Soul Sister Time

May Christ Reign Over My New Year               What will this New Year bring?   Are you one of those who could not have imagined how your heart would experience the sadness of living in a fallen world in the year just past?   If so, that was one of those years in which you were given the opportunity to learn great lessons that you never want to experience again.   Even though you may have experienced pain, Christ has reigned over your year.   He reigns from heaven.   Others may be devastated by your pain, but if you were able to rise above your personal torment—getting up to face the world in spite of all that has happened, it is because Christ.   It was not accomplished without the ears of caring friends and family and most importantly; the comfort of the God of all comfort. If you are still trusting God in spite of all 2018 brought you, then you have applied His truth as balm to your wounds.               Personally, I don’t want a year of feeling so sad, but I can say that th

              Did you do it?   Did you get to the last week of Advent with Christmas right around the corner and deepen your love and appreciation for Christ while growing more eager by the day for His return?   I really have.   It’s so much easier for me now that my kids are grown and I don’t have much shopping.   I’m married to a man who loves to live contrarian to the Christmas trappings, and have decided to bless my friends by not baking for them (Now that my kids are grown it is more than obvious that I am the one who decorates the Christmas cookies like a kindergartner.)   Yet, even when my Christmas was more jammed packed, I found that focusing on Advent soothed my soul and led me to a joy that lasts far beyond December 25.               When I ask if Christ reigned over your advent, I’m not asking if you didn’t decorate your home in a way that it could be the set of a Hallmark Christmas movie.   I’m not suggested that the demands of parties, programs and performances didn

              The Christian life is not about religion.   Religion is about following a specific set of behaviors.   It is more about what we do.   It is about why we do what we do.   When Christ is ruling over our wills, our mind-emotion-actions fall into order.               When Christ is ruling over our wills, we act from the center of His presence in our souls.   It seems to me that all the work of the Old Testament was given to reveal that although our minds and emotions wanted God’s rescue from our sins, we needed something greater than ourselves to set us free.   The New Testament exposed the mystery that was known to God from the beginning, that we humans had been depleted of the will-power to follow God without His help.   Ezekiel 36:26 explained it this way: “ I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh .”   That heart of flesh is Jesus.   When we believe that His life, death and re

              On the second week of Advent our virtue is love.   It is the greatest of everything: affection, virtue, connection to God.   Imagine what it was like to live in the world that God created from His heart of love with the purpose of nurturing every need and delight a human could experience.   Adam and Eve, alone, experienced what this world was like when love was incorporated in every tiny cell of creation.   Because of sin, God’s love has been obstructed.   Our emotions have become corrupted along with everything else about us.   In Advent we celebrate the love of God poured over the earth by the incredible lengths God went to in order to restore us to His love.   He took on human flesh in the form of an embryo in the womb of Mary, His chosen mother.                 Imagine Mary’s corrupted human emotions when she was visited by an angel from heaven.   Who knows what she had been taught about the Messiah?   She probably lived in Nazareth based on the Prophets words t

              Christmas Eve 2018 marks the 100 th anniversary of the first Nine Lessons and Carols service held at King’s College in Cambridge, England.   Many churches include this meaningful service as part of their Advent lineup.   It is a service celebrating the birth of Jesus by following the story of the fall of man and the promise of the Messiah in the scriptures.   The nine lessons are Bible readings from Genesis, Isaiah and Gospels are presented in between hymns and Christmas carols.   These lessons remind us how our minds became corrupted and why we need the mind of God.               I love this service because it teaches how Jesus’ birth will restore my mind.   The basic lessons are: 1.        God announces in the Garden of Eden that the seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent’s head. Genesis 3:8—15. 2.          God promises to faithful Abraham that in his seed shall the nations of the earth be blessed. Genesis 22:15–18. 3.        Christ’s birth and kingdom

              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

              We are born into this world with a longing to be loved.   We can’t help it.   We can’t stop it.   It is a part of being human.   It will never go away.   So many live their whole life without experiencing the love they were created to know.   Many who make a connection with God never strain hard enough to discover that His love is the love they have been searching for all their lives.   All those promising relationships, first with parents, then teachers, caregivers, girlfriends and boyfriends, husbands and wives.   None of these relationships reach their full potential until you know that you are loved by God.   When you stop and let it sink in; it is overwhelming to realize the love God describes He holds for us.   As I cleaned out my round brush blow dryer this week.   The picture is kind of gross.   Besides the fact that I lose a lot of hair in my round brush, it made me sit down and to take in how God describes about his love for me.    I wondered how long it m

              I was in a meeting this week that highlighted a simple reality that creates crisis in our relationships.   That reality is that we continue to be so focused on our own belief system that we miss out on the truth that would bring unity.   Whether it is in politics, families, marriages, or with God.               Sometimes it takes a crisis in our lives to open our heart, mind and spirit to understand the belief of another.   Sometimes we have to be desperate to lay down the beliefs that separate us.   Belief is vital to our spiritual life, our relationships and, of course, to our salvation.   It all comes down to what we believe and how willing we are to seek a common point of belief in order to discover the possibility for unity.               This was reinforced when I had a very interesting discussion with my uber driver in the fifteen minutes it took to arrive at my destination.   He asked where I worked, and since I am a Baptist minister my answer often opens

              Have you ever been betrayed?   Betrayal is one of the most soul crushing relationship experiences.   Betrayal requires a deeper intensity of forgiveness. This is because betrayal leaves a silent, unrelenting and devastating effects on your soul.   It is more severe when the betrayal is inflicted by a close friend, spouse, or intimate family, member more so than an organization.   Betrayal sinks your soul into a black hole forcing your heart to concede the harsh reality that you can no longer trust a person or organization that you once relied on for a sense of security.   The experience of betrayal may lead you to discover your blind-spot about how much you placed your identity in this person or place.   Betrayal forces you to recognize your world is far more dangerous than you previously assumed.   That is why it rocks you to your core in a way that other disappointments do not.   It overwhelms you like an emotional tsunami knocking you off your feet, weakened and ov

                Luke 9:49-50 says, “ For everyone will be salted with fire.   Salt is good, but if the salt has lost its saltiness, how will you make it salty again?   Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another .”   So, what is this salt that Jesus is talking about?   And what about that fire?   We all want peace with one another; but if it takes having salt in me, what does that mean?               Salt is often used in scripture to refer to purification and to illustrate the Christian’s spiritual impact on a decaying world.   Salt brings out the taste of the things of God and preserves the world against the propensity of sin to decompose and destruct God’s intended creation.   Christians are called to be the salt of the earth, delaying the day when there is no hope of faith from any soul.   If you think things are bad in the world you live in, consider if there were no Christians (the salt) living among us.   Perhaps it is because the Christians you know have lo

              Ahabah is the Hebrew word for love that is translated in to agape in the Greek.   Ahabah is the most Godlike love known on earth.   This kind of love centers on the lover rather than the lovee.   It is an unconditional, unbreakable, sacrificial kind of love.   You cannot ahabah popcorn.   It’s not about how you feel.   When you know for certain that you have ahabah is when the subject of your love has betrayed, abandoned, cut out your heart and you remain committed to their well-being.               Ahabah is not being a doormat.   It is not putting a band-aide on the lovee’s cruel treatment.   It is born out of a struggle with hate, revenge, punishment and unforgiveness.   The journey to ahabah will take you to places within yourself that decent people never want to recognize.   You cannot truly have ahabah until you have recognized that you are capable of being equally as cruel and disgusting to God as the person you despise, yet He sees you as worthy of His ahab

              Romans 11:33-36 explains a lot about answered prayers.   Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God!      How unsearchable his judgments,      and his paths beyond tracing out! “Who has known the mind of the Lord?      Or who has been his counselor?” “Who has ever given to God,      that God should repay them?”   For from him and through him and for him are all things.      To him be the glory forever! Amen.                             Some of us want better answers than we are getting to our heartfelt prayers!   We wonder—Is God listening at all?   It appears that I am getting the exact opposite of which I prayed.                 God’s answers often don’t make sense to our finite minds and Romans explains why.   This is good.   I mean it.   When you get disappointing news despite all your reading scripture, obeying God’s ways, asking in prayer and asking others to pray, it is good.   Why?   Because God is good.   There are

              Your doing reveals what is hidden in your soul.   3 John 1: 11 says: “ Dear friend, do not imitate what is evil but what is good. Anyone who does what is good is from God. Anyone who does what is evil has not seen God .”   The soul that connects deeply with God is capable of doing good in a way others are not.               What have you done lately?   Perhaps this is a good time to stop and think about the things you do?   What is on your “To Do” list?   Or what is on your What I Did today list?   (Sometimes my “To Do” list is my intentions and doesn’t show what I have actually done.)   Your doing can open your soul to where you are presently and where you want to be.   What you do can be a window to the soul!               You can stop right now and make a list of what you did yesterday.   Brainstorm everything—were you obsessing about a certain thought?   Did you spend time fuming in the car about traffic?   Those are actually things we do along with get grocer