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Date Posted: 13:28:50 05/20/22 Fri
Author: c
Subject: additional teachings since 2017 (old but finally revised)

(This is old but I had to make a correction: changing "morning" to "mourning" in the excerpt from "The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah: Complete and unabridged in one volume")



The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah: Complete and unabridged in one volume

by Alfred Edersheim

copyright 1993

Fourth printing April 1997


p 456

It is only a sense of sin, and the felt absence of the Christ, which should lead to mourning and fasting, though not in order thereby to avert either the anger of God or outward calamity.

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Near and True: A devotional study of the Minor Prophets leading to a beautiful life with God.

by David Guzik



Sixty-Four

...Here we see the pattern for coming to Jesus and true repentance. First we look to Jesus, then we mourn for our sins. Looking to Jesus must come first.

This is a great mistake that is commonly made. It is often believed that we must first mourn over our sins, and then look by faith to Jesus....Do we not find a pattern here for something different? Our text gives us a pattern of first looking to Jesus, and then mourning for our sins. We can tell people to look to Jesus immediately.

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intouch.org Daily devotion January 15, 2021

Purify Your Heart

James 4:7-10

Once we have received Jesus Christ as our personal Savior, we are clean in His eyes. But that doesn’t mean we will never sin again (John 13:9-10). As we live in this world, we’ll continue to exhibit some fleshly patterns—at times thinking wrong thoughts, making hurtful comments, having inappropriate attitudes, and behaving foolishly. That’s why continual cleansing from sin is important.

James gives us a process by which we can purify our hearts. When we resist the devil, mourn for our sin, and humbly draw near to God in submission, our Father is always faithful to forgive and cleanse us. Confession and repentance are like a spiritual shower that washes away the filth of sin so we can be clean and renewed (1 John 1:9).

Ephesians 5:25-26 speaks of cleansing the church “by the washing of water with the Word.” Scripture acts like a sharp sword that convicts us, reveals our hidden sins, and teaches how to live in a manner pleasing to the Lord.

Let’s follow James’s advice today by submitting to God and renewing our minds with His truth. I pray that we can perceive and understand the Lord’s ways—and be confident of our salvation and eternal security despite our failures.

----------------------=

In Touch magazine 7/18, 8/18

The Ministry of Lament: What many churches lack, our culture desperately needs

by D.L. Mayfield

p 57

Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann refers to these kinds of questions as pressing forth into the pain of God, which is a rich biblical tradition, evident in the work of the prophets as well as in the Psalms (40 percent of which are classified as lament).

p 58

John Swinton, author of Raging With Compassion, writes that "Lament is...a very particular form of prayer that is not content with soothing platitudes or images of a God Who will listen only to voices that appease and compliment. Lament takes the brokenness of human experience into the heart of God and demands that God answer." It encourages authentic engagement with God, which is a prerequisite to actually being in a relationship with Him. And it has a purpose, says Swinton. Ultimately, lament exists to give voice to suffering and to reconcile us to the love of God.


.....But Brueggemann writes that "the riddle and insight of biblical faith is the awareness that only anguish leads to life, only grieving leads to joy, and only embraced endings permit new beginnings." Or as Jesus declared in the Sermon on the Mount, it is those who mourn who will one day be comforted. People who run away from mourning are also running away from the spiritual benefits of lament.


.....But lament not only soothed suffering communities with honesty and an ultimate hopefulness in the work of God; it also served as a way to invite people to confess and repent. For people involved in compassion work, this is a vital understanding.



So whenever we engage in helping others less fortunate than ourselves, we have an opportunity to lament and mourn the breakdown that got us there.


.....Walter Brueggemann explains the disconnect this way: "The 'have-nots' develop a theology of suffering and survival. The 'haves' develop a theology of celebration."

For people involved in justice or compassion work, this is an important dichotomy to recognize. If we have been raised to view God as blessing and taking care of those He loves, what happens when people suffer - when they experience trauma, or war, or famine, or systems of poverty that will never allow them to escape?


....And this is what lament in the Bible does. It gives language for the suffering that people experience. It encourages authentic engagement with God. It invites us to both listen to suffering communities and engage in confession and repentance. And lastly, it reveals the ways we try to numb ourselves to the realities of the world.

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In Touch magazine 1/20, 2/20

p 16


Faith/Works

One question, four answers

Which of the Beautitudes do you struggle with the most and why?

"Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted," Jesus says. It's the one I struggle with the most, not because I assume I will not be comforted, but because I'm not sure that I actually mourn....

I have been more purposeful in the last five years to enter into lament for injustice, but expressing grief is still out of my comfort zone, even when I profoundly care. I wonder what blessing of comfort I am missing. I wonder what those who mourn well have to teach me. I believe that the promise of comfort is not just encouragement for those who mourn but the promise of blessing for those who will enter into the grief of the world. This practice of seeking to lament leads me deeper into seeking the heart of God, where I am learning to listen to the voices of those who mourn - and mourning with them.

- J. Nicole Morgan, Author of Fact and Faithful: Learning to love our bodies, our neighbors, and ourselves.

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In Touch magazine 1/20, 2/20

Hope Springs Eternal: Through all our loss and longing for more, God is with us.

by Michael Morgan


p 39

....I have endured seasons of unemployment and underemployment, and Martha's mixture of "Why didn't You prevent this, Lord? Maybe You could fix it? But I know I'll die and go to Heaven someday, so I guess that's always something" has definitely come out of my mouth in prayers. Yet in those moments, I've always known I was holding something back. That I didn't want to show God my full anxiety, even anger at my situation. To do so would reveal me, incontrovertibly, as a self-righteous, entitled brat God would absolutely not help find a job. I thought expressing hurt to God would be tantamount to blaming Him, and there's no way that could be okay.

Well, but let's look to Mary....She doesn't gild her pain with good theology to make it presentable. She says, Lord, I'm wrecked by heartache You could have stopped, and she weeps.

The phrase "If You had been here" - and it's used by both sisters - exudes faith, but also pain. A feeling of abandonment, perhaps even betrayal. This phrase is the beginning of what I have found to be the hardest part of Christian faith: encountering God's silence. The financial windfall does not come....Often, we see a clear path to health, happiness, and fulfillment, but we are not allowed to set foot on it. We wonder, God, where are You?

I'd guess each of us has a dream life that, if we could live it, would be only minimally painful in a "we got each other the same Christmas present" kind of way. None of us hopes to be miserable. Dreams have a weird logic, though. When we build a life pursuing them, we can begin thinking the absence of pain equals the presence of health. But when our imagined perfection eludes us enough times and we come to the end of our rope, we're heartbroken. We can't imagine a healthy soul alongside dreams gone wrong, because it hurts too much to miss them. The question at the heart of God's silence is, How could health and pain possibly co-mingle?

The thing about jobs and mates and kids and money is that our hope for them never really dies. There's always a chance. God could always open another window. We peruse job postings on bad days at work because our hope for meaningful vocation is never really crushed. When we lose a romantic relationship, our friends tell us, "There are plenty of fish in the sea." And over time, we find they were right. To understand they truly irreplaceable, we must return to death. It is the one door that shuts tight....


p 41

...The pain of that grief has tested and tried us both, leaving us raw to other struggles that might otherwise have rolled off thicker skin. Many times in the past few years, I've found myself in a dark tunnel resounding with echoes of my crying out, "Lord, if You had been here."

The miracle I see in Mary and Martha's story, aside from the obvious one, is that Jesus receives both sisters equally. Especially, He does not rebuke Mary for leaving out her theology....


Lately, I've been reading a book called The Voice of the Heart, which Chip Dodd wrote as a guide for tending to those wounded by loss. In it, he says something quite striking: "Our hurt reveals our hope" that something will heal our pain.....


The mystery of our faith is that resurrection and the end of pain are two different thing. God does not want to numb us with easy jobs and loads of money and friction-free friendships. God wants to raise us from the dead. The gift of God's silence is the opportunity to hurt, to feel our pet hopes rise to the surface and truly see how we fail to deal with what's going on in our soul. If pain is a dark tunnel, the end isn't to finally arrive at the thing we dreamed would make it all better. The end comes with stepping out of the dark and seeing by the light of the world (John 11:9). By that light, we see the things we thought were riches are actually frail and fleeting. It can be a painful realization filled with mourning. But, in crying ourselves empty, we finally become poor in spirit.

.....In turning our ideas of blessing upside down, Jesus invites us to a sense of health that doesn't hinge on what we have or what we lose, and so it has room for pain. It may hurt to exchange our old hearts for strange new ones. Part of us has to die to do so. But ours is the Kingdom of Heaven. Ours is a Father Who is never really silent, though He may be still and quiet and weeping with us until we are able to listen.

---------------------=

Adult Bible Class - Fall Quarter 2019 - Union Gospel Press - "Christian Life Series"

Editorial: Stealing Glory

by Megan Hickman


p 2

Believers in Christ can also harden their hearts to a degree. There are times when doing God's work is not emotionally rewarding. Though we know that He promises to draw close to us if we draw close to Him (James 4:8), it can become difficult to pursue the Lord on a daily basis during spiritual dry spells. We can grow discouraged that our spiritual disciplines do not immediately bring us positive feelings (cf. Proverbs 13:12).

Despite the prodding of the Holy Spirit to keep reading His Word and communicating with Him through prayer, we may choose to ignore His tugs on our hearts. We reject His attempt to pull us deeper into faith. When we are disobedient, we grieve the Spirit in our lives (cf. Ephesians 4:30). We must be sure to respond to the Lord's call that He lays out in His Word, no matter how we feel. This way, we will become sensitive to His leading and conviction in our lives and can glorify Him through good works.

....We often say that we do not doubt the power of God, but our hesitations reveal that we do doubt that He can work through us.


p 3

Another way we steal glory from God is by grumbling and complaining. Paul urges believers to "do all things without murmurrings and disputings" (Philippians 2:14). We know that "all things work together for good to them that love God, and to them who are called according to His purpose" (Romans 8:28). This verse is often misapplied because people want to believe that their "good" means their comfort and ease. However, God wants to form us into the image of Christ.

If we believe God is sovereign over our lives, we must admit that even the uncomfortable things - even the painful things - are for our sanctification and God's glory....When we complain like the Israelites in the desert, we are basically telling the world: "God doesn't really know what's good for us," "He can't bring it about," or "He doesn't care!" We communicate a bold and incorrect assumption that discredits His love for us.

When we doubt God's love for us or His power over our circumstances, we tend to return to our sin (cf. Proverbs 26:11)....When you continue to sin as a believer, you reject God's purpose for our deliverance (Romans 6:1,2).

But praise God for His patience with us! Though we often question His plan or even put off responding to His call, He persists in His good plans for us....

Why does He continue to lavish grace on us when we are so disobedient? Because God's love, goodness, and care is not dependent on us, but solely on His own character....He delivers us - weak, sinful, and broken people - so that His generous and loving character will be seen in all the earth.

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