In this devotional monologue, M.t. Clark shares a personal holiday snapshot from his countryside retreat, describing his family life, walks with the dog, and the warmth of his wife's hospitality. He recounts his ongoing project of dictating the book Living from the Heart Jesus Gave You for his Deeper Walk International School of Prayer ministry, highlighting its model for healing trauma (Type A and Type B) through a spiritual family. Clark then reflects on listening to The Insanity of God, summarizing its narrative of a 1990s missionary in Somaliland and the testimonies of persecuted Christians across the former USSR, Ukraine, Eastern Europe, and China, and uses the book to affirm the “crazy” cost of true discipleship. He exhorts listeners to embrace Scripture, citing 2 Timothy 3:16‑17, and urges daily Bible reading, especially the New Testament. Clark promotes his online resources—mt4christ.org, the M.t. for Christ 247 podcast, and teachings by Dr. Neil Anderson—while inviting participation in a weekly Bible study led by Arthur and Suzanne Zinkadi. The message concludes with a heartfelt prayer for guidance, divine appointments, and blessings on listeners, reinforcing the central theme that following Christ, even amid suffering, is worth every sacrifice.
Chapters
To see today's photo, go to mt4christ.org or follow me, M.t. Clark, on Facebook or Twitter. Good morning. Let's see. Good morning. Today's photo of sunset from the vantage point of Pelican Point at Crystal Cove State Park in Newport Beach, California comes to us from a friend who enjoyed this scene on Christmas Eve with his family and shared it with his friends on social media. Well, it is Tuesday, and for the vast majority of the working population of my friends, the sun of the Christmas holiday, actual or observed, will have set last night as they will be rising this morning and returning to work. As for me, I will continue to enjoy an extended holiday vacation this week in the bliss bubble of my countryside home, which I only left briefly yesterday for a couple of walks down Waite Road with the dog. Although I may be prone to cabin fever because I am usually on the go 6 if not 7 days of the week and enjoy getting out to stretch my legs, the cold temperatures with highs in the 20s made the walks brisk ones and fewer in number if the environment was more hospitable. As for the accommodations inside, I have no complaints as my wife has created an atmosphere of warmth and love where I can feel cared for and carefree, as she provides for my every need while simultaneously giving me the space to not feel smothered, as we each have individual projects and activities to occupy our time and interests independent of one another. I've been reading through Living from the Heart Jesus Gave You, a text by Jim Wilder and company that I will be required to study as part of Deeper Walk International School of Prayer Ministry that begins in a few weeks. To familiarize myself with the content of the book, I decided to dictate its content into a Word document, creating my own e-version of the book. The book creates a life model for individuals and churches to follow that encourages recovery from trauma and maturing in one's faith through community. Essentially developing a spiritual family from the body of Christ that helps us overcome the things in our past that shouldn't have happened, Type B traumas, and providing us with the good things we never received, Type A traumas. The testimonies presented in the book demonstrate how faith and the church, when operating properly, properly gives us everything we need to become the people God created us to be. I am all but finished, all but finished the dictation of this book yesterday, with just a few last sections to complete today or tomorrow, as I have been working on getting her done for a week or two here and there. Dictating can be a draining process, and as I have made great progress to all but complete this project over the last few days, I have often hit a wall of exhaustion and frustration that needed to be alleviated by taking the dog for a walk, lying down and taking a nap, or taking a break and listening to an audiobook I started just before Christmas. As the impending Yuletide splendor of secular Christmas was upon us, I decided to listen to The Insanity of God as a way to not only keep Christ in Christmas but to remind me of the reality of the cost of Christian discipleship. I heard about The Insanity of God back when I was in my undergraduate days of Bible college and had put it on my wish list years ago, but I didn't actually purchase it until shortly before Christmas, admittedly as part of an out-of-control spending spree where I was making some final purchases to take care of my Christmas shopping and decided to treat myself as well. Anyway, perhaps out of guilt or a true desire to draw close to God in repentance, I started listening to The Insanity of God on Christmas Eve, Eve, or the day before, uh, and have been listening to it here and there ever since. Although I've heard— I had heard it was a good book, I didn't really exactly recall what it was supposed to be about. Having listened to all but a few hours of the totality of the book, I can report that The Insanity of God chronicles a Christian missionary's life and his and his family's experience in Somaliland in the 1990s, and the author's search for the answers to the hard questions that come when one takes Christ's direction to go out into all the world to make disciples seriously. Tragic, frustrating, and almost unimaginable things happen in the mission field, which causes, uh, the author to seek the answer to his questions from others who have experienced persecution for their Christian faith, leading to conduct interviews of persecuted Christians in the former USSR, the Ukraine, Eastern Europe, and China, where persecution was a normal and expected part of life As the sun rising— as is the sun rising in the east. I'm not through the book yet, but the heart-wrenching testimonies of faithful Christians who suffered emotional, mental, and physical torture and death, and the amazing things that they experienced to maintain their faith, makes me thankful to be a Christian and relatively free from persecution. Persecution and almost unworthy to be mentioned as a part of the same body of Christ as these saints, as these Christian saints and martyrs. If my resolve to remain faithful to the goal God put on my life to encourage others to be disciples ever wavered before the testimonies of these other brothers and sisters in Christ in urges me to continue walking and talking with God and to pursue this crazy course that the Lord has called me to. Considering all that I have received and considering all that other Christians have suffered for their faith and intention to live and share the gospel of Jesus Christ, I consider that my efforts are the very least I can do for the Lord. I was a little puzzled by the title of the book but can understand why it's called that. In this world broken by sin and that actively seeks to silence the gospel, it is considered crazy to follow the Lord and positively insane to have to suffer for our faith. The author, as a young man, was a few weeks away from pursuing his dream to become a veterinarian when he suddenly heard a voice from the Lord calling him to abandon his planned out course to follow the Lord. Even though his faith and knowledge about Christianity or Christian service was minimal, the author answered the call and he has been answering it ever since. Despite the pain and suffering his journey has led him through, his encounters have confirmed the goodness and presence of God here on the earth. Similarly, I have experienced loss and suffering as I have answered the Lord's call to follow to follow him. And even though I sometimes wonder about this path of Christian discipleship and how positively insane some of it has been, I too am convinced of the truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and God's ever-present goodness, presence, and love. So let me encourage you to ignore those who would call you crazy and to instead seek the Lord and his purpose for your life. As those who have received the new life in Christ will agree, God's love and life make anything we have to go through worth it all. If you feel anything like I do after this Christmas of overindulging and overspending, you feel ripe and ready for repentance. You might not have gone far from Him, but it is so easy to take a few steps in the wrong direction when we seek to treat ourselves. That's okay, because the Lord is still calling us to come on home with open arms and start walking in his wisdom and ways again. I'm taking a vacation from sharing the Bible verse of the day from the new— the NLT Bible Promise Book for Men again. Well, frankly, because I think I left that book back at River House. But I did grab the Quick Scripture Reference for Counseling by John G. Craig. Impress, and we'll share the first Bible verse listed right in the introduction to impress upon you the importance of reading God's Word. 2 Timothy 3:16-17 tells us, all scripture is inspired by God and is useful to teach us what is true and to make us realize what is wrong in our lives. It corrects us when we are wrong and teaches us to do what is right. God uses it to prepare and equip equip his people to do every good work. Today's verse tells us that all scripture is useful to teach us what is true and what is wrong in our lives. It corrects us and teaches us to do what is right. God uses the Bible to prepare and equip us to do every good work. So read the Bible every day. Start with the New Testament to learn about Jesus and to learn how we as members of the body of Christ, the church, the saints, are supposed to live. It might seem crazy to live according to the Bible in this post-Christian age, but the author of The Insanity of God, countless numbers of Christians who have experienced the new life in Christ, and myself would tell you to be crazy and to answer God's call and obey his word, because his life and his love make it worth it all. As always, I invite all to go to mtforchrist.org, where I always share insights from prominent Christian theologians and counselors to assist my brothers and sisters in Christ with their walk. Today we continue sharing from Dietrich Bonhoeffer's The Cost of Discipleship, or Discipleship as it was originally known. And today we're sharing from the last chapter, uh, basically of that work, part of Bonhoeffer's Works Volume 4. It's considered chapter 13, and it's called The Image of Christ. So if you want to see what Bonhoeffer has to write about the image of Christ. Go to mt4christ.org and you'll see the beginning of that chapter at the bottom of today's blog post. As always, we encourage a life of Christian discipleship because the Lord calls all of us to be disciples and to make disciples. And so to be faithful to it, we provide the podcast to encourage you that you're not alone in your faith, that other people are out there who believe, believe in God, believe in Christ, believe in His word, read His word, and try to obey it with the way they live. I myself and, you know, other people in your local community and other people throughout the, the world are following the Lord. So we're not alone in this thing, and as always, God is with us. So put your faith in Christ and make the decision to follow him daily. If you need help with that, we, we provide on our podcast and our YouTube channel teachings from Dr. Neil Anderson based on the Word of God that'll help you discover who you are in Christ and help you discover your freedom in Christ. Those teachings again are from the Victory Over the Darkness, the Bondage Breaker, and Freedom in Christ. They're all available on our podcast and our YouTube channel, M.t. for Christ 247. Also, we do revere the word of God. We read it daily, and we encourage people to, uh, to study it. And if you want, we encourage Bible study by sharing our own Bible study, our topical study that we participate in once once a week with Arthur and Suzanne Zinkadi. Arthur makes this study and we just, we discuss what he, what, what he brings and what the Holy Spirit, um, makes us, makes us think about what he brings. So if you need a Bible study of your own, you can join ours. All of our Bible studies are on the podcast and our YouTube channel under Bible Study with the Zinkadis. Well, it's Tuesday. My wife does have a list of activities for us to do— chores, trips, errands— so there's that. So we'll be busy and we'll be faithful to get 'er done. And, you know, that's part of our Christian life is take care of our responsibilities. We should consider consider those things as an act of faith. And so we're going to take care of what we need to today and, uh, you know, seek, seek time in his word. My wife and I have been doing a Bible study since the beginning of December where every night we're reading a chapter from the New Testament. We started with the Gospel of John for the first 21 days of December, and we enjoyed it so much that we decided to continue with the study, and we're now in— we switched to the Gospel of Luke. We get together and we read one chapter a night together as a way to keep us close to God and close to one another in our faith. So you can do that too, or just do it on your own. Certain scriptures in the tell us to meditate on the word of God day and night. And so we're doing that, and we don't regret it. So whether or not you have to work today or have the day off like I do, we're praying for you. So let's, let's do that. Lord God, Heavenly Father, thank you for another day in your kingdom. Lord, we thank you so much for who you made us to be in Christ. Lord, we just pray for, uh, you to guide us today. To open our eyes to the things you need us to do and things you want us to see. Lord, we pray for you to go before us, make those divine appointments, help us to, to in the moment, to best represent you here on the earth. Lord, as always, we, we ask you to come alongside the people who might be listening or reading this message today, Lord, to help them and guide them, come alongside their prayer requests to bless them. And, uh, lead them in the way they should go. As always, Lord, we love you, we thank you, we praise you in the mighty name. And we pray all these things in the mighty name of Jesus. Amen.
