I’ve shared this video in the World Religions class I teach. I think it’s great for putting the religious and cultural evolution in perspective. We live now. However, the global schema has not always been as we experience it. It’s good to remind oneself that the current experience is only part of history. There is much more. Enjoy!
What surprised you about this video? What was particularly enlightening?
I love the Bible. I’ve studied it all my life. Moreover, I am a Bible Professor at a university. I get to lead hearts of gladness and curiosity into the embrace of the Bible. It’s an honor. And a joy.
I particularly like this man’s words about the Bible. Enjoy! And feel free to share videos, songs, etc which celebrate the Bible. Let’s stir each other up with more love, more perspective, and more strength.
Jesus said, “Don’t worry” so, it must be possible. He would not command us to do something we could not do.
HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!! May this be the most joyous, free, triumphant, victorious year of your life thus far!
Shake off last year’s dust, step into breakthrough. Do a prophetic act RIGHT NOW: stand up, shake your limbs, take a deep breath and say, “It’s a NEW year. This will be the best year of my life thus far!” Feel free to dance and run around.
Get child-like. Be a warrior of hope.
“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?” (Matthew 6:25-27)
“The triumph of the gospel is enough to make any man the wildest kind of enthusiastic optimist. the unifying of the nature of God and man is the crowning achievement of Jesus Christ. the reason for the cross was thus revealed, man in God and God in man, one spirit, one purpose, one effort, one power and one glory.”
“When you and I are lost in the Son of God, and the fires of Jesus burn in our hearts, like they did in Him, our words will be the words of spirit and of life, and there will be no death in them.”
– John G. Lake
Weeks ago I was in Baghdad: a city of my dreams, my blood, my hope. As often happens after great success, there is a gentle tapering, a daily walking, a calm thinking: from this place where and when – upward and onward: what does it now look like?
I am waiting for the timing to return to Iraq. I am choosing to enter God’s rest. I have zillions of thoughts, like Styrofoam peanuts charged with static-electricity, they awkwardly seem to go everywhere and yet, nowhere simultaneously. I am fireworks on a boat in a bay, waiting for the next great sea voyage. The voyage is what I was born for, made for, prepared for. Ships are “safe” in harbor, but not designed for staying.
The tension hurts. The waiting, at times, feels horrible. Romans 5 tells me perseverance produces character and character produces hope; but the excruciating pain of the development of this particular brand of fortitude challenges me to decide how much I truly believe this truth. It REALLY challenges me. In many moments I feel so far from seeing the answers it is laughable, yet I feel those answers like I feel God: for they are in Him. Today I was driving through the mountains of Yosemite with my family. I pictured myself as God’s lung: filled with Him, filled with Him to the degree I would allow Him to breathe deeply of me.
I sometimes think about inhaling Him less deeply. Then I realize, yet again, I am lovesick. I can’t stop. He’s got my heart: hook, line, and sinker. So, I keep letting Him be breath to me, invisible life to my physical life. The collision of the unseen and the seen smarts almost daily: it cuts against me like icy wind on cheekbones down a ski slope. Intimacy can be downright gut-wrenching, especially with consummate lovers like God.
So, I keep on keeping on. And in my resting the fire gathers fresh color. Jeremiah’s notion about God as a fire in one’s bones both terrifies and liberates me, because I know I would do anything for His capital “L” Love.
I am too much like Him to let Him go. And He is also too much like Himself to let me go.
He’s radical. (I laugh.) His radical-ness is what got me into this situation: His character has rubbed off on me quite irrevocably.
<Oh, God. GOD! Your creativity has left us undone. For Your Name’s sake we remain thus. For the sake of the world we live thus. Well done, God. You have made us well. We are like you. And revolution is here; and coming.>
Jesus is the most romantic, most beautiful person I’ve ever known.
And He’s alive. And He loves YOU incomprehensibly and completely.
THERE’S GONNA BE A WEDDING!
One day, at the end of time as we know it, Jesus is going to marry His bride, the Church.
Meanwhile, we all get to fall madly, absurdly, entirely, blissfully in love with Him daily.
hahahaha! HE LOVES YOU! HE LOVES WHO YOU ARE! HE DELIGHTS IN YOU! HE CELEBRATES YOU! HE ACCEPTS YOU!
YOU ARE ALTOGETHER LOVELY. You’re gonna shine!
These are videos from worship from the last day of my second year of Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry (BSSM) on May 11, 2011. As a friend said tonight, “You often don’t know how much bondage you are in until you really get free. Then you wonder how you ever lived with all that stuff.” Really experiencing true freedom, the freedom Jesus paid for, has been a big part of my journey at BSSM. I highly recommend it: the freedom journey.
One of my favorite worship songs in Hebrew. I have stunning memories of singing this song alongside six Arabs in a massive group of primarily Messianic Jews.
Jesus is PEACE for the Middle East.
I usually say I don’t believe in bad days, and I don’t – in that everyday with God is still guaranteed to be moving from glory to glory (even when I don’t observe that with my eyes); it is at its core, a GOOD day. However, rough spots happen. Personally, I’m terrifically exasperated and looking for resolution in the midst of it. I’m living in the divine tension of resting in knowing God is moving on my behalf, and also doing the part I am responsible for. I’m stir crazy and yet, I simply want to be still. I want to go somewhere wonderfully intoxicating like the Amazon and yet I want to simply be in Redding and drink the luscious stars in the night sky. I want to see whole cities engulfed by love and I want the homeless guy I passed today on the street to be engulfed too. In all that I am waiting for several major things to take flight. Like a housecat who sits at the door calmly waiting to be let in, and moments later is digging her claws deep into the door in frustration and eagerness – I am torn between patience and impatience.
These times are an opportunity to let love lead, not emotions, not circumstances, but the forever FULL love of God. For me they are a time to practice the fine art of rejoicing when I don’t feel like it. One’s soul, the seat of one’s emotions, is subject to one’s spirit, the part of you seated with Christ in heavenly places (Ephesians 2:6) and thus innocuous to one’s atmosphere. God turns even exasperation into joy. Sometimes it’s merely about getting alone with Him in quiet, laying down, and chatting with Him – not for answers, but just to chat. It’s like having a conversation with a good friend – you don’t only talk when you “need” answers, you talk to get to know the person and to be known by her.
If you are in the exasperation zone, I declare NEWNESS to you today. Today is a day when mountains will move, peace will come, and HOPE will rise. God wants to meet with you. He wants to talk with you. He wants to share His heart with you. He LOVES you and accepts you fully. He champions your dreams. He is your GOOD Father.
Come believe with me. 