“O Great Lover of my soul, so captivate my senses that all I see is You, all I hear is Your voice and all I long to do is Your will. Make every breath a prayer, every thought a praise and every action an offering. Speak, O God, through my daily life so that everyone may know how You can turn ashes into beauty, dross into gold and something worthless into something priceless.”

“The practical problem about charity (in our prayers) is very hard work, isn’t it? When you pray for Hitler & Stalin, how do you actually teach yourself to make the prayer real? The two things that help me are (a) A continual grasp of the idea that one is only joining one’s feeble little voice to the perpetual intercession of Christ, who died for those very men (b) A recollection, as firm as one can make it, of all one’s own cruelty which might have blossomed, under different conditions, into something terrible. You and I are not, at bottom, so different from these ghastly creatures” (C. S. Lewis).

It’s one thing to pray for our enemies in theory, but quite different to pray for actual people in positions of leadership who are actively seeking to do us harm. Many of the Roman emperors during the early days of the Church were set on destroying Christianity in its infancy. Think of how many believers gave their lives during this time, yet their sacrifice was not in vain — Christianity took off like a wildfire (pun not intended).

In these days, it’s hard to pray for men like Putin who are not only aggressively invading other countries but also targeting civilians, hospitals, and maternity wards. How can you pray for those who seem like evil incarnate?

First of all, it’s helpful to remember that these men are also the ones that Jesus died for. They still bear the image of God and can be redeemed as much as anyone else. Remember the Apostle Paul was once the foremost enemy and persecutor of the Church.

Second, we must bear in mind that apart from the grace of God, there’s no telling how low we might have sunk. You or I, left to ourselves and given free rein, are capable of any and every kind of evil known to humankind. The only difference is that in our case, grace won.

So I’m praying for Putin. I’m praying that he will have a change of heart and pursue peace instead of war. I’m praying he will seek reconciliation and not violence. I’m even praying he will come to a saving faith in Jesus as Lord and Savior. I’m not above praying that if he won’t back down from warmongering that he will be removed from office and that another will take his place.

Above all, I believe prayer works. Prayer is not the preamble to the battle. Prayer is the battle itself, and we will not see victory where we do not engage in prayer like our very lives depend on it.

I’ve been known to be wrong before, but I think that yesterday was the official first day of spring. Of course with this being Tennessee and Tennessee having the crazy weather that doesn’t always follow the rules, it could still snow tomorrow. Or next week. Or even in April. It’s been known to happen.

But for all intents and purposes, winter is over. As much as I loved seeing all the snow and feeling the keen crisp bite of wintry air, I’m ready for a new season. Even I can admit that having the same kind of weather all the time would get boring and old after a while. I imagine even constant sunny and mid 70s would wear thin after a while. Plus, with no rain at all, Tennessee would eventually become one big desert.

So I’ve learned to cherish all the seasons. Even when we get them all in one week. Each season has its own joys and rewards, even the super hot and the super cold. Having one season indefinitely would be nice for a little while, but for me not having changing seasons would grow tiresome. Even my favorite season Fall would eventually wear out its welcome with no green or new growth.

So I’m thankful for winter, spring, fall, and summer. I look forward to each one. But I’m sticking with fall as my favorite.

“Jesus had stayed outside the village, at the place where Martha met him. When the people who were at the house consoling Mary saw her leave so hastily, they assumed she was going to Lazarus’s grave to weep. So they followed her there. When Mary arrived and saw Jesus, she fell at his feet and said, ‘Lord, if only you had been here, my brother would not have died.’

When Jesus saw her weeping and saw the other people wailing with her, a deep anger welled up within him, and he was deeply troubled. ‘Where have you put him?’ he asked them.

They told him, ‘Lord, come and see.’  Then Jesus wept (John 11:30-35, New Living Translation).

John 11:35 is the shortest verse in the Bible. Or as I learned recently, it’s the shortest verse in English. But when you look at the context, why was Jesus weeping? It’s not like He didn’t know the outcome of the story. He knew very well He was about to resurrect Lazarus in short order, but still He wept. Why?

This question was put to a group of children once, and one of them answered in typical childlike fashion, “Because He lost His friend.”

Even though Jesus knew that Lazarus would soon be alive again, He saw the grief of those He loved. He saw the effects that sin and death had brought once again in a beautiful but broken world. So He wept.

I think when we lose loved ones, we do well to weep. Even though we know the final outcome — that those we love who have put their faith in Jesus will not stay dead but rise again healed and whole — we still miss them now. There’s still an empty chair at the table. There’s still an absent voice in the conversation. There’s still a void in your day to day life.

Grief is not wrong for those who follow Jesus. Even Jesus showed that it’s okay to be sad over the fact that the world is not as it was created to be since sin and death entered the world. Death is not natural, but as Jesus demonstrated first with Lazarus and then later with His own emergence from the tomb, death is not final. The grave will not have the last word.

So we grieve and weep, but with hope. We have sorrow, knowing that one day joy will prevail. We cry because we live in the now but not yet where everything we long for and hope for will be perfectly realized and Jesus will prevail.

For those who annually go through the torture and agony of filling out brackets for the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, this is for you. So how’s it going?

I figure by now most of you are sending your brackets through the shredder at this point. That is if you still do the old school brackets where you print out the form and fill out all your teams by hand. That way you get the joy of crossing out the teams that you picked that you were certain were going to win but lost instead.

I saw where toward the middle of the first round, there were less than 800 perfect brackets. Later on, that number went down to less than 200, then down to 17, and then finally to the last one. I believe by now that no one has a perfect bracket. Now it’s all about hanging on and hoping for the best for the rest of your teams.

Or you can be like me and just chuck it out the window and hope for all upsets from here on out.

“I really want to encourage you not to despair, not to lose faith, not to let go of God in your life, but stand in your suffering as a person who believes that she is deeply loved by God. When you look inside yourself, you might sometimes be overwhelmed by all the brokenness and confusion, but when you look outside toward him who died on the cross for you, you might suddenly realize that your brokenness has been lived through for you long before you touched it yourself.

Suffering is a period in your life in which true faith can emerge, a naked faith, a faith that comes to life in the midst of great pain. The grain, indeed, has to die in order to bear fruit and when you dare to stand in your suffering, your life will bear fruit in ways that are far beyond your own predications or understanding. . . . Spend some time each morning doing nothing but simply sitting in the presence of God and saying the Jesus Prayer. Gradually, God will enter your heart in a new way and bring new light into your struggle” (Henri Nouwen).

“And that’s not all. We also celebrate in seasons of suffering because we know that when we suffer we develop endurance, which shapes our characters. When our characters are refined, we learn what it means to hope and anticipate God’s goodness. And hope will never fail to satisfy our deepest need because the Holy Spirit that was given to us has flooded our hearts with God’s love” (Romans 5:3-5, The Voice).

I’m thankful every day that God substituted Himself for me in Jesus by taking my sin on Himself and letting me go free. I’m thankful that the weight and penalty of sin is gone from me. I’m thankful that God didn’t just free me from sin but freed me to a life abundant and gave me as much of Himself as I could ever hope to handle — and then some.

The first verse that comes to mind is from Isaiah 55:8, which says, “I don’t think the way you think.
    The way you work isn’t the way I work.”
        God’s Decree.
“For as the sky soars high above earth,
    so the way I work surpasses the way you work,
    and the way I think is beyond the way you think.”

I wouldn’t want a god that I could fully comprehend and understand. I wouldn’t want a god that only operated according to my standards, who would only do what I would do in any given situation. That would put me above the god I claimed to serve.

God is far above me and what He says and does are often beyond me. But I know that He is good and only does what is good, so I trust what I know over what I perceive. And He is for me and for those He loves. That’s where my hope lies.

Tonight, Cameron Russell spoke from Luke 15 about the parable of the Prodigal son. I think if you polled any group of believers, that parable would almost inevitably rank as one of their top three favorite Bible stories. And with good reason, since it is one of the best examples of the limitless nature of God’s love.

Traditionally, the story is about the bad son who went away and the good son who stayed, but if you pay attention to the story, both sons were prodigal in different ways. The younger one basically told his father to drop dead, asked for his share of the inheritance, and took off to a distant country for some wild living. The older one stayed but viewed his worth in his work rather than in his sonship. Both missed the mark.

But the prodigal love of the Father was big enough for both sons. It was the love that caused the Father to run in an undignified manner toward the very son who betrayed and left him. It was also the love that pleaded with the older son to come to the family party and celebrate like a son rather than to sulk outside like a servant.

I think that in the context of Luke 15, the younger son represents the tax collectors and sinners that Jesus dined with and whom the Pharisees looked down upon and scorned, while the older brother represented the Pharisees themselves who viewed God’s favor as very much earned and not to be given away freely.

But the real prodigal in the story is the Father. To be prodigal is to be lavish and wasteful, and that’s what the Father did. He prodigaled his love on the son by giving him his inheritance early and by receiving him back as a son before the son had shown true repentance and change. As I mentioned before, he didn’t wait for the son to come to him but did something that no respectable older man in those times would have ever done — he ran to meet his son. And he was patient and loving toward the older son even after the son insulted him and cheapened his love.

That’s the kind of love that God shows both to the ones of us who ran away to a far country and the ones who stayed with hardened hearts. When we scorn the fact that God loves those sinners we look down upon, we show that we too are just as in need of that love as they are. The Father God’s love is for all of us, and all of us need it.

I ran across something I wrote a long time ago — back when I was writing notes in Facebook before I discovered the joy of blog posts and WordPress. These words were true then and they’re still true now for all those who have said yes to what God offers through Jesus:

“You don’t ever have to be ashamed of who I made you to be. You don’t have to apologize for being you. You are special. I created you exactly the way I wanted you to be and when you were hopelessly lost in sin and misery I redeemed you for My own. You have a purpose, a reason, something that makes you come alive. Even if no one else thinks you matter, I DO! Believe that I love you, not because I have to, but because I choose to. Hear the sound of my Voice singing over you tonight and know how deep that love goes. I will never change and My love for you will never change, so you can rest in it. I will not leave you as you are, but will through trial and tribulations make you who you were always meant to be– My perfect image-bearer.”