Soul Sister Time

              Advent begins this Sunday.   Advent includes the four Sundays before Christmas.   It is a season of preparation for the coming of Christ.   Advent also marks the beginning of the New Church Year.   The color of Advent is purple which signifies that this is a season of fasting and repentance.   Our culture has diverted its original intentions to a focus on food, parties, decorations galore, and red and green.   I learned from my friends in England that even the church liturgy reminds them when to start their Christmas pudding.   On the last Sunday before Advent, the prayer begins “Stir up, we beseech thee, Oh Lord the wills of thy faithful people.”   This prayer reminds parishioners to start their pudding that Sunday.   In the 14 th century this pudding was a soup that was used for the days of fasting before Christmas.   By the 19 th century it became a fermented sweet Christmas delight that required five weeks before ready.                 I love the cultural part

              Richard Baxter offers good questions:   “God is in earnest with you.   Why are you not so with him?   Why trifle with God?”               He goes on to tally the reality of Jesus’ earnest life on earth and in death.   He describes how distracted Jesus was in ministry that He forgot to eat and how He prayed all night.   He was willing to suffer in fasting, temptation, betrayal, mocking, and ultimately crucifixion.   Jesus modeled the Christian life for us as one of such deep trust in God that He was willing to ignore all the good things of the world.   He had no home on earth; His true home was heaven, and He lived contrary to the religious people, the pagan, all of them.   He showed us a whole new way to live in the world.   He taught us where abundant life is found.   He exposed the emptiness of the beliefs we have developed since childhood of where life and love are found.               The best kind of living, according to Jesus, is to follow Him in denying you

              Believe it or not; God is who He says He is and God does what He says He will do.                 Belief is key to our eternal destiny.   In his letter to the church Jude states that he wanted to write about the wonderful, amazing, too-good-to-be-true salvation that we share but that he needed to write about the false teachers who were leading people away from the power of believing in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.   He reminds us all about Cain the Israelites who saw the power of God to bring them out of Egypt but got out into the dessert and doubted God.   He also talks about the fallen angels who left their position of authority and home in heaven because they did not believe God.   He claims that the judgment on Sodom and Gomorrah is a picture of the eternal fire that God tells us was prepared for the fallen angels but will be shared by human beings who do not believe. Jude 1:5-7 states:   Though you already know all this, I want to remind you that the Lor