Giving and Receiving Thanks and Moving Forward - Purity 1206

To see today's photo, go to mt4christ.org or follow me, M.t. Clark, on Facebook or Twitter. Good morning. Today's photo of the sun setting on the horizon obscured by a stand of trees alongside the asphalt pathway of Waite Road comes to us from yours truly as I captured this scene during an extended stroll near my countryside home in Easton, New York last Saturday. I love how the trees obstruct the sun but also seem to create a pathway of their own, inviting us to take a different path, a more direct path to the sun in the distance. I can imagine this picture challenging us. You can take the roadway which has been well-traveled and clear, but it may not lead to where you want to go. Or you can go between the trees where the direction is sure and the path is clear for a time, but seems to be blocked the closer you get to your goal, assuming you're pursuing the brilliance of the sun. Or you can just stand here to enjoy it from a distance, but be warned, it will only be here a short time before it fades away and its light and its heat is gone, possibly leaving you cold, lost, and in the dark. It reminds me of the dilemma posed by The Clash Should I stay or should I go now? If I go, there will be trouble, and if I stay, it will be double. Anyway, it's Black— it's Friday, Black Friday, and thanks to my union, I am in the midst of an extended holiday weekend. And whether or not your Thanksgiving— Thanksgiving Day celebration yesterday was joyous or not, I pray that you were able to accomplish what really mattered about yesterday's holiday. That you were able to give and possibly receive. Thanks. I for one was very thankful for my family. I was thankful for their presence in my life in general and was especially thankful for my brother and sister-in-law Donald and Megan Seguin for hosting Thanksgiving dinner, uh, for my wife Tammy Lynn for her love and her service in preparing a bunch of food for everyone to enjoy, and my mother Kathy and brother Mike who provided and delivered a Thanksgiving meal to my 20-something children Haley and Brennan who were quarantined at my place down by the river, having tested positive for COVID the evening before Thanksgiving. Although I like to consider myself a pretty independent person, I have to acknowledge that having the love and support of your family sure makes life a lot better, and I have been blessed by my family's love all my life. One of the lies that Satan loves to tell, uh, tell us is that nobody cares, or you are all alone. But if, but if we rejected— if we reject that lie and decide to be vulnerable and ask our family, friends, or even strangers and support organizations for help, we would discover that what the enemy says that would keep us depressed and cause us to isolate from others is a complete and utter lie. We are not alone. People do care. But there is a condition to meet to know this. We have to let go of our pride and seek the company and help of others, knowing that we may be rejected. And we may be. Let's be real, we may have burned bridges we can't go back over. We may have exhausted the goodwill of everyone we know. So, and so we may find out that I am all alone, or no one will help me, not only feels true, but can— we could back it up with a lot of evidence. But God, you know, hopefully, uh, we haven't burned all our bridges in life. But even if you have, even if you have destroyed or have been destroyed in every relationship of your life, there is one person who will never leave you or forsake you, and that's God. Of course, the Lord has one condition to be fully received— to be, uh, to be able to fully receive his unconditional love: faith in Jesus Christ. While God unconditionally loves all his created beings, entrance into his kingdom family comes through faith in Jesus Christ alone. He didn't send Jesus to live and live a sinless life and die on the cross for nothing. He sent Jesus to save us, and being in a covenant relationship with God is only a matter of putting our faith in Jesus. When we make Jesus our Lord and Savior, the Holy Spirit comes to dwell within us. Experiencing the joy and power of our relationship with God comes from living in harmony with him by living according to God's word and by abiding in his presence. With that love and power that we receive from the Lord is supposed to be is supposed to be— isn't supposed to be just experienced by us. Although the Lord's love and strength can empower us to take a lonely road out of the darkness, it isn't necessarily supposed to be used for individual use. We are supposed to experience and share the love, power, joy, and peace of God with others. I can encourage you that you are not alone when you have the Lord in your life, because I have had some lonely times and some dark periods of my life where even though I had family and friends who loved and supported me, I was basically on my own. Personal problems of addiction and broken relationships are highly personal problems because they intimately involve you. You either caused or played your part in the mess you are in, and while you are— you can receive help from others to work out some of the kinks, A lot of the work of transformation and change has to be done by Y-O-U. I can't believe for you. I can't stop believing lies and that drive pattern behaviors for you. I can't repent for you. I can't diet for you. I can't exercise for you. I can't read the Bible for you. I can't pray for you. I can't commit to living a surrendered life for God for you. But if you choose to do these things for yourself with God consistently, continually, you will see the power of God change your life. And if you experience the freedom that Christ has for you, even though you did a whole lot of this work and walking and talking with God solo, you won't stay that way. The joy of experiencing your salvation and freedom in Christ compels you to share it. It compels you to worship the Lord in community. You join a church. It compels to tell— uh, compel— it compels you to tell others about the hope you have in Jesus. It compels you to fellowship and serve alongside other Christians. So as you walk on this path of Christian discipleship, you will be joined by a whole cast of characters from God's kingdom to join you in to join you as you seek— to join you as you seek to share the love of the Lord, love of God, with the world. You will encourage and counsel others in the ways of God and will rejoice when you see the Lord move in their lives. And if all this wasn't enough— triumph, victory, freedom, righteousness, peace, and joy— If that was not enough, you get blessed when people thank you for being the person God created you to be. People thank you for the encouragement you give. They thank you for giving what the Lord gave you. Yesterday, on the day to give thanks, I received several Thanksgiving greetings and specific thanks for my help. That only happened because of what the Lord did in my life and continues to do in my life. I received thanks from old comrades of the faith that I've known for years, and I've received thanks from people I didn't even know a year ago. I was humbled because it wasn't anything I necessarily did that caused them to thank me, thank me, more than it was who God made me to be that led to our relationship. And their gratitude. And of course, I thank them for being faithful to follow the Lord, for them letting me be a part of their journey through life. But today is a new day. We made our thanks, and if we were lucky, we received some. But now we start again. Just like today's picture seems to invite us to take a different path, I encourage you to consider Thanksgiving Day to be a crossroads to a new beginning, or as a way to make the most of the holiday season and the rest of 2023. Let's endeavor to love the people that we were thankful for yesterday and move forward to resolve issues that need to be taken care of and to purposefully align ourselves with God's will for our lives. We've had our feast yesterday, so let's remember it fondly and move forward with the confidence that comes from knowing that we are loved. That we have, we have decided to follow the One who is love, and that if we just keep walking and talking with him and share his love along the way, there'll be much more to be thankful for further down the road. Today's Bible verse comes to us from the Quick Scripture Reference for Counseling by John G. Cruis. This morning's meditation verse comes from the section on the church, or communion of the saints, and today's verse is Hebrews 10:25, from the New Living Translation, the Word of God says, "And let us not neglect our meeting together as some people do, but encourage one another, especially now that the day of his return is drawing near." Today's verse falls under the 9th point of our Counseling Reference Guide's resource section on the church, or communion of the saints, and that 9th point is: Attend worship services faithfully. And today's verse is the quintessential go-to church verse that tells us to join together with others in the body of Christ for worship, to encourage one another. You know, let us not neglect our meeting together, as some people do. We're not supposed to walk out our Christian faith alone. So if you are not in a church, find a church that believes in the Bible and where you can fellowship and serve with other Christians to encourage one another as you seek to share and show the love of God with others. I could go on and on about the church, but I think we'll just leave it at that. Um, yeah, you need— if you believe in Jesus, you need to be in a fellowship, a Christian fellowship, where you can worship continually and learn and grow and serve the kingdom, um, whatever, wherever the Lord brings you. Just make sure they believe in the Bible and, you know, faith, faith, you know, salvation by faith in Christ alone. That's that. As always, we, we invite all to go to mtforchrist.org where we share insights from prominent Christian theologians and counselors to assist our brothers and sisters in Christ with their walk. Today we are sharing from God in the Manger: Reflections on Advent and Christmas by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. As I explained yesterday, we're going to actually read through this, this resource because I want to read it. Um, but it is available to read on the, on the, on the blog as well. So let's begin with God in the Main— God Is in the Manger by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Advent week 1, waiting, day 2. Waiting is an art. Celebrating Advent means being able to wait. Waiting is an art that our impatient age has forgotten. It wants to break open the ripe fruit when it has hardly finished planting the shoot. But all too often the greedy eyes are only deceived. The fruit that seems so precious is still green on the inside, and disrespectful hands ungratefully toss aside what has so disappointed them. Whoever does not know the austere blessedness of waiting —that is, of hopefully doing without—will never experience the full blessing of fulfillment. Those who do not know how it feels to struggle anxiously with the deepest questions of life, of their life, and to patiently look forward with anticipation until the truth is revealed, cannot even dream of the splendor of the moment in which clarity is illuminated for them. And for those who do not want to win the friendship and love of another person, who do not expectantly open up their soul to the soul of the other person until friendship and love come, until they make their entrance— for such people, the deepest blessing of the life, of the one life of two intertwined souls, will remain forever, forever hidden. For the greatest, most profound, tenderest thing in the world, we must wait. It happens not here in a storm, but according to the divine laws of sprouting, growing, and becoming. Be brave for my sake, dearest Maria, even if this letter is your only token of my love this Christmastide. We shall both experience a few dark hours. Why should we disguise that we that from each other. We shall ponder the incomprehensibility of our lot and be assailed by the question of why, over and above the darkness already enshrouding humanity, we should be subjected to the bitter anguish of a separation whose purpose we fail to understand. And then, just when everything is bearing down on us to such an extent that we can scarcely withstand it, The Christmas message comes to tell us that all our ideas are wrong, and that what we take to be evil and dark is really good and light because it comes from God. Our eyes are at fault, that is all. God is in the manger, wealth in poverty, light in darkness, succor in abandonment. No evil can befall us. Whatever men may do to us They cannot but serve the God who is secretly revealed as love and rules the world and our lives. That's a letter to fiancée Maria von Wedemeyer from prison, December 13, 1943. And finally, they end the passage with Isaiah 11:1-4, which says, a shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. The Spirit of the Lord shall rest on him, the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord. His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord. He shall not judge but what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear, but with righteousness he shall judge the poor. Again, that was Isaiah 11:1-4. Is the scripture that's shared with this passage. And I apologize, the text is stacked one on top of the other, so we go from a passage of writing by Bonhoeffer and then into a letter to his fiancée from prison. So it's a little disconcerting. If you need some clarity on what was said and what was read, you can go to M.t. Clark for Christ.org. To see it in its written form at the end of today's blog post. I won't share too much commentary on it, so we'll go with that. Well, we would, would like to share our discipleship teachings that we've— we did back in 2021 that we share on our podcast. So we encourage you to check those out on our podcast. They're Victory Over the Darkness, The Bondage Breaker, and Freedom in Christ. We also have a course on Bonhoeffer's discipleship where we did a presentation of his, uh, of that book on YouTube, and it's on the podcast as well. So if you want to see that, that one's called Bonhoeffer's Discipleship. So we encourage you to check those out, and we encourage you to go into the holiday season today with peace and understanding as you might run into impatient people, um, and And, uh, yeah, so we're supposed to share the light of the world, so let's remember that, um, that we want to point people to Jesus and encourage them to, you know, do what's right and follow the word of God with the way they live. I'm not sure what I'm doing today. I'm pretty sure I'm gonna do a lot of work, or at least some work, on ministry preparation for the upcoming weeks of our Celebrate Freedom growth group. Also I've got my class list for the Freedom in Christ men's course that I'm doing for Freedom in Christ Ministries that'll begin in January. So I'm going to begin praying over those guys and probably reaching out to them after December 1st, you know, just to say hello and to encourage them as we draw near to a new year and the Freedom in Christ course. So yeah, there's still spots available for any men who want to join the group I host. Um, you can go to ficm.org to courses, and I'm leading the Freedom in Christ course that is on Monday nights from 6:30 to 8:30. So you can register and get the materials, and, uh, we can, we can see each other on Zoom. So that's available to you as well. But yeah, so, and my studies with Deeper Walk are wrapping up in 2 weeks, so I don't know if that'll be the end of that. So a lot going on, and we're just going to press ahead, accept what we can accept, you know, accept the things we cannot change and change things we can, as they say. So we'll just press ahead with our faith and be faithful to be the people that God created us to be. And we encourage you to do the same. So let's pray. Lord God, Heavenly Father, thank you for another day in your kingdom. Lord, we thank you so much for all that you do for us. We pray for you to bless anyone who's listening or reading today's message, that you would come alongside them and their prayer requests, Lord, and guide them in the way they should go. And Lord, today we just pray for you to empower us to do the work you have for us today and to take moments to rest and appreciate the time off that we have. Because Lord, we just, um, we don't want our life to be a drudgery. We want to be able to walk with the joy that you've given us and not to worry or be consumed by stress. So we just pray for you to be with us today, to give us guidance, strength, and diligence to do what I should do and, you know, to enjoy this life You've given me. Lord, we thank You for the blessings of this life, and we thank You for Your continual presence in it. Lord, we pray all these things— well, first, of course, we thank You, we praise You, we love You, and we pray all these things in the mighty name of Jesus. Amen.