Category Archives: Light

The Parable of Salt

Who, What, Where, When, Why and How?  I’m guessing anyone of “an age” learned those are questions to ask if you want to learn more.  I want to find the “moral” behind the simplicity of Jesus’s Words.

Who? You!
What? Salt
Where? Earth
When? Saltiness is lost
Why? To make it salty again.
How? Have salt in yourself

The Words Jesus spoke are clear and simple but there is that warning about salt losing its saltiness that’s curious.  Salt was more than a seasoning for food.  It was rubbed on newborns to cleanse them after birth. It was a means of cleansing and preserving all things.  Salt was required as part of every offering made to God.  It was included in the recipe of the Temple incense that was thrown onto the burnt offerings.  To share the “covenant of salt” in the Bible created a lasting obligation of a shared relationship.  All good, right?  

BUT there’s that warning about salt losing its saltiness.  The same salt that preserves and cleanses can lose its effectiveness when contaminated and actually become destructive.  Salt was sometimes sowed in the earth of a defeated city to contaminate it and insure it would always remain a barren place.  It seems like the moral of Jesus story is this: The external application of salt can lose its ability to preserve if contamination occurs.  You wouldn’t expect contaminated salt to preserve your food or make it taste better, or use it to cleanse a newborn or become a gift for God.  Jesus has an answer for the question about that tasteless salt — “how will you make it salty again?”  This time it’s His internal application of the “covenant of salt” that becomes the lasting obligation of His shared relationship with “you” to season and preserve your life: “Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.”

Propitiation

Propitiation: appeasement of God’s just wrath
God is love √
Love is from God √
Jesus is from God √
God has created the human heart with a natural
“pacemaker” that sets the rhythm of a person’s heartbeats.
When we begin to recognize it was God’s Love that sent Jesus
as His provision to turn away His just wrath against our sin,
and to make amends for our guilt or wrongdoing, our hearts begin
to experience the rhythm of love from God’s own heart abiding in us.
Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another
knowing with every beat His love is being perfected in us.

Confession

Confession is so much more than saying words. It’s our promise to God that we will not pretend to ourself or to Him that we’ve cleared sin from our life.  Our confession is His evidence of our trust that his faithful desire is to be true to Himself.  He will hear our promises and forgive and cleanse us from the unrighteousness of our human attempts to be committed to Him…if we walk in His Light and continue to confess our desire is to claim our shared life with him.

Compete Glory

Around the Truth of God spoken in the Old Testament
— Exodus 32:9 
And the Lord said to Moses, “I have seen this people, and behold, it is a stiff-necked people. 10 Now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them, in order that I may make a great nation of you.” 11 But Moses implored the Lord his God 

Premise: The weight and heaviness of God’s Sovereignty and Glory were captured within the Words he wrote on those stone tablets of His testimony so they would last.  How would you describe Glory?  I’d go for words like majestic and powerful.  Paul has given us a vivid word picture of God’s complete glory that includes four unusual aspects to think about.  These  10 Words were God’s own Testimony of the purpose of His Glory — to reveal what He required for the people to live in relation to Him and to make sin so obvious, the reality of it could not be denied. That Testimony was to be administered not just through the power of the Words themselves but because they were infused with evidence that the completeness of  God’s Glory was designed to overcome the corruption of sin, death and condemnation with the ministry of the Spirit and righteousness for His people.

Risen


Acts 13:32 And we bring you the good news that what God promised to the fathers, 33 this he has fulfilled to us their children by raising Jesus, as also it is written in the second Psalm, “‘You are my Son, today I have begotten you.’ 34 And as for the fact that he raised him from the dead, no more to return to corruption, he has spoken in this way, “‘I will give you the holy and sure blessings of David.’ 

“Wherever we bury Jesus, he comes back to life. We can bury him in the Bible or in stained glass windows. We can bury him in creeds and formulas and the heritage of our own tradition. We can bury him in movies and plays and music. We can bury him in our past. We can even bury him in bread and wine. And each time from each place he rises from the dead. He sheds the words and images and walks right on out into the world.a

a Br. Curtis Almquist, Society of St. John the Evangelist, a monastic community of The Episcopal Church.

Shiloh

To the Truth of God fulfilled in the Old Testament
Genesis 17:6 I will make you exceedingly fruitful, and I will make you into nations, and kings shall come from you.
Genesis 49:10 [KJV] “The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come; and unto him shall the gathering of the people be.”
Judges 1:1 “Who shall go up first for us against the Canaanites, to fight against them?” 2 The Lord said, “Judah shall go up; behold, I have given the land into his hand.”

God is establishing His family tree based on the new Blood Covenant given to Abraham in Genesis 17 not on the law of blood lines and first-borns. God chooses Isaac over Ishmael, his first son. Then history repeats itself and from Isaac’s sons God chooses Jacob,  his second born twin.  The line is shifted even further when Jacob gives his fourth son a prophetic blessing of authority in Genesis 49. FYI: Shiloh is a name of Hebrew origin, meaning “tranquil,” “abundance,” and “His gift — and it’s “unto him shall the gathering of the people be.”

Luke 1:33
When the angel Gabriel appeared to Mary to announce she had been chosen by God to give birth to the Messiah, these were the words used to describe what he (the Gift) would accomplish:
“And he will reign over the house of Jacob forever”

 

Riches

It was kind of you to share my trouble. I’m thankful for your gift because it confirms our partnership in the beginning of the gospel.  I received your sacrifice as full payment and more because it came with the sweet aroma of the fruit of God to your credit and my benefit.  God was pleased, along with me, to accept your gift.  You are His riches in glory in Christ Jesus, and according to that He will supply every need of yours.  To our God and Father be glory forever and ever!

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ
be with your spirit.
❤️

Don’t Miss the Details

This is a perfect example of the premise of letting one Testament read you the other.  Jesus talks in John 16:25 about using “figures of speech.”  The “horn of salvation” is like that.  I have read it, I know it’s Jesus, I have no reason to disagree. It’s a “figure of speech” I can easily skip over except this exercise has caused me to see a tiny little letter that directs my attention to Psalm 18 and I find details of worship for that moment I would have otherwise missed.

I love you, Jesus, my strength. You are my rock and my fortress and my deliverer the rock, in whom I take refuge, my shield AND “the reality of my salvation,” my stronghold.  Amen.

Rejoice!

Can I do all things through Christ?  Is it my strength or His? What have I learned?

I learneda a Greek word [αὐτάρκεια] which in English letters looks like “autarkes.”  According to Strong’s Concordance it comes from autos (“self”) and arkein (“sufficient”). It’s the word Paul used that is translated in Verse 11 as “content.”  The link I put at the end of the post is a good explanation of why Paul would choose a word that mentions “self” in relation to Christ, or being strengthened and being content.  The secret lies in three other words I want to share with you today that do relate to self — “I have learned…”   The Grace of God and daring to trust His Providence over every circumstance of life is the secret of being “autarkes.” 

The “secret” is the mysterious and wonderful reality that within myself God has placed HimSELF to help me learn “in whatever situation I am to be content”…because I am SELF-sufficient.  May it be so!

 a John Piper 

Three in One

to Old Testament Verses
Genesis 1:26-28 Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”  So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.  And God blessed them. And God said to them,“Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth
Psalm 110:1 The Lord says to my Lord:..

I love that God has a history of talking to Himself!  And I love that these Old Testament verses use plural pronouns to confirm the reality that God exists in the mysterious wonder of three identities for the purpose of identifying Himself to the them that includes me.  As believers in Christ we know those three identities are a)the creator God, b)the Son Jesus and c) the Holy Spirit, the witness — but why Three?   I wonder if there’s more to that conversation God was having with Himself?  I wonder if knowing about His self-talk and that we’re created in His image means I need to pay more attention to my self-talk as a follower of Jesus because self-talk may be God’s way of speaking to me.  It does say “God said to them.”

Self-talk is an inner voice that combines our thoughts, beliefs and feelings to influence our response to life.  Sometimes it’s way below the radar of consciousness but that’s why that mysterious three are so important. The one who at creation knew He would speak life into you just as He did for Adam, at just the right time. The one who walked on earth to be the guide for your steps through the twists and turns of daily life, and the one who came after, to be the internal helper that could keep track of those steps long before anyone else even thought of step tracking.  They are the same Three in One having an important conversation with each other about your life and their intended purpose for it that spans creation to eternity.  Listen carefully, and practice their Words as part of your own self-talk.