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Tuesday, October 4, 2022

Such a Time as This - Purity 853


Such a Time as This - Purity 853

Purity 853 10/04/2022 Purity 852 Podcast

Good morning,

Today’s photo a streams waterfall, fall foliage, and a sliver of blue sky comes from our a friend who spent the first day of October visiting “The Flume Gorge, at Franconia Notch State Park” in New Hampshire.  I said that I might share more of our friend’s photos and liked this simple waterfall and decided to see where it would lead.   

Well, It’s Tuesday and today I am giving thanks for how the Lord has led my wife, TammyLyn, into her new career as a special education teacher  and how what may have caused others to turn and run has inspired my wife to press into her new role with care, concern, compassion and creativity.

Her first day was yesterday and she reported that there was more than one instance of her students having episodes that needed individual instruction and behavioral coaching. Her students are junior high age but have the mental and emotional capacities of first and second graders and any bump in the road of their regular routine or a conflict to their expectations can result in emotional outbursts and insubordination.

In the aftermath of her first day on the job and in light of these episodes of what I would describe as “meltdowns”, the other staff sheepishly inquired what she thought about her new job choice.  They were pleasantly surprised when TammyLyn assured them that she was excited about her new position and that she didn’t quit easily and had a few ideas of activities she could introduce to the class to keep her students engaged and on task that could possibly help them to reduce their outburst sand help them to learn and grow.   

Where many people would be looking to cut and run, TammyLyn is rushing in to meet needs and to possibly calm the storm.

I am extremely proud of my wife and know that I have been truly blessed to have her as I stand in awe and wonder when I consider her faith and her servant’s heart. Where some may only see a problem to be dealt with and be hardened to find ways to enact measures of control, TammyLyn’s is coming in to share the love of God as a caregiver and teacher who will seek to nourish and encourage her pupils in the ways they should go.   

And I know that TammyLyn’s presence will be calming influence on her co-workers as well, as she will minster to them and lead them to understand the power of love to transform the atmosphere of the places that women of faith walk into.

TammyLyn’s attributes of strength, patience, kindness, intelligence, and creativity are just what her classroom needs and when I consider her path over the last year I can see the Lord’s hand was bringing her to this place at this time, “as if it were meant to be”.  

My wife’s path reminds me of Esther’s story where she “just happened” to be in a position to influence the king of Persia, when her people the Jews, were being faced with persecution and genocide.  In encouraging Esther to be bold and to risk her life by speaking out, her uncle Mordecai wondered:  

Esther 4:14 (NKJV)
14  … Yet who knows whether you have come to the kingdom for such a time as this?"  

Of course being a woman of faith in God, Esther chose to act, surrendering herself to God’s will, by saying: 

Esther 4:16 (NKJV)
16  "…so I will go to the king, which is against the law; and if I perish, I perish!"

Esther stepped out of tradition and what was acceptable to do what was right and because God had brought her to that place at that time. 

And likewise my wife, has been brought to this place and time, and is going in to this special needs classroom to represent the Lord and who she is in Christ, by showing her students and co-worker what God’s love looks like outside of the pages of the Bible and the four walls of a church building.  

Like today’s photo, my wife’s path over the last year has been tumultuous and led to more than one fall, but her faith kept her afloat and now she has risen from the depths to breathe again, to find her purpose to love and serve others in a way that only she can, in a place she didn’t see coming, “for such a time as this.”

 

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Today’s Bible verse comes to us from “The NLT Bible Promise Book for Men”.

This morning’s meditation verse are:

Psalm 139:13,16-17 (NLT2)
13  You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body and knit me together in my mother’s womb. ….16  You saw me before I was born. Every day of my life was recorded in your book. Every moment was laid out before a single day had passed.
17  How precious are your thoughts about me, O God. They cannot be numbered!

Today’s Bible verses encourages us because they testify of how intimately the Lord knows us and how He has laid out our paths before us and how His thoughts for us are precious.  

Considering my wife’s path, I just have to encourage everyone to seek the Lord and to come to understand just how much He loves you. He created you. He has a plan for you and He encourages you to follow Him to discover and experience it.   

TammyLyn’s story is a testimony of how we are to remain faithful to trust and follow the Lord even though our paths may be uncertain and circumstances can challenge us.  

If we keep walking in the Spirit, seeking the Lord, His presence, wisdom and ways for living, we start on a path where we invite the Lord in our circumstances and make the decision to see what happens when we trust Him.  

Because We have peace with God through our faith in Christ, we are already victorious and free and when we stay grounded in who we are in Christ, we have peace, love, joy no matter what we face. 

And so when we keep walking and talking with God we enter into the potential to see the impossible happen in our lives. We can see God’s divine favor, His grace, blesses our lives. 

So reflect on the awesomeness of God as Creator and Sovereign King, and marvel over that fact that His thoughts are precious and numerous when they consider you. 

 

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As always, I invite all to go to mt4christ.org where I always share insights from prominent Christian theologians and counselors to assist my brothers and sisters in Christ with their walk.

Today we continue sharing from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “Discipleship”, also known as “The Cost of Discipleship”

As always, I share this information for educational purposes and encourage all to purchase Bonhoeffer’s books for your own private study and to support his work.  This resource is available on many websites for less than $20.00.

Chapter Five

Discipleship and the Individual – Continues

 

So people called by Jesus learn that they had lived an illusion in their relationship to the world. The illusion is immediacy. It has blocked faith and obedience. Now they know that there can be no unmediated relationships, even in the most intimate ties of their lives, in the blood ties to father and mother, to children, brothers and sisters, in marital love, in historical responsibilities. Ever since Jesus called, there are no longer natural, historical, or experiential unmediated relationships for his disciples. Christ the mediator stands between son and father, between husband and wife, between individual and nation, whether they can recognize him or not. There is no way from us to others than the path through Christ, his word, and our following him. Immediacy is a delusion.

But because any delusion which hides truth from us must be hated, immediacy to the natural given things in life must also be hated, for the sake of Jesus Christ, the mediator. Anytime a community hinders us from coming before Christ as a single individual, anytime a community lays claim to immediacy, it must be hated for Christ’s sake. For every unmediated natural relationship, knowingly or unknowingly, is an expression of hatred toward Christ, the mediator, especially if this relationship wants to assume a Christian identity.

Theology makes a serious mistake whenever it uses Jesus’ mediation between God and human persons to justify immediate relationships in life. This mistake says, “If Christ is the mediator, then by being so he bore the sins of all our unmediated relationships to the world and justified us in them. Jesus is our mediator with God, so that with a clean conscience we can again relate directly to the world, to the world which crucified Christ.” That brings love of God and love of the world down to a common denominator. The break with the given circumstances of the world is presented here as a “legalistic” misunderstanding of God’s grace, which is said to spare us from precisely such a break. Jesus’ words on hatred toward what is unmediated now are twisted into an obvious, joyful Yes to the “God-given realities” of this world. The justification of the sinner again[9] turns into the justification of the sin.[1]

---------------------------more tomorrow------------------------

Join our “Victory over the Darkness”, “The Bondage Breaker”, "Freedom in Christ" series of Discipleship Classes via the mt4christ247 podcast!

at https://mt4christ247.podbean.com, You can also find it on Apple podcasts

(https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-mt4christ247s-podcast/id1551615154). The mt4christ247 podcast is also available on Google Podcasts, Amazon Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartradio, and Audible.com. 

These teachings are also available on the MT4Christ247 You Tube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTxjSNstREpuGWuL0bF3U7w/featured

Email me at mt4christ247@gmail.com to receive the class materials, share your progress, and to be encouraged.

My wife, TammyLyn, also offers Christian encouragement via her Facebook Group: Ask, Seek, Knock (https://www.facebook.com/groups/529047851449098 ) and her podcast Ask, Seek, and Knock on Podbean (https://feed.podbean.com/tammalyn78/feed.xml)

Encouragement for the Path of Christian Discipleship


[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, ed. Martin Kuske et al., trans. Barbara Green and Reinhard Krauss, vol. 4, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003), 94–95.

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