jesus there is no longer any condemnation left for us! Jesus received our punishment so we could instead receive His love. Romans 8:1 affirms this for us:

There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

Jesus is there to receive us back from our mistakes. He stands on the shore ready to love us!

Think about an occasion when you spent time beating yourself up over a mistake. Now imagine what Jesus would say to you. Write yourself a letter from Him in which He tells you how He feels about you. Remember, just like with Peter, Jesus isn’t there to condemn you but to love you.

Excerpted from The Year of Living Happy by Alli Worthington, copyright Alli Worthington.

When was the last time you left a failure behind and leapt after Jesus? You don’t have to be devastated anymore. Jesus is waiting for you with open arms and delicious grace!

Pastor Dale

Notes of Faith December 30, 2021

With us is the Lord our God, to help us and to fight our battles. — 2 Chronicles 32:8 NKJV 

Nadin Khoury was thirteen years old, five foot two, and weighed, soaking wet, probably a hundred pounds. His attackers were teenagers, larger than Nadin, and outnumbered him seven to one.  

For thirty minutes they hit, kicked, and beat him. He never stood a chance. 

Khoury’s mom had recently moved the family to Philadelphia from Minnesota. She had lost her job as a hotel maid and was looking for work. In 2000 she’d escaped war-torn Liberia. Nadin Khoury, then, was the new kid in a rough neighborhood with a mom who was an unemployed immigrant — everything a wolf pack of bullies needed to justify an attack.  

The hazing began weeks earlier. They picked on him. They called his mother names. They routinely pushed, shoved, and ambushed him. Then came the all-out assault on a January day.

They dragged him through the snow, stuffed him into a tree, and suspended him on a seven-foot wrought-iron fence.  

Khoury survived the attack and would have likely faced a few more except for the folly of one of the bullies. He filmed the pile-on and posted it on YouTube. A passerby saw the violence and chased away the bullies. Police saw it and got involved. The troublemakers landed in jail, and the story reached the papers.  

A staffer at the nationwide morning show The View read the account and invited Khoury to appear on the broadcast. He did.

As the video of the assault played on the screen behind him, he tried to appear brave, but his lower lip quivered. “Next time maybe it could be somebody smaller than me,” he said.  

Unbeknown to him the producer had invited some other Philadelphians to appear on the show as well. As the YouTube video ended, the curtain opened, and three huge men walked out, members of the Philadelphia Eagles football team.  

Khoury, a rabid fan, turned and smiled. One was All-Pro receiver DeSean Jackson. Jackson took a seat on the couch as close to the boy as possible and promised him, “Anytime you need us, I got two linemen right here.”

Khoury’s eyes widened saucer-like as Jackson signed a football jersey and handed it to him. Then, in full view of every bully in America, he gave the boy his cell phone number.1  

From that day forward Khoury has been only a call away from his personal bodyguards. Thugs think twice before they harass the kid who has an NFL football player’s number on speed dial.  

Pretty good offer. Who wouldn’t want that type of protection?  

God gives you the same promise. In fact, the writer of Hebrews quoted the words in his epistle:  

For [God] has said, ‘I will never leave you or forsake you.’ So we can say with confidence, ‘The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can anyone do to me?’ — Hebrews 13:5–6 NRSV 

That last question is a troubling one.  

What can anyone do to me? You know the answers. “Lie to me.” “Deceive me.” “Injure me.” “Terrorize me.” “Bully me.” 

But the Scripture asks a different question. If the Lord is your helper, what can anyone do to you?  

The Greek word for helper in this passage is boēthos, from boē, which means “a shout,” and theō, which means “to run.”2  

When you need help, God runs with a shout, “I’m coming!” He never leaves you. Ever! He never takes a break, takes a nap, or takes time off for vacation. He never leaves your side.  

The job market is flat? True. But God is your helper. Your blood cell count is down? Difficult for sure, but the One who made you is with you. Is the world in fear of pandemics? Indeed it is. Still, the Almighty will never leave you or forsake you.  

Consequently, everything changes! Since God is strong, you will be strong. Since He is able, you will be able. Since He has no limits, you have no limits. With the apostle you can boldly say,  

The Lord is my helper; I will not fear. What can man do to me? — Hebrews 13:6  NKJV 

But there is more.  

The biggest — and best — news is this: God not only stays with you... He fights for you.  

Not only does God desire that you have a chance to begin again, but He fights for you so you can and then remains your guardian throughout your journey.  

Fears, diseases, pain, disappointments, and hurts come at you like a legion of hoodlums. Yet rather than run away, you turn and face them. You unsheathe the promise of God’s Word and defy the enemies of God’s cause. You are a grizzly and they are rats. “Get out of here, shame! Begone, guilt! Fear of death, regrets of the past, take your puny attacks elsewhere.”  

This is what happens when you are living the new-beginning life. You were not made to quake in fear. You were not made to be beholden to your past. You were not made to limp through life as a wimp. You are a living, breathing expression of God. What’s more, He fights for you.  

Is this a new thought? You’ve heard about the God who made you, watches you, directs you, knows you... but the God who fights for you? Who blazes the trail ahead of you? Who defends you? Who collapses walls, stills the sun, and rains hail on the devil and all his forces?  

Did you know that God is fighting for you? That 

with us is the Lord our God, to help us and to fight our battles. — 2 Chron. 32:8 NKJV 

That  

our God will fight for us. — Nehemiah 4:20 NKJV 

That the Lord will  

fight against those who fight against [you]. — Psalm 35:1 NKJV 

God fights for you. Let those four words sink in for a moment.  

God. The CEO, President, King, Supreme Ruler, Absolute Monarch, Czar, Emperor, and Raja of all history. He runs interference and provides cover. He is impeccably perfect, tirelessly strong, unquestionably capable. He is endlessly joyful, wise, and willing. And He...  

FIGHTS.  

He deploys angels and commands weather. He stands down Goliaths and vacates cemeteries. He fights...  

For. For your health, family, faith, and restoration. Are the odds against you? Is the coach against you? Is the government against you? Difficult for sure. But God fights for...  

You. Yes, you! You with the sordid past. You with the receding hairline. You with the absentee dad. You with the bad back, credit, or job. He fights not just for the rich, pretty, or religious. He fights for the yous of the world. Are you a you?  

The big news of the Bible is not that you fight for God but that God fights for you. And to know this — to know that your Father fights for you — is an unparalleled source of empowerment.  

When God became flesh, He fought for your soul. When Jesus faced the devil in the wilderness, He fought for your peace.

When He stood up for the neglected, was He not standing up for you? When He died on the Cross for your sins, He fought for your salvation. When He left the Holy Spirit to guide, strengthen, and comfort you, He was fighting for your life.  

Miss this truth and you might as well plant a mailbox in the wilderness. You will be there a long time. But believe this, and watch the clouds begin to clear.  

Believe this:  

[God] won’t let you stumble, 
your Guardian God won’t fall asleep.  

Not on your life! Israel’s 
Guardian will never doze or sleep.  

God’s your Guardian, 
right at your side to protect you —  

Shielding you from sunstroke, sheltering you from moonstroke.  

God guards you from every evil, He guards your very life.  

He guards you when you leave and when you return, He guards you now, He guards you always.  

– Psalm 121:3–8 The Message 

This is what God wants to be for you; it is His goal for you. This is your inheritance: more victory than defeat, more joy than sadness, more hope than despair, more new-beginning days.  

1. Sean Alfano, “Teens Arrested after Posting YouTube Video of Beating 13-Year-Old Boy and Hanging Him from a Tree,” New York Daily News, February 1, 2011. See also Rick Reilly, “Eagles over Wolves in a Rout,” ESPN. com, last modified February 14, 2011.  

2. W. E. Vine, Vine’s Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words: A Comprehensive Dictionary of the Original Greek Words with Their Precise Meanings for English Readers (McLean, VA: MacDonald Publishing, n.d.), 554.  

Excerpted from Begin Again by Max Lucado, copyright Max Lucado.

Have you recovered from reading that yet? Hallelujah, amen and AMEN! Let’s just stop and worship Jesus for a moment because He is worthy of our praise! God Himself, in your struggles, in your trials, in mistreatment, in crisis, He is fighting for you.  He is with you, always.

Pastor Dale

Notes of Faith December 29, 2021

Why do people get sick? This is one of the most pressing questions when it comes to healing, and it must be answered by using the Scriptures. Opinions and abuses abound, so the only way to address this question is to cement ourselves in the truth of God’s unchanging Word.

I’ve seen it time and time again, and I’m sure you have too. A world-renowned faith healer hits the news after promising to heal people, but only if they pay up first. Some even go so far as to say that God is going to pour down judgment on people if they don’t give a certain amount of money. These “healers” appear to have all the answers for sickness. Years ago I sat through many services in which a faith healer explained to people why they were sick. Some people were told that they weren’t giving enough money, others apparently were not forgiving people, and others had been spending time with negative people. Not only that but some were said to be sick because they just didn’t have enough faith. This sort of guesswork breaks hearts, leads lives astray, and spiritually abuses desperate people.

Thankfully, the Bible breaks such deceptive bondage. If you’ve ever been confused about why people get sick or you know someone who needs answers, the following truths will be a soothing balm to a weary soul.

Truth 1: Sickness and Death Entered the World through Original Sin

On the sixth day of creation, the Bible tells us,

God saw all that He had made, and it was very good. — Genesis 1:31

Notice it doesn’t say “some of what He had made was very good.” It says all. There was no sin in the world, sickness did not exist, and Adam and Eve were set to enjoy a flawless life complete with a perfect relationship with God.

Instead they were deceived by the serpent and disobeyed the one command God had given them to follow. This is what is called “original sin,” because it was the first sin the world had ever known, and it resulted in a fractured relationship between God and His creation (Genesis 3:1-19).

Because of sin, fear and shame came upon humanity (Genesis 3:7, Genesis 3:10), marital relationships experience conflict (Genesis 3:16), women experience pain in childbirth (Genesis 3:16), and work became incredibly difficult (Genesis 3:17-18).

Worst of all, death entered the scene and humankind would return to dust (Genesis 3:19). Sickness and death are the result of sin and the fallen world we live in. Because of sin, we need a savior. And while true Christianity looks forward to that day when Jesus will return and restore all things, until then we must realize that sickness and death are part of this temporary life.

Thankfully, eternal life knows nothing of such things.

Truth 2: Sickness and Death Can Strike Us Because of Our Own Sin

Using the Bible again, let’s face the truth that sickness and death can strike us through our sin. In 1 Corinthians 11:27-30, Paul says that taking communion in an unworthy manner is the reason why some people are weak, sick, or “asleep” (a biblical expression for death). This is a statement made directly to the New Testament church. Taking communion unworthily includes not taking it seriously, not examining oneself as Paul instructs (1 Corinthians 11:28), having impure motives, having unconfessed deliberate sin, and being embittered and unforgiving toward others (the very opposite of what communion represents, since we’ve been forgiven).

Another reason why sickness and death can result from sin is based on the law of consequences, the idea that “a man reaps what he sows” (Galatians 6:7). If you do drugs, drink and drive, act foolishly and belligerently, take poor care of your body, engage in rampant and casual sex outside of marriage, might you not at some point experience sickness or death (often prematurely)? Sin often does lead to these things. Therefore when we examine our lives and the reason for some unfortunate experiences, we must be sure to know the difference between what is self-inflicted sickness or death and what is a genuine trial or tribulation that we did nothing to cause (James 1:2-4; Romans 5:3-5). Should you find yourself convicted by the Holy Spirit concerning sin that is causing your sickness, take hold of Jesus’ beautiful grace. Confess your sin and He will forgive you and cleanse you (1 John 1:9), and then you should go to the elders of your church and ask them to pray for you, as well as confess your sin and be honest with them about your situation (James 5:13-16). God’s Word says that in this context, “the prayer of a righteous person has great power” (James 5:16 ESV).

Truth 3: Sickness and Death Are Not Always the Result of Our Sin

It’s impossible to diagnose the reason for everyone’s sickness, but we could certainly say that most if not all of God-loving, sin-confessing, Jesus-believing Christians who are sick fall into this third category. If original sin isn’t the only culprit, then a certain situation in Jesus’ ministry can shed some light on why some are sick. The Gospel of John recounts the story.

As [Jesus] went along, He saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked Him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

“Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.

As long as it is day, we must do the works of Him who sent me.

Night is coming, when no one can work. While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”

After saying this, He spit on the ground, made some mud with the saliva, and put it on the man’s eyes. “Go,” He told him, “wash in the Pool of Siloam” (this word means “Sent”). So the man went and washed, and came home seeing. — John 9:1-7

This story is an incredible lesson to all of us that what we might think is the reason for sickness isn’t always the reason. Our finite human wisdom gets us only so far. Jesus makes it clear that God’s purposes and ways are far above our pay grade and that we do not control His plan and schedule. Sometimes God allows certain things or determines how long a circumstance will last so He can showcase His infinite power and wisdom and reveal more of Himself to us. We wouldn’t praise Him for His mercy if we weren’t aware of His wrath. We wouldn’t appreciate His love for sinners if we didn’t realize His hatred of sin. In the same way, we couldn’t begin to glorify Him for His healing hand if we didn’t experience (or see) sickness.

This leads to the fourth and final truth. Buckle up. You may not like it — at first.

Truth 4: God Can Use Sickness and Death for His Glory and the Good of Others

Just because God is not the cruel originator of sickness does not mean He can’t use it. He is God, and nothing is outside of His scope of authority. Sin may have brought sickness into this world, but

God gets the final word.

You might be thinking I’ve lost my mind to think that God could somehow bring something good out of sickness, but before you give up on me, let’s dig deeper. For starters, nowhere in Scripture do we find God to be a cosmic abuser who gets joy out of striking His children with sickness in the name of growth and glory. That is not what this truth means. However, the Bible does give us a hopeful perspective about sickness, suffering, trials, and even death that helps us sift through the broken pieces these often leave at our feet.

God is strong enough, wise enough, and powerful enough to bring purpose out of our pain, even if He doesn’t take us out of the pain right away.

You and I experience this more often than we realize. Whenever someone we know dies, it can lead either to bitterness toward God or to our appreciation of the gift of relationships and the life we’ve been given. Of course, the grieving process may be arduous, but He never leaves us there alone. Furthermore, our grief often matures us to a place where we are able to encourage and support others when they go through what we have gone through.

Romans 8:28 says,

We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him, who have been called according to His purpose.

This passage is often thrown around as a broad promise that everything is going to turn out the way we want it to. But God wants us to understand important truths from it before we jump to conclusions. First, “all things” means the good, the bad, and the ugly. I think sometimes we miss that fact and jump right to thinking, “God is going to make everything perfect.” God doesn’t promise that nothing bad will happen to us, but He does promise that all those things “work together for good” (ESV).

And remember, whose definition of good are we talking about here? His! Which means that however God chooses to define good is what is ultimately best, even if we don’t always understand it at the time. “All things” includes a cancer diagnosis, and “good” could mean that you are going to pray more than ever before and be closer to Jesus than you’ve ever been. “All things” includes losing a loved one, and “good” could be the opportunity you have to share the hope and saving love of Jesus Christ at the funeral. “All things” includes the loss of a child, and “good” could mean the beginning of a ministry to parents who are grieving the loss of children.

The ability to surrender our lives to Jesus is the mark of spiritual maturity.

The right perspective on who Jesus is will cause us to raise our hands in surrender, saying, “Jesus, this situation hurts and I don’t know all the answers, but I know that You can take pain and turn it into purpose. So have Your way. Thy will be done.

You are the potter; I am the clay. Turn this situation around so that it brings blessing to others and glory to Your name.

Whatever that looks like is fine with me."

These four biblical truths are helpful, but they are also extremely humbling. In the end, we won’t always have the answers, but we can certainly have the Answer. Jesus can and will cause anything and everything to work out for good. We must remember what that means.

Adapted from More Than a Healer by Costi Hinn, copyright Costi W. Hinn.

Painfully, sickness and death are part of this temporary life because of original sin. Sickness and death can happen because of sin, but not always. No matter what, we can always trust that God is in control and He can use every situation for good and for His glory. Amen!

Pastor Dale

Notes of Faith December 28, 2021

One minute, I was on a high of living my best life now! I had it all — my good ol’ boy husband, Justin, who would take a bullet for me, healthy children, a dream home nestled in the heart of East Texas complete with white picket fence and a kitchen overflowing with friends on any given night. I had a good reputation in my thirty-thousand-member hometown (no small feat) and the respect of my church as a leader, and as a woman (again, no small feat in the Southern Baptist, white evangelical, Bible Belt of the world).

Then in the very next minute, my entire life came crashing to the ground.

After months of dismissing her gut instinct, my best friend Rachel, decided to dig deeper into her husband, Ty’s, phone records. When she did, she unknowingly unleashed the beginning of our end — the day my secret, 3-year affair with Ty finally hit the light of day.

I think all of our life-altering ends find their beginning in the same four words Satan posed as a question to Eve in the garden: “Did God really say?”

“Kasey, did God really say he doesn’t need your help running the universe?”

“Did God really say you are enough right where you are?”

“Kasey, did God really say Justin is the right guy for you — forever? What if Justin really knew you — who you’ve been, what you’ve done? Would he stay then, love you then?”

“Did God really say you must not eat from just any tree in the garden?”

No wonder Paul compared the Christians of Corinth to Eve’s worst day when he confessed how scared he was for them. Paul was afraid that just like Eve, they would be deceived by the serpent’s cunning and their minds led astray from their sincere and pure devotion to Christ (2 Corinthians 11:3).

Even now, his warning echoes through the corridor of our twenty-first-century church that, just like our first mother, Eve, smack dab in the middle of everything she could possibly want or need, God’s chosen can still be lured into believing it isn’t enough. That even the most authentic and committed Christ-followers can find themselves beguiled by Satan’s charms, blind to the truth and belly-up in painful repercussion.

May we not forget that Satan’s ultimate fight is with God.

And because Satan knows he is not powerful enough to land an attack on his true nemesis, he will use all of his time and resources to wage war on the next best thing — God’s real, authentic children.

Like Eve, my intention was never to distrust God. Like her, I loved God, knew Him and spent daily time with Him. It was unlikely I would turn my back on Him over something as simple as attraction to the wrong man. Like Eve, I had to think about my decision, spend time turning the fruit over and over in my hands — smell it, position it on the mantel so I could stand back and stare at it a few weeks before biting into it.

Also, like Eve, I did something much more devastating than just take a bite of fruit; I used my love for God to justify disobeying Him. Over time, I convinced myself that God needed my help.

Help running my marriage, my friendships, my life.

The longer I pondered Satan’s question, the more reasonable it became. Maybe I did understand parts of Ty that Rachel didn’t.

Perhaps Ty did need my emotional support if their marriage was to be successful. Maybe Justin really wouldn’t care that I sneaked out of bed each night to “counsel” Ty over the phone, it being ministry, accountability, community, and all. If the fruit helped our marriages be wise and more like God, why wouldn’t I eat it?

In those moments after hearing Ty’s voice for the last time, alone in my house in the silence of napping children and surrounded by five loads of unfolded clothes, the next sound I heard caught me off guard in every way.

Laughter.

My own.

And not just tiny, breathless sighs or a chuckle but hysterical, from the belly, loud enough to wake my kids and throw my feet scissor-kicking in the air kind of laughter.

It sounds horrible, I know. Here I am holding a ticking time bomb that will destroy everyone around me and I’m laughing.

Had anyone else been in the room, I would have felt embarrassed or guilty. But as years of shackles fell to the ground and the weight of secrecy lifted from my shoulders, my heart erupted in such pure freedom that it could not help but spill over with laughter.

Rachel knew the truth. Ty said it was over. Maybe I could finally be free.

The courage to confess my adultery was suddenly forced upon me. I was no longer in control, no longer blind or deceived. My mind was more awake and clear than it had been in years.

I had no idea what life would be like one hour, one week, or one year from this moment. My mind raced in a million directions.

Would Justin leave, take our kids, what was Rachel thinking, would she take their kids? All I knew was that life would never be the same. Out of sincere gratitude for that fact, I laughed.

Maybe life could finally make sense now that I wasn’t running it. Now that plates were no longer spinning above my head, I could finally take a good, hard look through all of the broken pieces on the floor.

The lie I pampered and put makeup on and played with in secret could be seen for what it was — fear. Fear I would never be enough, fear no one could love the most honest version of me, fear that I, a devoted church girl, was capable of scandalous, horrible things just like the next girl. Fear that I was exactly who I thought I was — needy.

Most people think that fear is a lack of faith. But it takes great faith to fear. Faith is hoping in something we cannot see. Fear functions in a similar way. When we are scared, it is easy to have faith in the “what if” scenarios we make up in our heads but are not necessarily true. At its core, fear is not lack of faith.

Fear is questioning God’s love for us.

How clever, Satan. We call your bluff. Use God to turn us against him. Distract us just long enough to switch the awe-inspiring fear of God into the pride-inducing fear of man. Use the cloak of godliness to disguise the subtle shift from “God is enough” to “I’m not enough.”

Which leads me back to what God really said…

God really did command Adam and Eve not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and warn them that to do so would bring death. But what Eve seemed to forget in her conversation with the serpent was what else God really said. “You are free. Free to eat anything and everything else. Free to create, work, have sex. Free to rest in the life-sustaining peace that because I am God, you don’t have to be.” (See Genesis 2:15-17.)

God really did say that He alone is the measure of all that is true, good, and right in this world. He placed a tree in the middle of our lives to remind us of our mortality and His sovereignty over those attributes. He knew how devastated we would be when our version of truth, goodness, and justice proved to be ever-changing, misunderstood, and packed with impossibly high standards.

So, we remember our freedom tree, the tree of God’s sovereignty, His full command over all created beings. Like Adam and Eve, we’ve been given this one life, our one story, to know and understand God’s grand, eternal purpose — the best story.

So, it’s not enough to say that God uses our lives if He does not also design them.

What God permits, He permits for a reason. And that reason is His design.

Because He didn’t stop it — for me, for you, and for millions of people throughout history — He has a purpose for it. And if we don’t believe our lives are designed and purposed by God, we will waste them.

This is our story — the beginning of our end, when God takes His rightful place as the greatest love of our lives. This is the moment we finally take Him up on his offer to be exactly who He says He is.

Adapted  by Kasey Van Norman from her book Nothing Wasted.

How has the enemy whispered to you “Did God really say?”? Let’s not waste our lives listening to Him and not doubting that He knows what is best!

Pastor Dale

Notes of Faith December 27, 2021

Article by David Mathis
Executive Editor, desiringGod.org

Closed for Christmas. No birth in history has changed the world like that quiet, unsuspecting night in Bethlehem. Two thousand years later, no day marks as many calendars, determines as many schedules, pauses as many businesses, and draws together as many friends and families.

No prophet’s or great teacher’s origin, no king’s or president’s birth, no other single event in the history of the world transcends tribes and nations, continents and hemispheres, epochs and ages, liberal college campuses and secular places of employment, as the birth of one Jesus of Nazareth. Even the annual calendar at Hogwarts is set in time with Christmas Day.

And this peculiar influence is no accident of history. When we pause to ponder the surprise that this “present evil age,” at least for now, nearly shuts down for Christmas, we see the wink and smile of God. Rightly has no birth story, the world over, been rehearsed even nearly as often as the day that God himself, in the person of his Son, was born among us as one of us, fully God and fully human, to save his people from their sin.

God and Man in One

Of course, to mark the birth of “God himself” is far more controversial than just “Jesus of Nazareth.” Historically, the birth of the latter is hard to deny with a level head. Yet, the heart of the Christian faith pulses with “Jesus of Nazareth” as “God himself.”

“On Christmas Day, we celebrate the birth of ‘the God-man’ — man like every other, and God like no other.”

On Christmas Day, we celebrate the birth of “the God-man” — man like every other, and God like no other. A long history of devout and deliberate thought and tense dialogue has taught us to call him, among countless other names, “the God-man.”

Names from Scripture

Most of our many names and titles for Jesus come from the Scriptures themselves: He is “the Word,” the eternal, uncreated Logos who was in the beginning with God, and through whom God made the world. He is the long-promised, singular “seed of the woman,” who crushes the serpent’s head. He is the prophesied Son of David, anointed heir to Israel’s throne, the shoot and branch that grow again from the severed tree, and stump, of exile. As David’s son, he is “son of God” as Israel’s king, and “Son of God” as the eternal Son of the divine Father.

Veiled in flesh, he moved among us as the enigmatic “Son of Man,” manifestly human, but also harkening to Daniel’s shadowy figure approaching the throne of heaven to receive worldwide dominion from the Ancient of Days. He comes as Alpha and Omega, yet Suffering Servant and Lamb of God, giving himself to rescue sinners. And most shockingly, breathtakingly, awe-inspiringly, as the apostles make plain, he is God himself, not only divine in some general sense but specifically, and even more daringly, as Lord (kurios), somehow Yahweh himself among us, as one of us.

But nowhere in Scripture do we hear, in as many words, that he is “God-man.” When we call him that, and mark Christmas Day as the birth of such, we are not repeating strictly biblical terms. Rather, we are drawing on the fruit of theology. We are benefiting from the sweat and blood of centuries of faithful voices who responded to those who erred in trying to bottle up the mystery.

Enter God-Man

For the apostles, and first Christians, it was very clear that Jesus was fully human. None doubted it in that first generation. His mother knew it; she birthed him. His brothers and sisters knew it; they lived with him, ate with him, touched him, heard his voice. So too his disciples who walked with him for three years, and saw his undeniable humanness in public and private. Large crowds witnessed his teaching and miracles, saw him ride into Jerusalem on a humble steed, stand trial, endure slander, carry his own cross, and die on it horrifically under a sky that went black. And Paul writes that “more than five hundred brothers at one time” (1 Corinthians 15:6) saw Jesus alive again after his crucifixion.

But what wasn’t yet plain — and what his disciples progressively came to realize, all too slowly, during his life and ministry, and then climactically with his resurrection from the dead — was that this Jesus was no mere human. Human he was, without dispute. But somehow Yahweh himself had come in this man, not figuratively but literally — not just “in spirit” but actually in the flesh, truly man, with a reasoning soul and body.

The disciples, and those being added to their number, came to worship Jesus, as first-century Jews otherwise could not fathom. Jews inarguably did not worship Moses. They did not worship David. They did not worship Elijah. But remarkably, Jewish though they were, the risen Christ they worshiped (Matthew 28:9, 17; Luke 24:52).

So, the first question of Jesus’s disciples and their contemporaries was not, Is he human? but, Is he God? That question came to be answered by the resurrection.

Can God Be Man?

Consider, then, how this changed in subsequent generations, at least among those who confessed “Jesus is Lord,” as the starting place of their faith and worship. For later Christians — who worshiped him, but did not hear him, see him, touch him for themselves — his Godness was the given; his humanity might be less certain. Some were prone to ask, Can the one who is God be truly man?

To far oversimplify, but give some sense of the challenges from all sides, Greek influence led to Gnostic claims that Christ couldn’t really be man, but only seemed to be (Docetism), while the heights of Hebrew monotheism led to Ebionite claims that he couldn’t really be God. And as test after test arose in those first centuries, the central truths about who Jesus is were not developed as much as defended.

The church and her councils did not provide further revelation about Jesus — the apostles did not waver on his humanity or deity. Rather, the Fathers and creeds sought to protect the faith once for all delivered to the saints. No ecumenical council made Jesus the God-man in a way that he wasn’t already in the apostolic writings and at the Father’s right hand.

Can Man Be God?

When third-century Arians asked, Is he truly God and not just God’s first and greatest creature? the council at Nicea (325) answered, He is truly God: “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of the same essence as the Father.” Then subsequently, when Apollinaris of Laodicea, renowned defender of Christ’s deity, raised new questions about the extent of his humanity, the council at Constantinople (381) answered, Jesus is fully man, including a human mind in addition to the divine.

Later, when the influence of Nestorius, archbishop of Constantinople, led some to question, Is he really one person, or two? the council at Ephesus (431) answered, He is one person indeed. And when Eutyches of Constantinople and others, in response, so emphasized Christ’s oneness to question, Does he have two natures? the council of Chalcedon (451) answered, He is fully God, and fully man — one person with two complete and uncompromised natures: “inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably.”

Jesus was not first declared to be the Son of God at Nicea in 325. He went fully public as divine Son by his resurrection from the dead (Romans 1:4). The church received him as such, then and there, and so became the church. The entirety of the New Testament documents received him as such, not only by the prose of direct assertion but through a web of poetic hints, divine overtures, frank acknowledgment, and glimpses of peculiar glory that stretch across and attach to every page from Matthew to the book of Revelation.

Made for Christmas

On Christmas Day, we celebrate a great heritage in remembering the birth of the Lord God Almighty. Jesus is Lord: preexistent, uncreated, God himself and fully God. Jesus is Savior: fully human, all the way from humble birth to sacrificial death, assuming our human body, emotions, mind, and will to save us. And he is Treasure: fully God and fully man in one spectacular, risen, reigning person. He is the Pearl of Great Price (Matthew 13:46), the Surpassing Worth (Philippians 3:8), who not only satisfies all that God requires of man, and satisfies the requirements of divine justice in view of our sin, but uniquely satisfies the human soul with his unique human-divinity.

“We were not only made for God; we were made for the God-man.”

Which may help explain why his birth still stubbornly haunts the calendars of the professing secular today. Perhaps it’s more than just historical and practical. Perhaps the goodness that Christmas whispers not only closes businesses on December 25 but lingers in the subconscious, leaving even calloused hearts longing for such a rescue.

The God-man has come, for us and for our salvation.

Though the day of Christmas is behind us, the Christ of Christmas, the God-man is always with us, and should be worshipped, praised, honored and glorified every day!  May we continue into the new year with the blessing of the birth of our Savior, serving Him, serving others, until the day He calls us to Himself!

Pastor Dale

Notes of Faith December 26, 2021

Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. — Hebrews 11:1

Debunking Christianity takes more than just trying to poke a hole in it by raising an objection. That’s because there’s a backdrop of other relevant evidence that creates a strong presumption in favor of faith in Jesus Christ. Simply examining individual challenges isn’t enough; this broad sweep of evidence must be kept in mind as each individual objection is weighed.

What kind of evidence? My interviews with experts elicited these persuasive facts that point powerfully toward the existence of God and his unique Son, Jesus Christ:

• The big bang. William Lane Craig, coauthor of Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology, showed that the universe and time itself had a beginning at some point in the finite past. Scientists refer to this as the big bang. Craig argued that whatever begins to exist has a cause; the universe began to exist; and therefore the universe has a cause — that is, a creator who is uncaused, changeless, timeless, and immaterial. Even renowned atheist Kai Nielsen once said, “Suppose you suddenly hear a loud bang… and you ask me, ‘What made that bang?’ and I reply, ‘Nothing, it just happened.’ You would not accept that.” To which Craig said that if there is obviously a cause for a little bang, doesn’t it also make sense that there would be a cause for a big bang?

• The fine-tuned universe. In the past 35 years, scientists have been stunned to discover how life in the universe is astoundingly balanced on a razor’s edge. The big bang was actually a highly ordered event that required an enormous amount of information, and from the moment of inception, the universe was finely tuned to an incomprehensible precision for the existence of life like ourselves. An infinitesimal difference in the rate of the universe’s initial expansion, the strength of gravity or the weak force, or dozens of other constants and quantities would have created a life-prohibiting rather than a life-sustaining universe. All of this contributes to the conclusion that there’s an Intelligent Designer behind creation.

• The moral law. Without God, morality is simply the product of sociobiological evolution and basically a question of taste or personal preference. For instance, rape may become taboo in the course of human development because it’s not socially advantageous, but it’s also conceivable that rape could have evolved as something that’s beneficial for survival of the species. In other words, without God there is no absolute right or wrong that imposes itself on our conscience. But we know deep down that objective moral values do exist — some actions like rape and child torture, for example, are universal moral abominations — and therefore this means God exists.

• The origin of life. Darwinism can offer no credible theory for how life could have emerged naturally from nonliving chemicals. Earth’s early atmosphere would have blocked the development of the building blocks of life, and assembling even the most primitive living matter would be so outrageously difficult that it absolutely could not have been the product of unguided or random processes. On the contrary, the vast amount of specific information contained inside every living cell — encoded in the four-letter chemical alphabet of DNA — strongly confirms the existence of an Intelligent Designer who was behind the miraculous creation of life.

• The Bible’s credibility. Scholar Norman Geisler convincingly argued that there’s more evidence that the Bible is a reliable source than there is for any other book from the ancient world. Its essential trustworthiness has been corroborated repeatedly by archaeological discoveries, “and if we can trust the Bible when it’s telling us about straightforward earthly things that can be verified, then we can trust it in areas where we can’t directly verify it in an empirical way,” Geisler said. Further, the Bible’s divine origin has been established in two ways. First, in defiance of all mathematical odds, dozens of ancient prophecies about the Messiah — including the precise time frame in which he would appear—were miraculously fulfilled in only one person throughout history: Jesus of Nazareth. Second, biblical prophets performed miracles to confirm their divine authority. Jesus’ own miracles were even acknowledged by his enemies. By contrast, in the Qur’an when unbelievers challenged Muhammad to perform a miracle, he refused and merely told them to read a chapter in the Qur’an, even though he conceded, “God hath certainly power to send down a sign.”

• The resurrection of Jesus. Craig built a compelling case that Jesus Christ returned from the dead in the ultimate authentication of his claim to divinity. He presented four facts that are widely accepted by New Testament historians from a broad spectrum. First, after being crucified, Jesus was buried by Joseph of Arimathea in a tomb. This means its location was known to Jew, Christian, and Roman alike. Second, on the Sunday after the crucifixion, the tomb was found empty by a group of his women followers. Indeed, nobody claimed the tomb was anything but vacant. Third, on multiple occasions and under various circumstances, different individuals and groups experienced appearances of Jesus alive from the dead. This is not likely to be legendary because of the extremely early date of these accounts. Fourth, the original disciples suddenly and sincerely came to believe that Jesus was risen from the dead despite their predisposition to the contrary. They were willing to go to their death proclaiming that Jesus was resurrected and thus proved he was the Son of God — and nobody knowingly is willing to die for a lie.

In addition, the 13 scholars and experts I interviewed for my book, The Case for Christ, established that the biographies of Jesus in the New Testament stand up to intellectual scrutiny, that they were reliably passed down to us through history, that there’s corroborating evidence for Jesus outside the Bible, that Jesus wasn’t psychologically imbalanced when he claimed he was God, and that he fulfilled all the attributes of deity.

Accounting for the Evidence

As Peter Kreeft conceded in our interview, the suffering in this world does constitute some evidence against the existence of God — but in the end it’s buried by an avalanche of other evidence that He does exist, that He does love us, and that He can even redeem our suffering and draw good from it. This mountain of evidence can give us confidence that even though we may not fully understand why there’s suffering or why hell exists, we can trust that God is just, that He is acting appropriately, and that someday we’ll have a deeper explanation.

When I was an atheist, I realized I would need to do more than merely raise random objections in order to cripple Christianity; I would have to come up with a nontheistic scenario that would better accommodate all of the facts that I’ve just listed. But atheism cannot credibly account for the big bang, the fine-tuning of the universe, the emergence of life, the existence of moral laws, the supernatural confirmation of the Bible, and the resurrection. The only hypothesis that explains them all is that there’s a divine creator whose unique Son is Jesus of Nazareth.

I had examined each obstacle on its own merits, interviewing experts who were able to provide satisfying explanations and analysis. Then I evaluated each of the objections in the context of the convincing evidence that Christianity is true and that therefore God is ultimately trustworthy and loves us deeply.

My conclusion is that Christianity emerged unscathed. After spending a year investigating “The Big Eight” objections detailed in my book The Case for Faith, I remained utterly convinced that the most rational and logical step people can take is to invest their faith in Jesus of Nazareth.

A Will to Believe

If I wanted to, I could continue to try to explain away the words of the experts I had interviewed, no matter how outlandish or nit-picky my arguments would eventually become. And believe me, my mind is quite capable of manufacturing all kinds of elaborate rebuttals, excuses, and counterarguments — even in the face of obvious truth.

Ultimately, though, faith isn’t about having perfect and complete answers to every single objection to Christianity. After all, we don’t demand that level of conclusive proof in any other area of life. The point is that we certainly do have sufficient evidence about God on which to act. And in the end, that’s the issue.

Faith is about a choice, a step of the will, a decision to want to know God personally.

It’s saying, “I believe. Please help me with my unbelief!” As Dallas Willard said, “It’s the person who wants to know God that God reveals Himself to.” Or as Lynn Anderson had told me, “When you scratch below the surface, there’s either a will to believe or there’s a will not to believe. That’s the core of it.”

I was thankful that I didn’t have to throw out my intellect to become a Christian. The positive evidence for Jesus being the unique Son of God and the convincing answers to “The Big Eight” objections cleared the way for me to take that step. But I did have to overcome my pride. I did have to drive a stake through the egoism and arrogance that threatened to hold me back. I did have to conquer the self-interest and self-adulation that were keeping my heart shut tight from God.

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To apply Dallas Willard’s words to myself, the biggest issue was, “What did I want?” Did I want to know God personally—to experience release from guilt, to live the way I was designed to live, to pursue his purposes for my life, to tap into his power for daily living, to commune with him in this life and for eternity in the next? If so, there was plenty of evidence on which to base a rational decision to say yes to him.

It was up to me — just as it’s up to you.

Adapted from The Case for Faith by Lee Strobel.

What do you make of Strobel’s conclusions? And how does it help you to know that the will to believe is really always what’s at the heart of the matter?

Give Him yours and your life will change for all eternity!

Pastor Dale