Easter

Living Easter Day by Day

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10403285_943106499066799_9100973137571227845_n[1]Celebrating Easter yesterday was amazing.  It was joyful, exciting, and had so many beautiful songs of worship and praise.  In my case, it also included watching our young children do their Easter program.  The church was filled with beautiful clothes in pinks, light greens, and all pastel colors in between. It was a sparkling blue day outside, with hardly a cloud after a week of gloomy cloudy weather.

However – our community has lost 3 young people in the last few weeks – a 15 year old and a 19 year old to auto accidents, and a 14 year old to a freak accident on a baseball field where he was hit in the head.  It is always hard to lose that many lives in such a short time, but even more when they were so young. It has sparked a lot of conversation about life and death at work, in our churches, and in our community.  During Spring Break last week, one of our elementary school principals died of a massive heart attack at the age of only 51.  There was a whole school today that was in mourning on a very tough first day back.

Thinking about all this today I could relate to the apostles.  Just after experiencing the unbelievable excitement and wonder of the resurrection of Jesus, they were “left” by Him after 40 days when He ascended to Heaven.  And I am sure their question was the same as mine today – now what??  After all, Resurrection Day for them was filled with awe, relief, and affirmation that Jesus was who He said He was.  And then…they were alone again.  The Holy Spirit was coming, but the physical reassuring presence of Jesus was gone.  AND He left them with the commandmant to take the gospel to the whole world!

We face the same situation today.  The world that watched us celebrate Easter yesterday is still watching.  They want to know how we handle the day after.  They want to know if it really makes a difference in daily life. In my community there are people grieving and trying to go on after major loss, and they want to know how our faith can help them.  They need to know that Jesus is not just there for the good times, but in the tragedies as well.  And WE have been commanded to show them.  My prayer today is that God will be glorified as we share Him in the midst of life after Easter.

Hope Available Here!

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DSCN0526DSCN0527I was inspired today to do a (little) spring cleaning, and our screened in back porch this time of year is always a sorry mess.  Pollen has literally invaded every inch of it, including the white (now yellow) cat!

We also have patio furniture out there underneath all that, and the table has an opaque glass top.  I can’t wait every year to tackle it when the visible pollen is finally through, because it is really sad when you can’t even see through the glass!  Before I cleaned it, however, I had a thought, and turned on the porch light to take a picture (picture on left).  You can barely see the light reflecting in it.  Then after washing it thoroughly, I took the same picture – and look at the results (picture on right)!  Amazing, isn’t it?

God used this to remind me, with Easter coming tomorrow, about what a difference He has made in my life.  We are all made in the image of God, and are designed to bring Him glory and honor.  And we are also created to reflect HIS image in our lives, and not our own!  You can see, however, that when sin (the dirt and pollen) collect and are not attended to, His light cannot hardly shine through us.  All the world can see (as in me looking at this table before) is dirt and ugly and annoyance that something designed to be beautiful, designed to reflect, is not doing it!

Put another way, if I had company and invited them to eat on the table on the right, I would be embarrassed and they would be totally turned off.  And who could blame them?  But I sometimes don’t have any trouble living in this world, or inviting others to my church, or sharing the gospel with the unsaved….and I SHOULD be embarrassed by the sinI have been harboring or the way I have been living…and they are always turned off!

So, as we celebrate Easter tomorrow, and the gift of salvation that Jesus made possible for us on the cross, lets also analyze which table top we represent – and ask God to make all things new by repenting and allow Him to wash us clean again!

I Have a BIG God!

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I grew up in the “golden age” of Biblical movies, back when Hollywood would bring the Bible to the big screen in a mostly accurate way with at least some reverence for the subject material.

Having said that, I tried to watch “Exodus: Gods and Kings” with my hubby last night.  I really did try.  But halfway through we turned it off…not because we were offended necessarily, but because of the inaccuracies and the sad treatment of my “and yet!” God.

I am NOT writing to bash this movie, because I know that those who aren’t Christians cannot correctly interpret what they do not know or believe.  I am, however, writing because of the way that God was portrayed.  When Moses first encounters God, and then in another scene, God is portrayed as a little boy.  No booming voice, no mystery, no awe, just a simple ordinary human, and a child at that.  Which shows just how far our world’s opinion of God has fallen.  No longer is He shown as an all powerful, big, bold God.  He has been made to look like what the world can accept – a small, ineffective person who can waver in his opinions and doesn’t have a lot of power.

Of course God did not let me stop there.  Hollywood is not the only place where God is made small.  I know many honest, sincere people in church – many of whom have trusted the Lord for their salvation – who worship a small God.  They know He is able to remove their sin and get them into heaven….but it pretty much stops there.  They don’t see Him as a personal, intimate God, who cares about every aspect of their lives.  Or who has a plan for their lives, who wants good things for them, and who wants to have fellowship with them on a daily basis.  They come and worship Him on Sundays, but they don’t seek Him out during the rest of their daily lives.

There are also many people in churches today who have a small God.  They are the ones who look like Christians, know all the right words, and can quote the Bible back and front.  But in their hearts, they don’t believe.  They can live in sin – of all kinds – and think that God really doesn’t care, or can’t really do anything about it.  They don’t recognize His holiness, or His power to judge – or even that He has a right to.

None of these images of our holy, risen Savior God is accurate!  As we celebrate Easter this Sunday, maybe we just all need to look inside, and examine ourselves, and see if WE are worshipping our great BIG God!  To Him be ALL the glory!

Celebrating Fire Ants

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theme_01-nodate[1]This time of year in deep south Georgia, there is a festival of some sort every weekend.  Peaches, peacocks, peanuts – you name it, we’ve got a festival!  Because I am from the big city (Atlanta) the first spring we were here was a constant surprise of the things people will celebrate.  As you can see from the photo there is a great event, complete with a “fire ant queen” beauty pageant.

Fire ants are remarkable.  I didn’t truly appreciate them until we lived in this part of the country.  They are aggravating, mulitply more than rabbits, and can make a grown man weep when he encounters a mound of them unexpectedly.  They are sneaky because they begin their colonies underground, and once the hill appears, they can be MILES deep. We know from science that they are incredibly powerful and smart.  They can move things many, many times their weight, and their colonies rival the best architecture in the world.  And they are practically indestructible! We spent major $$ one spring spraying our yard with the “strongest” pesticide, and they were laughing at us two days later. I found this out too when we had minor flooding one year – I watched as entire colonies, totally undisturbed, FLOATED down small streams, without one death among them! There is one “cure” for them, but it requires a licensed exterminator to come apply the treatment.  Even at that, the ants are not destroyed – they simply go to live in your neighbor’s untreated lawn!

Does that sound vaguely familiar to you?  I believe it SO accurately represents sin in the Christian’s life.  It begins small – ant size.  We don’t always recognize it, because it can hide so cleverly among all the other things in our lives.  And like the ant hill, when we do come to terms with it, it can be miles deep in our hearts.  It WILL aggravate, it will multiply, and it WILL cause even the strongest among us to weep. It can appear indestructbile.

AND YET!  This week we celebrate the ONE who not only addresses sin in our lives, He lived and died to completely conquer it!  Unlike the exterminator who can only “chase off” the ants, Jesus Christ’s death on the cross PERMANENTLY killed sin!  In the born again believer’s life, His blood has the power to not only remove previous “colonies” of sin, it can prevent future ones.  THAT is a fact worth celebrating this Easter, and every other day!  To God be the glory!