Justin Franz

Jesus is my LORD.
Bible believing Christian.
Image-bearer of my Father.
Father/Husband.
Sinner saved by God's grace.
Trying to love others as I love myself.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Researchers at Fred Hutchinson examined the brains of 59 women after death. In 63 percent of them they found male DNA, almost certainly left behind by a son. The oldest of those women was 94, and the cells were still sitting there.

Around week four or five of pregnancy, before most women have told anyone, a handful of the baby's cells cross into the mother's bloodstream. Some of them never leave. Scientists call it microchimerism, meaning you are carrying a few of another person's cells inside you. Doctors at Leiden University in the Netherlands checked organs from women who had recently been pregnant and found the baby's cells in every single one. Liver, lungs, thyroid, kidneys, bone marrow, skin, heart.

They do not sit idle. When researchers in Ireland biopsied cesarean scars from 70 women, they found the baby's cells living in the skin as ordinary skin cells, making collagen and repair proteins right at the cut. The child helped close the wound its own birth made.

At Mount Sinai, scientists tagged fetal cells with a glowing marker in pregnant mice, then damaged the mothers' hearts. The fetal cells went to the injury. They became heart muscle and the lining of blood vessels. Nobody has proven the human version yet, but doctors have noticed for years that women who develop heart failure around childbirth recover better than almost any other kind of heart failure patient.

In a study of 177 women, fetal cells appeared in the blood of 85 percent of the healthy participants and only 64 percent of the women who had a very early, non-invasive breast cancer. Nobody has worked out yet whether the cells are doing the protecting. The same cells also turn up in Hashimoto's, an immune condition that attacks the thyroid, so this is a gift with complications.

A French team looked at umbilical cord blood in 2021 and found cells belonging to the baby's grandmother in 5 of 28 samples. Cells that crossed one placenta decades earlier had crossed a second one. Three generations of women, alive in a single bloodstream.

Which means the pull a mother feels toward her child has a physical form. It sits in her liver, her heart, and often her brain, and it stays there for the rest of her life.

https://t.co/zy6gM4x5tl

[Faithfulness Okom @AttorneyF_]

I got goosebumps studying my Bible today.

In Genesis 28, Jacob has his famous vision of a ladder stretching into heaven, with angels ascending and descending.

He wakes up trembling with awe. On his own initiative, he sets up the stone he slept on as a pillar, pours oil over it, renames the place Bethel ("House of God"), and vows to give God a tenth of everything if God protects him on the road.

Fast forward twenty years to Genesis 31.

Jacob has spent two decades being cheated, exhausted, and trapped in Laban's household.

When God finally appears to tell him it is time to return home, He does not introduce Himself with an intimidating, distant title. He does not announce Himself as the Almighty or the Creator of heaven and earth.

He looks at Jacob and says: "I am the God of Bethel, where you anointed a pillar and where you made a vow to me."

Do you realize what is happening here? God grounds His very identity in a runaway's memory.

For twenty long years, God remembered a desperate prayer spoken over a rock in the dark. He lets a flawed human encounter define holy ground, taking the name a frightened fugitive gave to a stone and adopting it as His own divine signature.

Now leap forward over a thousand years to John 1.

Philip brings his friend Nathanael to meet Jesus. When Jesus sees him coming, He says: "Here is a true Israelite, in whom there is no deceit."

Remember what the name Jacob actually means. Jacob was the deceiver, the supplanter. Jesus is deliberately invoking Jacob from the very first sentence.

Startled, Nathanael asks, "How do you know me?"

Jesus answers: "Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you."

In Jewish life, sitting under a fig tree was the recognized place for solitary prayer, meditation, and wrestling with God in private.

Whatever Nathanael was carrying beneath that tree, whether an unspoken sorrow, a quiet wrestling match of the soul, or a prayer he thought had vanished into the silence, he believed he was entirely alone.

He had built no altar, poured no oil, and made no grand vows. He was simply sitting in the quiet with an ache he could not fix.

Yet that single sentence undoes him completely. Nathanael breaks: "Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!"

Then Jesus ties the entire story together:

"You believe because I told you I saw you under the fig tree? You will see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man."

Angels ascending and descending. That is word for word the scene from Genesis 28!

Jesus is telling him that the ladder his ancestors saw was never a stone staircase in the desert, and Bethel was never just a coordinate on a map. The ladder was always a person. The bridge between heaven and earth was standing right in front of him on a dirt road in Galilee.

The contrast between these two men is striking.

Jacob’s encounter was structured. He had oil, built a stone monument, named the place, and negotiated with a formal vow.

Nathanael’s encounter was raw. He was sitting in the shadow of a tree, empty-handed, carrying a weight he had no ceremony for.

Yet God claims both as holy ground.

He is the God of Bethel, the God who honors the altars you build when you have the strength to build them.

And He is the God of the Fig Tree, the God who sees you when you are too exhausted to promise anything at all.

[Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn @AI_Solzhenitsyn]

“Liberty and equality are mutually exclusive, even hostile concepts. Liberty, by its very nature, undermines social equality, and equality suppresses liberty – for how else could it be attained?”

[Rabbi Brian Samuel @rabbriansamuel]

Matthew 2:23 says Yeshua fulfilled what the prophets had spoken: “He shall be called a Nazarene.”

But you won’t find an Old Testament verse that literally says, “He shall be called a Nazarene.”

So what's the deal?

“Nazarene” shares a Hebrew root word with נֵצֶר (netzer), meaning “branch,” as in Isaiah 11:1:

“A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch (נֵצֶר / netzer) will bear fruit.”

The “Branch” became a recognized Messianic image in Jewish interpretation.

Matthew is making a deliberate connection between Natzeret (Nazareth) and Netzer (Branch).

Yeshua, the man from Natzeret, is the promised Netzer, the Branch from David’s line.

[heine kapp @HeineKapp]

Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
Matthew 11:28

[MAZE @mazemoore]

My wife is a nurse. She was pregnant during the pandemic. Her best friend is also nurse and she too was pregnant during the pandemic. She and her husband had been trying for a long time and this was their first.

They were both well into their pregnancies when the hospital that they work for started mandating full time employees get vaccinated. The hospital was pushing the vaccine so hard and the rhetoric was so crazy that they were both worried if it would even deliver their babies if they were not vaccinated. That's how scared they made people.

My wife and I decided immediately that there was no chance she was getting vaccinated while carrying our baby. She was only a couple months from giving birth so she tried to stall. She filed for an exemption, it was denied. She used whatever PTO she had. Then she quit full time and went part time. She made it through and gave birth to our beautiful, healthy, love of my life baby boy, vaccine free.

My wife's friend was just a couple months away from giving birth when she succumbed to the pressure to get vaccinated. She and her husband had already set up their daughter's room. They named her Penelope.

She was full term when she started having stomach pains. She thought she was in labor so she went to the hospital. The doctor told her that her baby was no longer alive. They induced labor and she delivered a dead little girl. Afterwards the doctor told her that a blood clot caused the death of her baby.

When my wife's friend sees our son she still gets emotional because her daughter would have been the same age as him. It breaks our hearts to see her still so heartbroken. What happened during the pandemic was just pure evil.

[heine kapp @HeineKapp]

But now, O Lord, You are our Father; We are the clay, and You our potter; And all we are the work of Your hand.
Isaiah 64:8

[Allie Beth Stuckey @conservmillen]

So we got Yesteryear, where a tradwife influencer was transported back to the archaic life she once glamorized. Can we also get a Tomorrowland where a lib female voter is forced to live in the Islamic, tyrannical, open borders future she voted for

[heine kapp @HeineKapp]

Trust in the Lord with all your heart, And lean not on your own understanding;
Proverbs 3:5

[Trust God @TrustGodHq]

Be still, and know that I am God.
Psalm 46:10

[Daily Bible Verses @Daily__Bible___]

Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have. - Hebrews 13:5

[Daily Bible Verses @Daily__Bible___]

“I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” - John 8:12

[Daily Bible Verses @Daily__Bible___]

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud...it is not self-seeking. - 1 Corinthians 13:4-5

[Faithfulness Okom @AttorneyF_]

Jesus rarely stayed inside the boundaries of the question in front of Him.

He had a habit of casually settling centuries-old theological riddles on the side, without announcing He was doing it.

My personal favorite moment is in Matthew 22, when He famously stumped the Pharisees by asking how the Messiah could be David’s son if David called Him "Lord" in Psalm 110. They had no answer.

But a far quieter, and sharper, moment happens in John 3.

Nicodemus came at night to ask about rebirth. Jesus used the meeting to close a case from Proverbs 30:4 that had been sitting open for 700 years:

Who has gone up to heaven and come down?

Who controls the wind and waters?

What is His name, and what is His SON’S name?

No one in the Old Testament could answer it.

Then Jesus looks Israel’s top scholar in the eye and says:

"No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven, the Son of Man." (John 3:13)

Some early manuscripts add: "...the Son of Man who is in heaven." Scribes stumbled over that clause because the claim was staggering, suggesting simultaneous presence on earth and in heaven.

In a single sentence, Jesus checks every box of Agur’s ancient puzzle:

The Descent: He is the One who came down from heaven.

Pre-existence: He existed before He arrived.

Omnipresence: He fills both realms at once.

Nicodemus didn't bring up Proverbs 30. Nobody in Jerusalem was debating it that night, but Jesus answered it anyway, mid-conversation, without breaking stride.

The proverb asked for the Son’s name. The Son stood there himself and gave it.

[Justin Franz @BoneSaw978]

@AttorneyF_ Thank you for this one!

[Faithfulness Okom @AttorneyF_]

In the Old Testament Tabernacle, there was a lampstand, a table of showbread, an altar of incense, and the Ark of the Covenant.

There was never a chair.

The Levites stood continually because their work was never finished. Animal sacrifices provided temporary covering, not permanent cleansing, so the posture of the priest was always in motion, always laboring.

So when Hebrews 1:3 declares that Jesus "sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high," the original Jewish audience would have felt the seismic magnitude of that claim.

Hebrews 10:11–12 drives the contrast home:

"Every priest stands daily at his service... offering repeatedly the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins. But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God."

His sitting down is the divine declaration that the debt is paid, the work is finished and no more blood needs to spill.

But Jesus didn’t just become the first priest to sit down, he became the first Priest to sit on a throne.

In ancient Israel, royalty (Judah) and priesthood (Levi) were strictly separated. A Levitical priest could never sit on a king's throne. Christ shattered that boundary, merging the altar and the throne forever.

Because our High Priest sat down, your spiritual striving can end.

The righteous King stepped into our darkness, bore our sin, and completed the work, so that we could stop working for acceptance and finally rest in Him.

[Maye Musk @mayemusk]

In 1967, I was one of four women on the university’s table tennis first team. I would sometimes practice with the worst player in the men’s fourth team. He would always beat me as he was larger and more powerful.
Nowadays, he could’ve replaced me if he identified as a woman. That’s just not fair. Keep men out of women’s sports.

[Justin Franz @BoneSaw978]

@mattvanswol Good luck!
Build on a solid foundation Matt.

Psalm 127:1

Keep going! Keep searching for Truth. He can be found.

[Shawn Ryan @ShawnRyan762]

Texas Pastor Josh Howerton Shares What Megachurch Pastors Actually Do With Their Money

“What a lot of people don’t know is what he did with all the money. First, he repaid the church every dollar that they’d ever salaried him. Then he and his wife sat down and figured out how to reverse tithe on the money.”

“They gave away 90% and only lived on ten. He used that money to start a series of nonprofits that helped the poor. People ask, ‘Why don’t I ever hear those stories?’ Because planes that land safely don’t make the news.”

@howertonjosh

[Allie Beth Stuckey @conservmillen]

If you have a hard time understanding the obvious and repeated correlation between men dressing up as women and pedophilia, I will explain. Sure, perversion begets perversion, but there is more here. One thing these men get off on that connects the two sick fetishes: humiliation. They like degradation - of themselves and others. It’s why they dress up like little girls or prostitutes. It’s why we see cases like this over and over again. It’s why they are so often guilty of heinous, violent crimes. Their fantasy is to be used and to use others. Once you see that this is porn-driven mania rather than gender dysphoria, you begin to see the whole issue with extreme clarity (and horror).