https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/acknowledge-hidden-trauma-church/
Month: June 2019
Quarrelsome
No longer innocent (church)
The eyes of a child have the innate capacity to look past brokenness, perhaps because children haven’t yet been exposed to the cynical harshness of sin, their purity calling back the lost world of innocence. Or perhaps they simply don’t know what to see. My eyes certainly missed the problems of that church — which I later found out were legion. As a child, church was a place only of positive associations. Now that I’m an adult, I long for that lost ability to see with purer eyes — to love the church the way I did as a child.
I’m older now. No matter how I might wish it, my childlike eyes aren’t coming back. And neither are yours. I see the people more clearly now. My inside view as a pastor to all their complexities, problems, failures, struggles, and tragedies has sobered me. The church is not old books, polished pews, and autoharps. It’s people, in all their weakness and frailties.
https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/for-the-bride-set-before-him
Trust God with salvation
Success
Prayer
Love
Lord help me to be a person that helps others to love you or love you more. We love because He first loved us.
Delight in the Lord
DAILY DEVOTIONAL JUNE 14, 2019
Delight yourself in the Lord.
The teaching of these words must seem very surprising to those who are strangers to vital godliness, but to the sincere believer it is only the reminder of a recognized truth. The life of the believer is described as a delight in God, and we are reminded of the great fact that genuine faith overflows with happiness and joy.
Ungodly persons and mere professors never look upon religion as a joyful thing; to them it is service, duty, or necessity, but never pleasure or delight. If they attend to religion at all, it is either because of what they might get or because they are afraid of the consequences of neglect. The thought of delight in religious exercise is so strange to most men that no two words in their language stand further apart than holiness and delight.
But believers who know Christ understand that delight and faith are so wonderfully united that the gates of hell cannot manage to separate them. Those who love God with all their hearts find that His ways are ways of pleasantness, and all His paths are peace. The saints discover in Christ such joy, such overflowing delight, such blessedness that far from serving Him from custom, they would follow Him even though the whole world rejected Him. We do not fear God because of any compulsion; our faith is no shackle, our profession is no bondage, we are not dragged to holiness, nor driven to duty. No, our piety is our pleasure, our hope is our happiness, our duty is our delight.
Delight and true faith are as interwoven as root and flower, as indivisible as truth and certainty; they are, in fact, two precious stones glittering side by side in a setting of gold.
‘Tis when we taste Thy love,
Our joys divinely grow,
Unspeakable like those above,
And heaven begins below.
True Friends
Look at Positives
The Lord has done great things for us; we are glad.
Some Christians are sadly prone to look on the dark side of everything, and to dwell more upon what they have gone through than upon what God has done for them. Ask for their impression of the Christian life, and they will describe their continual conflicts, their deep afflictions, their sad adversities, and the sinfulness of their hearts, but with scarcely any reference to the mercy and help that God has provided them.
But a Christian whose soul is in a healthy state will come forward joyously and say, “I will not speak about myself, but to the honor of my God. He has brought me up out of a horrible pit and out of the miry clay and set my feet upon a rock and established my goings; and He has put a new song in my mouth, even praise to our God. The Lord has done great things for me–I am glad.”
This summary of experience is the very best that any child of God can present. It is true that we endure trials, but it is just as true that we are delivered out of them. It is true that we have our corruptions, and sadly we acknowledge this, but it is just as true that we have an all-sufficient Savior who overcomes these corruptions and delivers us from their dominion. In looking back, it would be wrong to deny that we have been in the Slough of Despond and have crept along the Valley of Humiliation, but it would be equally wicked to forget that we have been through them safely and profitably; we have not remained in them, thanks to our Almighty Helper and Leader, who has “brought us out to a place of abundance.”1
The deeper our troubles, the louder our thanks to God, who has led us through them all and preserved us until today. Our griefs cannot spoil the melody of our praise; we consider them to be the “bass line” of our life’s song, “The LORD has done great things for us; we are glad.”
One-Year Bible Reading Plan
Legacy of Love 