37 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 4-2-18”

  4. I’ve done my part. But haven’t heard if my taxes are done. Oh, I suppose they must not be done as they haven’t sent me anything to sign. Once she was so busy that she asked me to file for an extension. mine are really pretty simple.

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  5. I posted yesterday afternoon that it had been a good day. It didn’t stay that way. My Aunt V called to tell me about my Uncle “Chuckles”. My dad was the second oldest of 12, Chuckles is his big brother. He purposely failed a year of high school so he and my dad could graduate together (probably so neither would leave the other without protection from my grandfather but that is a different story and most of the players are dead).
    My uncle started feeling badly about 3 weeks ago. To the point he told my aunt he needed to go the the ER. Cancer is everywhere. It started as prostate, but is in his hips, his ribcage….just everywhere. His hips had hurt a little before Christmas, but he has had rheumatoid arthritis for almost as long as I can remember.
    I called my aunt S (his wife) to tell her I had just found out and I would like to come see him Monday night. She told me to come on then, she hadn’t thought he would make it through Saturday night. I went with wet hair and stayed for a while. They have his bed in the den and people can talk to him and if he is awake he can try to talk to them. I told him I loved him. In some ways this is harder than watching my own father die. I was in denial with Daddy, I am not with my uncle. I have spent the past 9 years “fussing” over him at family events. I fix his coffee, I get him anything extra he wants. Things I never did for my dad. I talked to my “step” cousin last night. My uncle is the only father she has really ever known, since hers died when she was very small. She is devastated. She told me she has never seen him weak and unable to live life to the fullest.
    I doubt he makes it to the end of the week. His birthday is May 5th. He will be 81, so it isn’t as if he is leaving a young family behind, which brings me to…

    LEE. I awoke to a text saying that yesterday the crisis management team called the family in to take care of personal items and anything else. They were giving her 24 to 48 hours. She will leave behind a 14 year old son. Through this she has stayed strong, stayed faithful, and even used her musical and foreign language skills to be a blessing to others at the Cancer Center.

    I am sorry to be such a Debbie Downer this morning, but somewhere in all of this there has to be a ray of Son, sun, hope, love….something. I guess at this point, I would ask you to pray for peace and for a quick and peaceful end for both of them.

    Oh, and if Little Miss Maddy doesn’t make her appearance on her own, she will definitely be encouraged to make an appearance Wednesday.

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  6. Kim, thank you for telling us your burdens. Praying.

    The Real, I just went from a Baptist church where my family lives to a non-denominational church in the city and, yes, the Baptists and non-denominationals are pretty similar in outlook. I would attend a Baptist church again, but the non-denominational church is the best fit for me here.

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  7. Kizzie, on your question about Jesus’ clothes, it is helpful to remember that Jesus had a resurrected body. One that was physical and could be touched and eat, and yet one that could vanish suddenly, enter locked rooms, and be taken up into heaven. His garments may have been his own righteousness (Job 29:14, Psalm 132:9, Isaiah 61:10), such as those who keep his faith are promised in Revelation (3:4): “He that overcomes, the same will be clothed in white raiment.” Such a garment would make sense in the scene where Jesus tells Thomas to put his hand into the wound in his side.

    Cheryl, like Kizzie, I too have heard sermons on Jesus the man, many of them. Pastor A once preached systematically through the entire Gospel of John, verse by verse. He also preached in that systematic way through the book of Hebrews, which is where I first heard the explanation of Christ being our Sabbath rest. Matthew 5:17 and Colossians 2:16-17 are good cross references for what I was saying about our freedom in regarding the days of the week because of Christ’s fulfillment of the fourth commandment.

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  8. Roscuro, so if the Lord’s day is not a holy day, does it matter if a church decides to worship a different day of the week instead, or whether or not a Christian attends at all?

    (I looked up those references, and fulfilling the law doesn’t mean the law ceases to exist, or murder and adultery would now be OK too, and the second also doesn’t seem to be addressed to the Lord’s day, just to the idea of multiplying holidays. In other words, the second is relevant if someone is shocked I don’t celebrate Lent, but it has nothing to do with the Lord’s day, I don’t think.)

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  9. Re.: Phos’ 8:32
    Pos doesn’t imply this, but it is a mistake to believe that Jesus “went through a locked door” or “went to the men on the Emmaus road.
    The resurrected Christ APPEARED in those places.
    Difficult to understand. But Jesus knew that those tow men were making that trip. He didn’t GO there, he APPEARED there. The difference,, in my opinion, is significant.

    i.e. Where is Jesus?
    Answer: Where he wants to be..
    Where is Jesus?
    He is here. “Lo, I am with you….” Matt. 28:20

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  10. Morning! I am hearing some folks awakened to snow this morning…sadly we are not the folk to receive that gift this morning. However, we had the most glorious sunrise for which we are thankful!
    We have a precious friend, Bill, who is on the brink of death after having suffered several strokes, the latest one being last evening. We are saddened and leave him in the care of the Father. We know not whether he placed his life in the care of our Lord and Saviour…but “thou knowest” (he’s has told Paul he goes to church…he is so very private about his own life and Paul has spent countless hours transporting him from event to event with very little revealed in conversation) Bill is 84, single and lives in Leadville…he has been the biggest fan of all those who run ultra marathons…he has attended and cheered on all of those runners, kept all of their stats, supported , called and encouraged them all…he will be so missed.

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  11. Kim, I’m so sorry, how awful.

    This morning I was continuing my reading in “Side by Side, Walking with Others in Wisdom and Love” and read this portion (referring to Ps. 130:1-2 and its personal plea for deliverance; ‘Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord! O Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my pleas for mercy’):

    “In the psalms, the request is often for deliverance from enemies who threaten to destroy the entire nation. In Psalm 130, the entreaty is more personal. The psalmist is teetering between life and death, and God invites us to speak the same words when we are in overwhelming and threatening situations. Either way — ‘help’ for yourself or for you community — this this is one of the ways that God teaches us to call out to him.

    “What form will this deliverance take? This is a question in which we, indeed, need help, because is doesn’t always look the way we expect.

    “A child dies two days after birth. Her parents cried out for help, and hundreds of friends cried out too. Might there still have been deliverance? Consider that the parents had been delivered from death and the Evil One and that the child belonged to God and would be with him. Those deliverances might not lessen the parents’ and friends’ grief, but they do mean that the community can grieve with hope.

    “There are mysteries in deliverance, but since God has identified himself as our savior and rescuer, we are confident that we will see deliverance, even if it looks different from what we first expected.”

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  12. I just got up from 11 hours of sleep. I had not slept much on Saturday so we got to see the Lord being made perfect in my weakness all day yesterday!

    Today I feel like a real person and may actually get some of the piles of stuff done!

    17 for dinner but everyone brought something and pitched in, like my wonderful family always does, and it was a splendid afternoon.

    My now retired professional soccer player nephew was here for the first time in a dozen years. His family will join him in Sacramento in two weeks moving into a home and making my in-laws delirious with joy their two grandchildren will be within two hours of us!

    It was my great-niece’s fourth birthday and my nephew held the phone high (easy for him; he’s 6’6″) and we all sang happy birthday. The little girl squirmed and laughed, throwing back her head: “There’s so many people!”

    “And we’re all your relatives, K!”

    It will be good to mix those two little girls in with our mob of females. You should have seen the gorgeous dresses!

    And the baby is still with us as we pray for a miracle . . .

    We only missed Stargazer–who attended a baptism and fixed our same meal in Seattle. There is, finally, some hope on the job front up there . . .

    He is Risen, indeed.

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  14. I was reading the book of Joshua this morning.
    I notice that it is said of the Canaanites and Ephramites, that “they dwell among (the Israelite’s) unto this day.”
    We have to infer from that, that they were assimilated and that not all Jews were descendants of Abraham.
    It also incited the falling away that occurred so often in Judges.

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  15. Cheryl, regarding Sunday as no holier than any other day of the week does not mean one therefore thinks that the Church should not meet on Sunday or the Christians should not regularly meet together. Hebrews 10:25 establishes the need for Christians to meet with one another regularly; and the first day of the week is regularly mentioned as the meeting time for the Church in Acts, and in the instructions to the Corinthians on tithing. That the Church always meets on that day because it was the day of the week when our Lord rose, does not then render the day holy. God declared the seventh day holy, not the first. The seventh day, the Sabbath, was fulfilled in Christ, as has been pointed out in Hebrews 4:3, 9-10; while in Colossians 2:16-17 Paul commands the believers to not allow anyone to judge them with respect to the Sabbath, among other observances, because the things in the Mosaic law are a shadow of things to come (cross reference Hebrews 8:5, which makes it apparent that the shadow has already been fulfilled in Christ), but the body of believers is in Christ. When God declared the seventh day holy, he did so because on it, he rested from his work of Creation. He had finished. Christ finished the work of salvation on the cross. We have nothing left to do. Keeping the ordinances of the Mosaic Sabbath, which Paul said we no longer need to keep, on Sunday instead of Saturday is still trying to be righteous by our own works. I do try to rest on Sunday, because I think the human body was created to need regular weekly rests, but it is not a moral obligation, but rather a practical survival technique like eating healthy foods or exercising or getting enough sleep at night.

    The foundation against murder and adultery may be found in Genesis 1:17 and 2:24 (see Genesis 9:6 and Matthew 19:4-6). As Paul said in Romans 2:14-15, those who were never given the law of Moses still have a law written in their hearts. When the elders at Jerusalem wrote their first instructions to the Gentile believers (Acts 15:23-29), they did not give the Gentile believers any ordinances written in the law of Moses (in fact, they were seeking to stop those who told the Gentiles to obey the law of Moses) and said nothing about how one should observe Sunday; but their instruction that the Gentiles keep themselves from fornication, blood (Genesis 9:3) and things strangled and meat offered to idols. That even the four instructions in that letter were not equally important is apparent by what Paul later wrote about the freedom of conscience in eating meat offered to idols (Romans 14) – Paul did not offer the same freedom in regard to fornication because, as he says I Corinthians 6:12-20, there is a difference in importance between food (Matthew 15:10) and sexual relations to the body as the temple of the Holy Spirit. As Paul says in Colossians 2:6-3:17, we do righteousness not by observing rules and ordinances, but by living in Christ.

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  16. I will be in and out for the next 6 weeks. We’re leaving in a couple weeks for a vacation to Eastern Europe (which sounds like an oxymoron). I have a ton of things to do–including reading and copying a 650-page doctoral dissertation for research. (It’s coming from Fuller Theological Seminary to my local library in the next couple days–where I have to read it–for the next potential book. I have little time to pull this one off. I plan to scan, scan, scan and hope for the best).

    I no sooner return from Krakow, Prague (Tychicus not available), Lutherland and Berlin (where we’ll rendezvous with Hillary!), then I head out to Jo’s church 3.5 hours from home to speak! The very real possibility of jet lag means I have to plan a two day visit, which I hope doesn’t happen but I have no way of assessing.

    I need to get that talk’s powerpoint squared away, sort out a few other business-related events in conjunction (anyone use foursquare to process credit cards on your mobile device?), and have everything ready before I leave for Europe, including my clothes, sigh.

    Oh, and teach Bible study, work, hang with Adorables and exercise. I get to write all my Utmost Responses ahead of time and one more blog post. Somewhere in this pile of papers covering the desk, floor and chair, are notes of other things to do.

    Oh, yes, write the timeline for a 100 year-old birthday party in May, including any photos friends and relatives send. That needs to be completed and sent to the family before I leave so they can add items to it.

    So, I’ll pop in and out but have no idea what else I’ll be doing/thinking/saying/thinking.

    Ciao!

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  17. Michelle, sometimes in big family get togethers, Elvera will express the sentiment Ki had.
    “too many people to deal with”. I remind her that it’s all her fault.

    “None of this would be happening, but for you.”

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  19. Chas, some of the Canaanites were the Gibeonites, or Nethinim, who were hewers of wood and drawers of water for the temple (Joshua 9:23, 27, Ezra 8:20). When Saul tried to wipe the Gibeonites out because they were Canaanites, God judged Israel with three years of famine (II Samuel 21:1-11). They were treated as apart of the nation of Israel by the time of the return from Babylon (Ezra 1:42, Nehemiah 3:26). The law of Moses said to wipe out the Canaanites and never to allow a Moabite to enter the congregation of Israel (Deuteronomy 7:2, 23:3), yet the line of David’s ancestors, who were Christ’s ancestors, includes Rahab, a Canaanite woman, and Ruth, a Moabite woman. Moses said, at the end of his life, that Israel would not follow God’s commands because they did not have the right heart (Deuteronomy 9:24,10:16, 31:29). They didn’t need anyone else to influence them to sin. Similarly, James (1:14) says every man is tempted when he is drawn away of his own lust. Humans carry the impetus to sin in their own persons, they do not require outside forces to tempt them.

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  20. Roscuro, Reformed folk have a different view of the Law than that. The moral law (including the Ten Commandments, but with the Lord’s Day replacing and changing the Sabbath) is still applicable today. We are not made holy by keeping it–we never were–but we keep it in honor and thanksgiving to God, and by His aid.

    We do not confuse Law and Gospel, but we see them both as important. We are sanctified by the blood of Christ and through the work of the Holy Spirit, not by our keeping the Law, but we are sanctified to obey God, and we know by the Law what God requires. For instance, if God had not defined marriage, it would be easy to accede to the modern understanding that marriage is only about “love,” and that anyone who wants to marry (or who wants to have sex outside of marriage) is free to do so, and that individuals decide for themselves what marriage looks like (e.g., whether or not the husband is head of the home, whether or not to have children, whether or not to have an “open” marriage, and whether or not divorce is an option). That many of those are issues of Law and not Gospel does not make them unimportant or passe. In fact, the very basic purpose of marriage is that it points to Christ’s love for the church (a grace relationship), though marriage can only illustrate this if it stays within its proper boundaries (law). Both are important, not interchangeable, but interwoven.

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  21. Nightingale and I will be leaving in a bit to go to Town Hall with the papers from the probate court, to do whatever we have to do to put the house totally in my name. So, not knowing how soon she will be ready, I am jumping in here with this. . .

    First, I just want to say that my question last night about Jesus’ clothes was more of a humorous thing than an actual question. 🙂

    Second, yesterday a friend shared the verses about the dead in Christ rising first and then those still alive rising to meet Christ. I commented:

    “If I’m still alive when this time comes, I hope I am in the living room with [Hubby’s] urn. What a sight that would be to see that thing bursting open as his body is resurrected and taken up!”

    Thirdly, today marks six months since Hubby’s death. And it was on a Monday, like today is. I’ve been feeling like I’ve reached a point where the pain isn’t as acute, but I don’t know if this is a turning point or merely a lull in the storm. Still missing him terribly, still crying some every day, but the degree of pain is less.

    NancyJill – We have a few inches of snow today. Wish I could send it to you.

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  22. Yes, I am aware of Reformed doctrine, and that is one of the reasons why I am a Baptist by conviction. We once gave Pastor A some of Bill Gothard’s material to read. After he did, he taught a Bible lesson on how the Reformed teachings on sanctification by Law and Gospel, which he perceived as the inspiration behind Gothard’s teaching (Gothard talked about the Sabbath as Sunday, and further referenced the law in his secrets to spiritual success), was contradicted by the teaching of the New Testament. I did not fully understand the connection at the time, but over the years I have come to see it too. It was memorizing the book of Galatians that I became firmly convinced that Gothard’s teaching was wrong. The combination of Law and Gospel is what Paul warned against in Galatians – the Galatians said they were saved by Christ but thought they needed to also obey the law to be sanctified. They were not outright denying Christ, they just thought they could combine the law and the gospel. Not to say Baptists are free from such impulses, as I have encountered many Baptist teachings over the years that slide into legalism. The impetus to think we have to do something to please God has a magnetic draw to the pride of the flesh. It goes against the grain to rest in the finished work of Christ alone. I have by no means arrived yet, but the older I get, the more I see that I only can do good by the Holy Spirit by the work of Christ. “As the branch cannot bear fruit unless it abides in the vine, no more can you, unless you abide in me.” It is not Law and Gospel. It is Christ alone.

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  23. Interesting conversation about the Sabbath. I will have to catch up on all the comments from yesterday—but probably tomorrow. I started a new job last week and I’m on second shift in production. It’s a good place to work, but one of the most interesting features is that it is a wholly family owned business with several thousand employees. It was started in 1934 by the grandparents of the current CEO and VP.

    The really interesting part is that they are Seventh Day Adventists and all of the factories MUST be shut down completely before sundown on Fridays and cannot reopen until sundown on Saturday. So we run production 24 hrs. 6 days a week. They are very serious about it and everyone is provided a yearly calendar with the hour and minute of sundown for every Friday. So I guess my Sabbath day of rest for my body will now have to be Saturday since I have no other. But for my spirit, every day all day, it’s the Lord God who sustains. :–)

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  24. We’re in the middle of a sermon series on the 10 commandments, currently on the 4th.

    So grateful I never had any clue as to who Bill Gothard even was. Sounds like he caused all kinds of confusion and reactions that were unsound.

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  25. Roscuro, you said absolutely nothing in your 12:09 with which I would disagree, leaving me to assume that I stated myself poorly or that you misunderstood what I said (and what the Reformed faith teaches). To start, Gothard is not Reformed. We also do not believe that one is sanctified by keeping the Law–absolutely not.

    However, if you have a conversation with a person who tells you she is a Christian but she doesn’t like church and doesn’t go, that she and her husband have an “open” marriage, that she recently was pregnant inconveniently and she had an abortion (but did so in defiance of her husband, because he’s rather a silly man and not worth listening to) and she is rejoicing in all the money they have made in cheating people, would you not think that this woman is probably not a believer and she has no clue what the word even means? We aren’t saved by keeping the Law and neither are we sanctified by doing so. But a person who thumbs his nose at it shows no “fruit” of the Holy Spirit and no evidence of a saving faith. Are we not in agreement on that?

    Sanctification by Law and Gospel is an aspect of theonomy, and my husband and I have fought against it vociferously. It is not Reformed teaching.

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  26. Debra, even a Seventh-Day Adventist company should be able to honor the fact that many of their employees are Christians and it is Sunday that they take off. With second-shift work it may not be so straightforward which day you need to take off, but being a SDA company doesn’t mean they can require you to work on the Lord’s Day. (That has always been a basic of employment to me, and one on which I am inflexible–I’m not available to work. Our daughter who does care for seniors has no choice but to work on Sundays, or Saturday nights, and I respect that. But to work at a factory on Sunday is not “necessary” work, and if it were me I would simply be unavailable no matter how much they pushed.)

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  27. Cheryl, a Seventh Day Adventist run company is not responsible for catering to the wants of all others. They offer jobs, people can take them or leave them. Sometimes one person’s situation is not clear to those around them. Debra is doing what she believes is for her to do. That is between her and God. And she understands that every second is to be lived for Him.

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  29. Mumsee, I am not saying they should “cater” to all other people’s “wants.” My first two jobs were for companies that were open seven days a week, and that had no concept of “sabbath” at all, but I specificed on my applications that I wasn’t available on Sunday. Since they had plenty of people who worked only weekends, that worked out OK. One job (McDonald’s) frequently applied pressure “Just this time” and I always said no.

    It sounds like SDA employees who work for a non-SDA company are likely to be quite insistent about not working on Saturday. So certainly they would understand something like “I can work on Saturday night or Sunday night, but not both in the same week” or “not after this time on Saturday and not before this time on Sunday.” In my case, I worked fast food and retail, daylight hours, and so it was clear that the line was simply “no Sunday work.” Then I worked for a publisher that only worked Monday through Friday, and it wasn’t an issue. Doing freelance, I make it a point of stopping work by midnight Saturday night (to allow me enough sleep to be rested for Sunday). It is perfectly reasonable for a Christian employee to ask for such accommodations; they aren’t luxuries. In a job such as nursing, where people need care 24 hours, there is really no choice but to work–the work is serving a true need and patients need care seven days, just as babies do, and just as cows need to be milked seven days a week. But in fields where that isn’t the case, it’s reasonable to ask for (even to insist on, depending on how strongly one feels) accommodations.

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  32. We started the day with snow, getting about four inches by the time it ended mid-morning. By late afternoon, the snow was mostly off the grass, and The Boy was outside riding his bike, with a long-sleeved shirt but no jacket. 🙂

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  34. Cheryl, I agree that a hypothetical case such as you describe would indicate that the person had no fruit of a saving faith in Christ. I have said, in other discussions, that the law serves to convict those outside of Christ of sin, which is what Paul says repeatedly. But if I have been confused, it is because you seemed to be insisting that we ought to regard Sunday as the Sabbath, as if we were still under the law.

    Incidentally, I decided to search for what the early church fathers had to say about the Sabbath and Sunday, and found a convenient summary of early church quotes on the subject, on a Presbyterian-leaning website: http://apostles-creed.org/confessional-reformed-christian-theology/ecclesiology/quotes-from-early-church-fathers-on-the-sabbath-and-the-lords-day/. As the author of the summary post notes, the early church did not believe that the Sabbath was changed to Sunday:
    <blockquoteIt follows, accordingly, that, in so far as the abolition of carnal circumcision and of the old law is demonstrated as having been consummated at its specific times, so also the observance of the Sabbath is demonstrated to have been temporary. [Tertullian, An Answer to the Jews, Chapter 4]

    So he says elsewhere, “Let no man judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holy day, or of the new moon or of the sabbath-days, which are a shadow of things to come.” Here also, when he says, “Let no one judge you” in these things, he shows that we are no longer bound to observe them. And when he says, “which are a shadow of things to come,” he explains how these observances were binding at the time when the things fully disclosed to us were symbolized by these shadows of future things.[Augustine of Hippo, Reply to Faustus the Manichaean, Book 6]

    So, when you ask why a Christian does not keep the Sabbath, if Christ came not to destroy the law, but to fulfill it, my reply is, that a Christian does not keep the Sabbath precisely because what was prefigured in the Sabbath is fulfilled in Christ. For we have our Sabbath in Him who said, “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart, and ye shall find rest unto your souls.” [Augustine of Hippo, Reply to Faustus the Manichaean, Book 19]

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  35. Roscuro,

    To be honest, I am not totally clear on the Lord’s Day / Sabbath question, but when you say “if I have been confused, it is because you seemed to be insisting that we ought to regard Sunday as the Sabbath, as if we were still under the law,” first of all, if the Lord’s day is the Christian Sabbath, that is no more putting us “under the law” than saying that the law against murder, adultery, and so forth still apply.

    The sabbath is not just part of the Mosaic law, but a creation ordinance. Jesus’ resurrection changed the significant day to Sunday and removed the “burden” of the day, but the detaisl of how it did or did not change it, I am not totally sure. Jesus said man was not made for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath for man, and He strongly suggested that the Sabbath was more a gift than a burden. And that is how I am inclined to look at it: it is a gift to have a day to worship God, fellowship with a church family, rest, enjoy God’s creation, and refrain from housework and money-making work.

    Also, the law definitely does not only apply only to unbelievers any more than the gospel is only for unbelievers. The law has multiple purposes, and part of it is to show us (believers) what God requires. We are not sanctified by the Law, but it is nevertheless sin to disobey the Law (what portions of it are still applicable, the moral law).

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  37. Cheryl, in the quotes from the early church that I have just shared, they say exactly what I have been saying all along, that the Sabbath was not changed to Sunday, and rather, the Sabbath was fulfilled in the work of Jesus Christ. Read Augustine’s quotes that I put up and then read what I wrote at 10:55AM. We are saying the same thing about the same passages of Scripture. So, all the commands in the law of Moses to rest and do no work on the Sabbath day do not apply to Sunday, because Sunday is not the Sabbath. The Sabbath rest for the Christian is not a day of the week. As Augustine says, the Sabbath rest is Christ. To say we have to observe ordinances of the Sabbath on Sunday, when Sunday is not the Sabbath, is to put ourselves under the law again.

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