We are participating in our weekly prayer time at 5pm EST. Check out the prayer request forum for some prayer topics, but feel free to lift up your own.

You may also fast. There's no obligation or guidelines to how you should do it, or if you should do it at all. Just fast as the Lord leads and speaks to your convictions.

Something quick to note here, might just be local or regional to us. Wife and I were shopping for a new car--long story, but we're having unmanageable issues with our current one, and it's better for us to trade it in than mess around with it much longer--and it's been interesting. The car purchase price itself was a little higher than we expected, but the supply of cars (any cars) is dismal. Lots of waiting for new cars that will come weeks or months down the road, and not much to select from in the first place. The dealers we talked are trying to manage the demand where the supply just isn't there, and they all advised us to put deposits down to secure the purchase, when we can. The trade-in value for our car is rather high, part of the reason we are doing it in the first place.

Unrelated, we took our dog to the groomer today, as she badly needed a good haircut. The grooming prices for Zelda didn't go up, since she's a tiny thing, but for larger dogs the price has increased. Wholesale boxes of things like shampoo doubled over the past month.

Crazy stuff.

After discussing this between us, Veloyce and I agree that there is one more chapter ahead in our lives: We need to become mobile. It's an important part of our mission.

Now for the gritty details. We don't care if it's a motor home or a truck with a small trailer. Yeah, it has to be big enough to make a house for older people who can't crawl in and out of a camper van in bad weather. But we don't need a land yacht, either. I've done this before, having served in the military in maneuver units. I know how to downsize and give away a lot of stuff. It's not that hard. It would mean we could get by on less income.

It would also mean we could eventually come see some of you, providing fuel remains available.

There are surely a lot of other details, but the whole point is to get this out here for you to begin praying with us. We aren't interested in using credit to get this done. What makes this a miracle request is that someone will have to decide to let go of their mobile rig for us. We will have to take what comes. Pray with us.

Edit: This is not a rush thing. We anticipate this will be some months ahead of us, at the least.

The parallel passages (Mark 10 and Luke 18) indicate the man who approached Jesus was a synagogue ruler who was young and quite wealthy, and that this fellow came at a run to then kneel in front of Jesus. After the news of Jesus raising the dead got around, we can't be too surprised that someone with earnest questions in their heart would act this way. He was serious enough to address Jesus as "Good Rabbi" -- it was as much as the young fellow dared without calling Jesus "Messiah".

Jesus reminded the fellow that genuine goodness comes only from Jehovah. It was a bit of sarcasm prodding the young man to get off the fence. If Jesus wasn't the Messiah, then a synagogue ruler should not be asking Him any such advice. To the question about gaining eternal life, Jesus then gave a stock rabbinical reply, amounting to the well known Ten Commandments.

This was a synagogue ruler; he wasn't the only one who was convinced he had been observing such things since before his bar-Mitzvah. Still, he was under conviction. Obviously something was lacking, because nobody in the synagogue over which he presided could raise the dead. It was simply unheard of, yet here was the man who had performed this miracle. Surely this rabbi knew something his entire synagogue, and a great many rabbis from outside that synagogue, had missed.

Keep in mind that a common doctrine of Pharisaism is that a primary mark of God's favor was material wealth. Those who were wealthy and observant of the Pharisaical rules, as this fellow surely was, were clearly on their way to Heaven. Jesus' suggestion came as a shock. Again, it was meant to prod him to get off the fence -- Jesus was the Messiah or He was lying. Would this man be willing to ditch his worldly goods to find the treasure of Heaven?

At this, the man went away quite dejected. It was not at all what he was expecting, and went against everything he believed about God. His was a very worldly version of God, not the mystical God of self-denial and other-worldliness Who dominated the Ancient Hebrew culture.

Watching the man walk away, Jesus remarked to His disciples how hard it was for the rich to enter the Messianic Kingdom. Having been pickled in the same Pharisaical nonsense as the synagogue ruler, they were also astonished at the idea. Jesus referred to the Needle Gate in the wall of Jerusalem -- it had a high threshold and was quite narrow (it still exists in one section of preserved wall). At night, when the main city gates were officially closed, it was possible for an individual to step through the gate unencumbered, but he would have to leave his camels outside. Coming into the Eternal Kingdom meant abandoning whatever baggage you were carrying.

For those with little to lose, it was an easy matter to trust in the Lord, no matter how difficult the demand. But for those with great wealth, it meant leaving an awful lot behind. So the Twelve asked: If the rich aren't going to Heaven already, who was? Jesus replied that no mere man had the heart for such a thing. Only the power of God, granted to those whom He chose, was sufficient to make such a sacrifice.

Peter remarked how they had managed to do this, and asked what that indicated about their future in the Kingdom. The term translated into English here as "regeneration" refers to the restoration of the Covenant and Kingdom under the Messiah. Jesus promised that they would serve in His court as judges over the resurrected members of the nation from its prior history, twelve men to judge twelve tribes.

We need to keep hold of the context here. Jesus had just warned about how families were so very important (in our previous lesson), and then took a moment to bless children by the same ritual act as someone who was offering a sacrifice to God. The Covenant was meant to create a strong and stable nation to testify of God's mercy and power, provided through the obedience to His Word. Clearly, given the situation in which Jews lived, they did not have the shalom God had promised. Whatever they had built up to this point was not what God had in mind. They had some of the trappings, but not the thing itself.

So Jesus said that the fake imitation of the Covenant Nation was now just a useless burden against obeying the Father's will. To see what Eternity was all about, everyone would have to abandon this life itself, and everything that comes with it. Finally, Jesus added one of His favorite enigmatic epigrams: The first shall be last, and the last shall be first. What men value in this world is of little use in Eternity. God would turn things upside down once He acted.

During my adventurous ride yesterday, it occurred to me that God had granted a request from a few weeks ago. I realized that the VA was not going to provide any serious treatment for the knee pain. I was on my own. So I asked the Lord to restore my knees so that I could at least ride.

I can testify that hard riding had begun to hurt last year. I backed off only after the pain became too significant. Now the pain has backed off and I am able to do all the hard riding from previous years. I may even be able to return to bikepacking. Of course that depends on the economy, but at least the Lord granted the thing I did ask.

Thus, I rode with thanksgiving and praise.

We are participating in our weekly prayer time at 5pm EST. Check out the prayer request forum for some prayer topics, but feel free to lift up your own.

You may also fast. There's no obligation or guidelines to how you should do it, or if you should do it at all. Just fast as the Lord leads and speaks to your convictions.

Matthew places this teaching during the time Jesus was in Judea leading up to His Last Passover. It's a very hard teaching that a great many church folks would prefer to ignore.

The Pharisees approached Jesus to dispute with Him about something He had said not long ago, criticizing the Pharisees for trading wives like domestic livestock. So they asked Him whether the Law permitted them to divorce a wife for just about any reason or excuse a man chose. This was pretty much what their oral traditions said, but Moses was intended to be more strict than that.

Jesus cut to the heart of the problem. When you look at the Creation narrative, God made man and woman, and intended them to stay together for life. The teaching was plain: two shall become one flesh. This is a miracle of God, not some human choice. People can choose not to marry, but once wed, God has wired them to imprint on their first sex partner. Once that imprint is made, it can never be broken. It can be abused and forsaken, but it can never be broken. This is well known medical fact.

This is what Jesus is talking about. God made us this way. We are supposed to imprint and never part. Obviously we are supposed to be very careful about whom we propose to marry. It's not a frivolous social convenience, but a total change of heart. You now belong to someone for life. Any subsequent partner gets a broken spouse, and it will weaken the bond between the two.

You cannot undo this. You could try to ignore it at your peril; doing so would defile you in God's eyes, another aspect Jesus mentions here. So, the Pharisees ask: Why would Moses give such a low standard? Jesus said it was because the Israelis were particularly hard-hearted toward God's ways. But Moses' weak command was not the standard starting from the Garden of Eden.

Jesus then reinforced this teaching by warning that in the Father's eyes, divorce and remarriage made former spouses into adulterers. This was no small matter.

Once the debate was ended, the Twelve remarked that this was indeed a very high standard. This being so very hard, maybe it was better not to marry. Jesus responded that this kind of thing was only possible by divine calling. If God doesn't give you the conviction to live like this, you won't be able to do it.

He goes on the mention that there three kinds of eunuchs: those born that way, those made that way by third parties, and those who voluntarily chose it in order to keep peace with God. Without conviction, you could never do it voluntarily.

Whether or not you want to read this as a reference to literal castration or some kind of symbolism doesn't make any difference. In God's eyes, you can have either zero or one sex partner for life. Granted, widows and widowers can justly remarry. However, it's not the ideal situation, because the imprint is still there. The Levirate Law suggests that imprinting is less of an issue with close kin, something otherwise unthinkable. However, the whole question there is a measure of feudalism, something wholly rejected by modern western populations.

Still, this comes from the mouth of the Master Himself. We dare not suggest He didn't mean it to apply to us today. Just because it's so hard is no excuse for ignoring it. Paul goes into this issue at length in his letters, but the fundamental principle doesn't change: If you get this wrong, you will forever lose a part of your shalom that can never be recovered. The best answer is to be very, very careful in choosing to marry in the first place. You only get one shot.

    There were a few vehicles I couldn't get in the picture. The apartment building next door caught fire. We don't have the whole story just yet, but I believe all 8 units will be closed down for now. As I took these shots, the back side was still smoldering and the fire crews were tearing off part of the roof because the fire was in the attic.
   

We are participating in our weekly prayer time at 5pm EST. Check out the prayer request forum for some prayer topics, but feel free to lift up your own.

You may also fast. There's no obligation or guidelines to how you should do it, or if you should do it at all. Just fast as the Lord leads and speaks to your convictions.

Just had a tornado "hook echo" pass a mile south of us at 1956 hours local time in OKC area. Right after that, the sucking vortex effect started pulling in the rain from north of us. It was enough suction to pull it the full length of our breezeway. As I post this, Tinker AFB south of is getting wind damage. The Lord spared us again.