Wordless Wednesday

"That yogurt sure was good!"

Psalm 84

For the past several weeks I have been using "Voices From The Past:  Puritan Devotional Readings" edited by Richard Rushing during my quiet times.  God is using His word and these writings to speak to me in profound ways.  As I read the scripture and then the thoughts from men such as John Bunyan, William Cooper, Jonathan Edwards, John Owen, Thomas Watson and Matthew Mead and many more who lived and walked with God hundreds of years ago, it is like they are speaking such timely thoughts that apply so to me in 2010!

"The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God stands forever." 

I'm so thankful for that assurance from Isaiah 40:8!  God's Word can be trusted!

I wanted to share with you today the scripture and some points from the reading from October 10.  Psalm 84 has always been one of my favorite Psalms:

1. How lovely is your dwelling place,  O Lord Almighty!
2. My soul yearns, even faints, for the courts of the Lord; my heart and my flesh cry out for the living God.
3. Even the sparrow has found a home, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may have her young - a place near your altar, O Lord Almighty, my King and my God.
4. Blessed are those who dwell in your house; they are ever praising you.
5. Blessed are those whose strength is in you, who have set their hearts on pilgrimage.
6. As they pass through the Valley of Baca (weeping - explanation mine) they make it a place of springs; the autumn rains also cover it with pools.  (The Hebrew word here is "berakah" and means blessing divinely bestowed, source of blessing a gift, treaty of peace, refreshing rain - God's grace - Psalm 36:5-8)
7. They go from strength to strength, till each appears before God in Zion.
8. Hear my prayer, O Lord God Almighty; listen to me, O God of Jacob.
9. Look upon our shield, O God; look with favor on your anointed one.
10. Better is one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere;  I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of the wicked.
11. For the Lord God is a sun and shield; the Lord bestows favor and honor; no good thing does he withhold from those whose walk is blameless. 
12. O Lord Almighty, blessed is the man who trusts in you.

Here is the commentary from Matthew Mead (taken from "A Name in Heaven", pp. 111-132 as edited by Richard Rushing in "Voices from the Past"):

"A life of faith builds upon lasting principles.  The life of sense lives on fading objects.  What can he lack who lives by faith in him that is all and never changes?  When the mariner puts out to sea, he quickly loses sight of land, but no matter how far he sails, he will never lose sight of heaven.  The soul of faith sees a greater beauty in God, than in all worldly comforts, and tastes a greater sweetness in communion with Christ, than in all earthly friendships.  Grace weans the believer from all worldly things, and discerns between perishing and durable comforts.  How do we know we are weaned from the world?"

Mr. Mead answers like this:

1. "We are weaned when we have heavenly affections amidst earthly possessions.
2. When we reckon our happiness by divine fruit instead of worldly accommodations.
3. When we bear worldly evils, troubles, and losses with a holy quietness and satisfaction of spirit (Heb. 10:34)
4. We choose holiness, affliction and loss, rather than sin, pleasure and preferment (Heb. 11:24-26)
5. We are able by faith to overcome both the smiles and frowns of the world.  When the world smiles upon us with its splendours, honours, riches, pleasures, delights and glories, can we look upon all these as small things in comparison with Christ?  Or, when the world frowns upon us with crosses, losses, sufferings, reproaches, can we overcome them by laying aside carnal fears, and by patience, look upon afflictions and sufferings for Christ as our honour and happiness?

Mead finishes by saying:

"To have the world, and yet to be weaned from it; to possess the world, and not to be possessed by it; to live above all, amidst the enjoyment of all - these are mercies.  To see greatness only in God, and beauty only in holiness, O what a mercy is this!  Do not dote on the comforts of the world but wean your soul from them."

 Oh Lord!  I pray you bless me and all who read today with these mercies from your hand!

 Blessings,

Carrot Bars with Cream Cheese Icing

Cecily is taking Culinary Careers as one of her electives this semester at her middle school.  This week the class made Carrot Bars with homemade cream cheese icing and Cecily wanted to make them at home for us!  She made them this afternoon and I wanted to share her recipe here with you.

Carrot Bars with Cream Cheese Icing

1 cup sugar

1/2 cup vegetable oil

1/4 cup applesauce

2 jars baby food carrots (4 oz. size)

2 eggs, beaten

1 tsp vanilla

1 1/4 cups flour

1 tsp baking soda

1 tsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 chopped nuts (chopped)

Ingredients for Cream Cheese Icing

1/4 cup soft margarine

1 1/2 cups powdered sugar (sifted)

3 ounces light cream cheese, softened

1 tsp vanilla

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.  Grease and flour a 13 X 9 inch pan.  In a large mixing bowl, combine the sugar, oil, applesauce, baby food carrots, 2 beaten eggs, and vanilla, using an electric mixer on medium speed for 1 minute.

In a medium mixing bowl, combine the flour, baking soda, cinnamon and salt.

Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients.  Beat all the ingredients together till thoroughly combined.

Add nuts and stir.
Pour the mixture into the greased and floured pan and bake for 25-30 minutes, or until toothpick comes clean.

While the bars bake, make the icing:  combine the margarine, powdered sugar, light cream cheese, and vanilla.  Beat with an electric mixer until creamy.

After the bars are baked and cool, spread with the icing.

Cecily then let them cool in the refrigerator for 20 minutes to let the icing set on the bars. 

THESE WERE SO GOOD!  They were very moist and the icing was out of this world good.  I mean anything with cream cheese in it has to be, right?

Anyway, there were a few gone in a matter of minutes...

"Daddddeeeeeee, want biiiiiiitttttttteeeeee!"

"Yes, that's better daddy!"

Cecily says that pumpkin pie filling can be substituted for the carrot very easily, turning them into Pumpkin Bars!  Hope you'll try this dessert.  IT WILL NOT DISAPPOINT!!

What favorite Fall desserts do you enjoy making?

Family Walkin' and Sidewalk Chalkin'

Fall has made its way to Florida!  We are enjoying some very nice temps these days, especially in the mornings.  The humidity is very low making the temps throughout the day nice as well.  You can actually feel a nice breeze even in the middle of the day.

And because of this blessed change in the weather, we have been taking more "family walks" as Bentley affectionately calls them.  He actually was the one to initiate these walks.  I actually took he and JennaBeth out a couple of mornings ago for a "walk" and we didn't even break a sweat.

When we got back home that morning, Bentley decided he would "work out" like daddy does before coming inside.

This evening before supper, we took a family walk and I happened to get Bentley and Cecily riding their bikes.



Bentley loves his bike that he got for his birthday!  He's not quite ready to give up the training wheels, but his big sister has been real sweet about encouraging him along.  It won't be long before he will be flying down the road without them!

JennaBeth enjoyed learning about the fun of sidewalk chalk with big sister this afternoon.

She was so very proud of her own little creations!

It really makes this mommy's heart happy to have everyone enjoying a nice afternoon together!  I'm very blessed with a husband who works hard and then comes home and spends his time with his children.  And we are very blessed with three healthy little people.  It is a joy to see each one of them developing into three very unique individuals!  It's easy on the hard days to have a "woe is me" attitude.  Today was one of those grace gifts from the Lord reminding me of how blessed a woman I really am and for that I am grateful!

"I will praise you, O Lord my God, with all my heart;  I will glorify your name forever.  For great is your love toward me."  Psalm 86:12-13a

How are you and your family enjoying time together?

Nudge

I was provided a copy of Leonard Sweet's book Nudge:  Awakening Each Other To The God Who's Already There by Audra Jennings of B&B Media Group in exchange for my honest review here.

I'm not sure really where to begin, because there was more about this book that bothered me than I could appreciate.  That's the problem when you have enough truth mixed in with untruth; I feel it is a very dangerous place to be in.

The book's supposed goal is to awaken the Christian church to a new view of evangelism.  And I agree that there is much in this area that needs improving, but Sweet's message is not the way to get there.  While there were places in the book that I agreed with Sweet such as much in his chapter "Picture:  Use Your Eyes:  Do You Have a Vision for the Kingdom? and especially this quote:

"Cultivate CultureVision, the ability to see people who aren't usually on our radar screens:  the piriahs, outcasts, rejects.  Can we envision the hidden worlds of the less fortunate than ourselves?  Can we give up TunnelVision for TogetherVision?  Can we turn away from the spotlights to turn on the searchlights and find the hidden and forgotten?"

and this quote:

"The church has been more prone to 'take a stand' on issues or 'take a vote' on programs than touch."

We Christians can be a whole lot about what we are against and very small on what we are actually for!  So there are points in the book that I said "amen".

However, there were many more places in Nudge that I had to back up and say, "Wait a minute!", such as:

"Evangelists always nudge...Their words when spoken are not so much 'You are lost in sin' as 'You belong to God."

Now do I believe the most effective way to evangelize someone is to walk right up to them and the first words out of my mouth be, "Hey!  You are lost in your sins!".  Of course not, but as you read Sweet's take on evangelism, he would have you think that there is never a time you have that kind of conversation with someone.  As a matter of fact at one point in the book he refers to any talk about sin and the wrath of God as "the bad news about the good news".

The good new is that we were dead in our trespasses and sins, but God's plan of redemption for us was to have his Son die on the cross and be the wrath removing sacrifice for our sins so that we could have fellowship with Him!  That has to be a part of the conversation when sharing the gospel with people.

One of Sweet's "God-guarantees" is:

"Every person you notice, every person you brush up against, is a child of God, a Jesus-in-you noticer."

We were all created in the image of God as he qualifies in the section after listing his God-guarantees, but we are not all a child of God.
One of the other "God-guarantees", I agree with:

"Every worst is a juncture for grace."

Absolutely!  A believer who has received God's amazing grace in their life should be quick to be a channel of God's grace and blessing to others!

Lastly, throughout Sweet's whole concept of "nudging" in this book, he had very little to nothing to say about the work of the Holy Spirit in a lost person's salvation.

So, can I recommend this book?  The answer would be no.  While Sweet says some good things, there are more bones than good meat to chew on here.

Blessings,

Soul Custody

I received Soul Care:  Choosing To Care For The One And Only You by Stephen W. Smith from Audra at B&B Media Group in exchange for my honest review.

Mr. Smith begins Soul Care by describing a kind of violence that has been unleashed upon our souls and states how for many of us "life is not working as we think it should".  And the culprit according to Mr. Smith is busyness:

"Every single person who feels more dead than alive, more tired tan energized, more burned-out than motivated, more unfulfilled than thriving is a soul in need - a soul who needs to be cared for.  The Chinese have two characters for the English word busyness, which they define as 'heart annihilation'.  We're killing ourselves with all of our busy, busy, busy."

Mr. Smith spends the rest of the book helping the reader to understand how to "take back what you might have lost along the way while living your life".  He does this by laying out the concept of soul custody which he describes as "taking back what we've almost lost in order to gain what we should never want to lose".  He says this is our "sacred privilege".

Mr. Smith quotes Eugene Peterson in the first chapter and the quote is so good I have to share it here:

"Many people think that what's written in the Bible has mostly to do with getting people into heaven - getting right with God and saving their eternal souls.  It does have to do with that, of course, but not mostly.  It is equally concerned with living on this earth - living well and living in a robust sanity."

I don't know about you, but I'd love to discover this robust sanity!

To be honest, the subtitle to this book, Choosing To Care For The One And Only You, is what peaked my interest in reading this book.  My initial thoughts were, "On no.  Here is another 'Christian' book that's going to be more man-centered than God-centered; another book that will tell me if I just believe in myself, I can do anything!"

I was very wrong.

Mr. Smith does a very good job of pointing the reader to God's word and explaining that taking custody of your soul is an act of stewardship.  This life is not all about us, but how can we serve others and care for them following the example of Jesus by continually trying to give what we do not have?  Mr. Smith says:

"You can't help anyone else if you are dying for lack of oxygen.  It is not selfish for you to breathe first, then help the others in need."

Here are the chapter titles:

• Soul Choices:  Turning Your Life Around
• Soul Solace:  Choosing Stillness
• Soul Focus:  Choosing a Simplicity of Faith and Life
• Soul Serenity: Choosing to Detox From Stress
• Soul Sabbath:  Choosing to Cease the Insanity
• Soul Identity:  Choosing to Become the Real You
• Soul Vocation:  Choosing What to do in Life
• Soul Address:  Choosing to Honor the Body-Soul Connection
• Soul Companions:  Choosing Your Friends
• Soul Action:  Moving from Choice to Action

There are questions at the end of each chapter where Smith has the reader go to God's word and explore the concepts he shared in the chapter as they line up with scripture, making the book excellent for use with a small group study.

Soul Custody can be purchased at Amazon.com.














Blessings,

Who Built The Ark?

Noah! Noah!
Who built the ark?
Brother Noah built the ark! 

 

I love that children's song and I had it playing in my head all morning on Saturday!  On Saturday evening, we took the kids to see First Assembly Church's live presentation of "Noah's Ark".  Actually, Mike and I took the younger two; Cecily thinks she is too big for such things anymore!

I guess you notice the donkey in the spotlight!  Yes, they had live animals!  We sat in the balcony, but I think Bentley was actually able to see things better from up there than he would have down on the floor level.

Here come the camels!

There was also a Zebra, but I didn't catch him in time.  But I did catch "Monty"...

That's no "stuffed" snake!  It was the real deal!  If you look right above the woman in the red shirt, you'll notice a box right beside her.  That's the box "Noah" pulled "Monty" from!  I wonder what she was thinking when they pulled that thing out of there?
And they carried him right on the ark...

They had lots of smaller animals on the ark as well.

Bentley was really impressed when the alligator made his appearance on the ark...

And yes, he was for really real!

The presentation included humorous things like intermittent "Garko" (a take on the Geico) commercials.  And yes, they were selling flood insurance!  Ty Pennington even made an appearance (not the for really real one, but an actor :) and yelled, "Good morning Noah family"!  Of course Noah set him straight by stating that God was the designer of this boat and that nothing needed improving upon!

I appreciated how Noah was portrayed as the faithful man scripture tells us he was.  Noah and his family lived in perilous times:

"The LORD saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time.  The LORD was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain...But Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD...Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked with God."  Genesis 6:5-6,8-9

As I've reflected on this presentation since Saturday, I've thought about how grieved the heart of God must be in these present times.  Is His heart filled with pain at what He sees?

God gave Noah a plan for safety for he and his family.  God established a covenant with Noah.  He gave Noah very specific instructions for the ark and Noah did everything just as God commanded him (Gen.6:22).

In the presentation, Noah and his family were ridiculed and threatened.  People thought they were crazy, but Noah led his family and was obedient, even though it wasn't the popular thing to do.  Even though I have known the account of the flood from scripture for over 30 years, I was stilled gripped by the faithfulness of Noah and his family during this time.  Noah was faithful even though there was no rain for many years and people thought he and his family were insane for not living like the rest of the world.

I'm praying as the LORD's eyes roam throughout the earth that He will find me and my household faithful in following His commands "just as He commands"!

Blessings,