A Word about the Word
When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem. [Luke 9:51]
Resolve. The choice to do, especially when it’s the hard and necessary next thing. Jesus determined that Jerusalem was the next and most important thing to do. He was going to the cross.
What hard and important next thing must you face and not put off? Have you determined to trust and follow Christ as the Lord of your life?
Close to Home
When we serve, we are never more like Christ, who stated, “I came not to be served but to serve…” At Trinity, together and individually, we are committed to “bless the city.” We have already hit 14% of our goal of 1,000 service hours by year’s end! To log your (or your group’s) hours, go here.
One of the things that we’ve lost during this year of COVID is proximity. Like wise old Solomon wrote: “As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.” It’s hard to sharpen iron if you’re socially distant from it. Well, on Monday night a group of men did just that. We had a splendid evening talking about money. We got wise advice on buying a used car. We learned valuable things on how to inform our spouses and loved ones about where our valuable things are…and informing them now, rather than waiting until it’s too late. And we discussed biblical principles of money-management. We call it Manly Mondays and we all came away richer and sharper because of our fellowship!
The World as It Is
More bloodshed and murder in America’s streets and marketplaces. Such senseless violence and overwhelming sadness and grief. Ten people tragically killed in a Colorado grocery store. Eight gunned down in Atlanta massage parlors.
We quickly learned that the murderer in Atlanta was a member of a Baptist church and claims that a sexual addiction is what drove him to his heinous actions. Some are now blaming the “purity culture” of the Evangelical Church on his sex addiction (and his murdering rampage). In other words, a young man becomes addicted to sex not because we live in a sex-obsessed, pornography-laden culture but because his church taught him that sex was designed by our Maker and ultimately reserved for marriage. Give me a break!
That said, and so as not to be simply defensive, let me share an interesting article that examines the “purity culture” and Christian sexual morality teachings in a balanced light. The premise of the article is: “The problem with purity culture is not Christianity. The problem is that its extremes are not Christian at all.”
#CultureNerd
The new movie Resurrection may be worth watching with your family this Easter season. (Don’t hold me to it, as I haven’t seen the movie.) The filmmakers are looking to follow the success of The Bible miniseries, which earned them three Emmy nominations and 100 million viewers on the History Channel.
A Prayer for Coming Down the Homestretch of Lent
Dear Father,
In these days, as Lent draws us ever closer to Good Friday and Easter, our desire is to contemplate and appreciate the sacrificial death of Christ and his mortality-shattering resurrection.
Your plan was not only to forgive our sins and give us hope beyond the grave, it was to heal a broken world and restore all things to their original beauty.
Please help us to meditate on this great plan of new life and restoration.
May our lives experience your peace and flourish with your purposes.
Give us the will to maintain our spiritual rhythms and disciplines and grow in grace through them.
Help us focus not on trivial matters but on real issues and real people.
Minimize our talking, increase our listening.
Enable us to know where and how to act justly, love faithfully, and walk humbly with you in these days.
Give us the resolve to face our dangers and the hard things.
Increase our desire to know you.
We surely want to know Christ! And the power of his resurrection. And even to participate in his sufferings. We desire to become like him in his death so that, somehow, we may attain the resurrection from the dead.
Through Christ our Lord, we pray.
Amen.
I’ll catch you on the other side.
