Stand

Taking up the armor of God and bearing fruit

Introduction

Could there be two more disparate images of the Christian life than the battle cry to put on the Armor of God in Ephesians 6 and the Fruit of the Spirit listed in Galatians  5? Yet, when the Israelites were living in “the land of milk and honey” promised them by God, they were constantly battling to preserve the fruitful land and the “peace on every side” that…

Elijah's challenge at Mt. Carmel stood above religion.

Though the prophets of Baal ritually shed there own blood,

Elijah's altar, drenched in a lavish baptism of water,

Was licked dry by God's unquenchable…

A couple weeks ago when the weather was warm and beautiful, I took a long walk through the woods, made longer by getting myself thoroughly lost.  While I wandered, God reminded me of a call He has been continually placing on my heart.  

"Take my yoke, for it is easy and my burden is light."  I never want to believe that, being a nose to the grindstone kind of girl with worrywart tendencies.  Yet, He keeps calling me to joy.  What He asks of me is prayer, praise, writing, and pursuing…

Bread, warm, crusty, nourishing...the staff of life.  So much is evoked by this word, and the reality it stands in for.  Very few homes with the means to buy it are without it.  It is the foundation or compliment of nearly every meal.

"This is my body, broken for you."  The loaf is raised, the matzo is broken, and we take in again the reality of Jesus as our Bread of Life.  He paid the ultimate price so we could have, without price, His sustaining nourishment for our starving…

The Theme for GEMS this year is wisdom.  We are looking into Proverbs a great deal.  This is a book I have not tended to dig into much because it seemed like a big "to do" list, especially Proverbs 31.  I always had the unsettling feeling that I didn't measure up and might just be the fool Solomon the Wise and your mother warned you about.

Wisdom really does not get a lot of press these days.  People are smart or savvy or intelligent, but no one talks much about having wisdom or…

When I started, several weeks back, to write about creation, I was pondering the darkness of the abyss before God spoke His first word of creation and sent Light to our shrouded world.  I was questioning just how long the darkness lasted, as the Spirit brooded our egg of an earth.  Walking through Holy Week, especially the Maundy Thursday service,  I was struck by Jesus' "descent into darkness" as we celebrated the Service of Shadows.  As Jesus hung on the cross, the world once more plunged…

I have heard the creation story so many times I have lost the sheer wonder of everything springing from nothing at the WORD of God.  So, I am going all the way back to the dark, watery sphere of earth before....anything we know.  From The Message Bible: First this: God created the Heavens and the Earth-all you see, all you don't see.  Earth was a soup of nothingness, a bottomless emptiness, an inky blackness.  God's Spirit brooded like a bird above the watery…

It seems that in just about every religion created by people, either in fiction or the real world, any masculine deity has a feminine counterpart.  For every god there must be a goddess to act as counterpoint and consort.  Yet, the one religion that comes from God to man portrays God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, three in one, using masculine pronouns and masculine relational identities.  There is one God, who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  There is no need for a goddess, because God is…

My husband and I were just talking about free will and how it is a common theme in Science Fiction for a group of explorers to come across a perfectly peaceful, happy, well-ordered society where there was no free will.    The explorers want to "liberate" the poor people, and, in the process of introducing free will, totally ruin the society.  He then asked me if I would like to love in a society with no free will.

I replied that heaven will pretty much be the ultimate utopia of…

I am currently reading 1st Corinthians in the Message paraphrase of the Bible.  Reading chapter 10, this struck me for the first time, "They drank from the Rock, God's fountain for them that stayed with them wherever they were.  And the Rock was Christ."

Now, that being the case, some things about the story of Moses striking the rock to provide water for the Israelites take on new meaning and significance.  The first time, Moses was commanded to strike the rock so water would…