Rejoice in The New Life and Years Ahead!

"...and put on the new man which was created according to God, in true righteousness and holiness." 

~ Ephesians 4:24

"The God of Israel will be your reward." 

~ Isaiah 52:12

"Rejoice in the Lord always. Again I will say, rejoice!

Let your gentleness be known to all men. The Lord is at hand.

Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God; and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus." 

~ Philippians 4:4-7

"He who covers a transgression seeks love, but he who repeats a matter separates friends." 

~ Proverbs 17:9

"And now abide faith, hope, and love, these three; but the greatest of these is love." 

~ 1 Corinthians 13:13

     This is a great piggyback from the previous post and a cosmic reminder for the year and subsequent lifetime ahead. I love to think about, and yes sometimes fanaticize, how the early church did 'it.' I mean, how were the prophets and believers able to get through life back then? Truth be told things were about as chaotic, messy, joyful, political and everything in between. But there is no other thing like the Word of God to remind and recalibrate the mind, body, and soul (Isaiah 40:7; 2 Timothy 3:16-17). Speaking for myself, His word is the only shoreline I'm needing to refocus on navigating my life toward without ceasing. Compared with what I know now and have been through in just the last 365 days, what I knew then and who I was then is anemic compared to today.

     The Lord will grant growth and the process will involve a little "pressure." Let's be honest, it will require quite a bit of pain, but with just the right amount of rest and comfort. As those who partake in the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior, our Lord never patches up our natural virtues, He remakes the whole man on the inside. Paul's clarion reminder to put on the new man is a reality where the natural human life puts on the garb that is in keeping with the new life. The life which God plants at salvation develops its own virtues, not the virtues of Adam, but of Jesus Christ. Watch how God will wither your confidence in the natural virtues of this world after sanctification, and in any power you have. The Lord does so because He wants me to learn to draw life from the reservoir of the resurrection life of Jesus Christ. "Thank God if you ae going through a drying-up season and experience." God does not build up our corrupted natural vibes, virtues, and values and transfigure them, because our natural self can never come anywhere near what Christ Jesus wants. We have to be transfigured into wanting what Christ Jesus wants.

     So, about the past, present, and future. God requires that which is past. At the end of the year we learn to turn with eagerness to all that God has in store for His future. Even though anxiety is apt to arise from what happened yesterday, it is usually tied to yesterday's sins and blunders. Equally, our present enjoyment of God's grace is also apt to be checked by the memory of His faithfulness despite our weaknesses and some idiocies in between. God's cosmic love and protection held and guided my yesterdays, and He allows the memories of them sometimes in order to turn the past into a ministry of spiritual culture for the future. God reminds us of the past lest we get into a shallow security in the present. This era of political upheaval is only one such reminder. Let me not forget, Lord. There is a lot of repenting and recalibrating to do.

     About tomorrow. Let us learn to slow down and not go out in haste. We do need to slow down. I need to slow down like for real for real. As I go forth in the coming year let it no longer be in haste and impetuous, unremembering my delight in my Father and Lord, nor with the kind of rushing of impulsive thoughtlessness, but with the patient power of knowing the God of Israel and the Universe will go before us and make a way (Zechariah 4:6; Luke 14:28). Our yesterdays present irreparable things to us; as a matter of fact we have lost opportunities which will never return, but God can transform this destructive anxiety into a constructive thoughtfulness for the future.

Let the past sleep, but let it sleep this time in the bosom of Christ. 

Leave the Irreparable Past in His hands, and step into the Irresistible Future with Him.

(This article is adapted from "My Utmost For His Highest" by Oswald Chambers, 30 & 31 December)

     

How to Get Through the Next Four Years

 

by Russell Moore

November 13, 2024

“The nonstop news cycle will be crazy. You don’t have to be.”

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Bravo! to Russell Moore for some well-thought and convicting advice for all Christians in this country, and those affected by our country outside our country. We know how this song goes, but we also know how to better respond and behave in the years ahead. I anticipate a lot of change is coming, like in the 1960’s. History doesn’t always repeat, but it sure rhymes and that should bring peace to our hearts, minds, bodies, and spirit as we prepare to be better salt and light in this world which we are not to be of any longer.

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     “Someone walked up to me in an airport last week and said, “So, what do you think about the election?” I was in a less-than-ideal mood at the moment, for reasons that had nothing to do with the election, but I stopped myself from saying sarcastically, “What do you think I think about the election?”

     The last thing I wanted to talk about, after ten years of talking about him, was Donald Trump. Now the news cycle will be the Donald Trump Show all day, every day, for four more years.

The nonstop news cycle and drama won’t be some unforeseen circumstance. It’s what the American people voted for. The theory that people would want to “turn the page” on all that, offered by Vice President Kamala Harris, proved false. Turns out most people liked the drama just fine. So here we go.

      I have very little to say that I haven’t already said, very little to write that I haven’t already written, and there are very few people who think like I do. I can’t control that. But neither can you. As a matter of fact, there is very little any of us can do to control the next four years—with a news cycle that will be, like the last near-decade, all Trump, all the time.

     Just like during the last near-decade, those who support Trump and those who oppose him will continue to look at one another the way Adams and Jefferson did over the French Revolution: “How could you support (or not support) that?” You can control very little of that either.

 

And that’s surprisingly good news.

 

The passivity of Americans in their own civic order is always a problem. The word woke—before it became associated with identity politics—spoke to the sense of waking people from their slumber about injustice. The opposite of passivity, though, is often not responsibility or engagement. Sometimes it’s a kind of passivity that feels like “doing something.”

     Wherever someone falls on the political spectrum, that’s where “doomscrolling” comes into play. We feel we are informed by having a steady stream of drama in front of us, our emotions driven up or down by the news cycle.

    We’ve seen the end result of that. The constant flow of (real and fake) information spikes our adrenaline, activating our “lizard brains.” We throw our limbic systems into the sense of having to support or to oppose something—when, much of the time, there’s actually nothing we can do about it. And this works because many people like it.

     What we call “politics” these days offers people a sense of meaning and purpose, an interruption to the dead everydayness of life. A jolt of adrenaline can feel almost like life—for a little while.

This kind of political “drama” is related to actual political life the way that pornography is to intimacy. Porn gives the same physical sensation as sexual union. The nervous system responds the way it is meant to respond in the union of a husband and wife; it just does so by getting rid of the love, the connection, the other person. In other words, it gives the physical sense without what actually brings about the joy.

     Someone might think that porn use will kick-start their flagging passion, that it’s a temporary step toward intimacy. That person is left, though, feeling deader and lonelier than before. A news cycle can be like that too—ultimately leaving people not more informed and thoughtful but with worn-out attention spans and burned-out expectations.

     One of the things you owe your country is your attention. By that, I do not mean your constant focus. I mean, quite literally, your attention: your ability to think and to reflect apart from the roar of the mob.

     During the tumult of the 1960s—war, civil unrest, assassinations—Thomas Merton argued that his ability to speak to all of those things was not in spite of but because of his vocation as a Trappist monk, devoted to silence and solitude.

     “Someone has to try to keep his head clear of static and preserve the interior solitude and silence that are essential for independent thought,” Merton wrote. He continues, A monk loses his reason for existing if he simply submits to all the routines that govern the thinking of everybody else. He loses his reason for existing if he simply substitutes other routines of his own! He is obliged by his vocation to have his own mind if not to speak it. He has got to be a free man. Merton concludes by saying, “What did the radio say this evening? I don’t know.” 

     I believe in the priesthood of all believers and, in this way, I suppose, in the monkhood of all believers too. News and information are important in helping a free and attentive mind discern what’s happening and how to make sense of it. News and information as sources of a sense of personal “drama” or belonging, though, will fray your attention, scatter your thinking, and affix you to whatever mob it’s easiest to mimic. It’s hard to maintain sanity with a mind like that. It’s hard to love your country with a mind like that. It’s hard to love the Lord your God with a mind like that.

     The stakes are too high for us to see our country as a reality television show. You can’t opt out of the country, but you can opt out of the show. In some ways, you get there by subtraction. Don’t rely on social media for your news, for instance. Don’t fall into the trap of every-ten-minute hits of dopamine about how your side is losing something or winning something.

     But maybe an even more important factor is not subtraction but addition. You are meant to have a life of drama and adventure and excitement. Politics—of the left, right, or center—can’t deliver it. News cycles can’t replicate it.

     For those of us who are Christians, we already have it. We need no Jungian hero’s journey. We are joined to the life of Jesus of Nazareth. His story is our story. Our lives are hidden in him (Col. 3:3). We are crucified under Pontius Pilate. We are raised out of the grave. We are seated at the right hand of the Father.

     All of that is true, right now, for those who are joined by the Spirit to the life of Christ. And we are waiting a trump—not a Trump—to tell us when the action of our lives will really get interesting, in ways we cannot even imagine yet.

     Realize that this is true for you. You don’t need to be part of some make-believe drama. You don’t need to adopt some politician as a father figure. You have an actual Father who is making plans for you. And when you realize how temporary, how fleeting, and how pitiful much of what is counted as glory is in this moment, you can learn how to love it without placing on it the burden of making you happy or driving you crazy. We always come to hate our idols—whatever they are—because they never give us what we want.

     That means you will need the Bible—and more than just the devotional cherry-picking or doctrinal proof texts to which modern American Christianity is accustomed. You will need to immerse yourself in the stories there until you gradually start to sense they are your stories. You need to plunge into the poems and songs there until you find they are telling you the story of your own life too. 

     You need to spend enough time with the Jesus found in the pages of Scripture that he starts to surprise you again. You don’t have to understand what you’re reading all the time. Read it anyway. Let the Word do its work. Don’t immediately Google “How to understand Psalm 46” or “What does Colossians 2 mean?” Wrestle with it. Be baffled by it.

     And sooner or later you will start to hear, as though calling to you personally from those words: “Who do you say that I am?”

 

The news cycle will be crazy for the next four years. You don’t have to be.

 

https://www.christianitytoday.com/2024/11/next-four-years-donald-trump-russell-moore-election-2024/