Look to the example of Jesus Christ, shape your thoughts deliberately so that your feelings will follow, and trust that the Holy Spirit will give you the joy that comes from doing what you uniquely can do as you explore how to be a witness to the beauty of God’s love in a hurting world.
Faith can easily get mixed with culture, wherever and whenever Christian faith exists.
What draws you to stay laboring in one spot over and over, turning the soil over and over, but never planting and moving on?
Christians are called to witness to the Beauty of the sacred through our rituals, our service, our worship, our love.
You could put conservative Christian parents and conservative Muslim parents in the same room with coffee and pastries and they would commiserate about the challenges of attempting to instill religious values in their kids in an age of globalization, when many influences far outside their zip code influence their children as much as – or more than – locality does. They have a shared enemy: Western secularization. The religions are not the same, but the frustration is.
What were the specific needs of our town, what were the specific passions and gifts of our church members, and how might they converge?
It’s dangerous to ground our whole understanding of the second person of the Trinity in a scenario in which the only way we know him truly depends on human sin, as if fallenness is necessary in order to know the Word. Because of fallenness, we know the Word as Jesus Christ, the Word Made Flesh. But to suggest the only possible universe in which we could truly know God is one that has the crucifixion means that God in some way ordained human sinfulness so that we could know him.
“The time is always ripe to do right.”
Any Christian who wants to appear pious knows that he or she should want God’s will to be done on earth, as it is in heaven. Few people want to scrub a toilet, wipe down its exterior, and clean the floor surrounding it. But you cannot separate faith from works.
In other words, the will to pray for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven is not nearly as important as the will to ask God how we might help bring about God’s will to be done on earth today in our home and town and nation.
Let’s all go around and say what we’re thankful for…
Your year flashes in bits and pieces in front of your mind and you search for a socially appropriate response that doesn’t include “good medical attention after a miscarriage” or “pro bono lawyers” or “insightful marriage and family therapists.”
Pass the stuffing.