Kathy McInnis

[Diane Langberg, PhD @DianeLangberg]

There is great hope in knowing God is not calling us to bigger, better or extraordinary. He wants to take the small, hidden, little & seemingly unimportant things in our lives & inject them with eternal glory. We can rest in our commonness, our ordinariness, and our smallness.

[Chad Bird @birdchadlouis]

It seems to me that there are two equally dangerous and false extremes that we can fall into about America.

One is that it is the new promised land, a utopia, God’s favorite nation on earth. This fosters a kind of religious nationalism that is both idolatrous and willfully dismissive of the many ways our country has failed.

The other extreme is a profound and debilitating modern hubris that defines our history not by its successes but its failures, that exhibits a rank ingratitude for the men and women who have, however imperfectly, worked and sacrificed so much to hand on to us a country where, by all objective standards, we live with more opportunities and privileges than any people have had in the history of the world.

Avoid extremes. Let us be thankful for what we have and be diligent to work toward improvement.

Happy 4th of July to you all!

[Chad Bird @birdchadlouis]

I’ve always chuckled at a Hebrew expression that occurs a few times in Jeremiah’s writings. In English, it reads, “From the day that your fathers came out of the land of Egypt to this day, I have persistently sent all my servants the prophets to them, day after day” (7:25).

A more literal translation for “persistently” is that God was “daily rising early” and sending the prophets. I picture the Lord God, well before dawn, pouring himself a cup of celestial coffee, taking a few sips, glancing at the sunrise, then musing to himself, “Well, I guess it’s about time I sent my people another prophet.” And so he did, time and again.

Why? Why did God not just wash his hands of the rebellious people to whom he sent his prophets? The short answer is this: he has a ferocious, unrelenting love that comes after us. He doesn’t take betrayal lying down, but neither does he impulsively annihilate sinners. No, he is patient and long-suffering, heaven-bent on getting us back.

God himself put it this way, “Have I any pleasure in the death of the wicked…and not rather that he should turn from his way and live?” (Ezek. 18:23). Paul writes that God “desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. 2:4).

Aren’t those some beautiful words? Whether it was with wayward Israelites or with our wayward souls still today, when we begin to stray from God or even lead hellish lives of evil, the Lord will move heaven and earth to bring us to repentance and faith in him.

-Adapted from my new book, Hitchhiking with Prophets: A Ride Through the Salvation Story of the Old Testament. Preorder here: https://t.co/NHiXUj85OI

[Kathy McInnis @FerventGrace11]

@birdchadlouis Hallelujah

[Kathy McInnis @FerventGrace11]

@elonmuskADO 1

[Kathy McInnis @FerventGrace11]

@elonmuskADO Definitely

[Kathy McInnis @FerventGrace11]

@elonmuskADO Hi

[Dominic Done @DominicDone]

God does some of his best work when we’re not looking. When Moses was alone, a distant bush began to burn. On a quiet Sunday morning, the rustlings of resurrection began. Doors open not when we strive, scream and claw at them, but when we rest in the goodness and timing of God.

[Dominic Done @DominicDone]

God’s deepest work is not what he does for you but what he does in you.

[Kathy McInnis @FerventGrace11]

Amen

[Chad Bird @birdchadlouis]

Only after the death of my son, Luke, did I realize how unpredictable and vacillating emotions can be, including how we feel toward God. There were moments, almost mystical in nature, where God seemed as close as my eyes to my tears. Touching. Intimate. And there were moments—more like days and weeks—where he seemed as far away as warm beaches are from the ice and snow of Antarctica.

I loved the Lord. I was appalled by him. I warmly welcomed him. I coldly rejected him.

Such ups and downs, noons and midnights, are the stuff of suffering.

My own harrowing experience also helped me better understand Job’s vacillating emotions. In particular, I better appreciate now how Job can go from pleading for his day in court with God to wishing that God would “look away from him and leave him alone” (Job 14:6). Or as the psalmist says, “Look away from me that I may smile again, before I depart and am no more” (Ps. 39:13).

Go away, God!
Come near, Lord!

So it goes in the spinning, turbulent vortex of a believer’s life when we are swept up into pain and confusion as to what God is doing with us.

I am grateful that we serve a Lord who is ready and willing to hold us as we weep, struggle, fight, and attempt, in our meager and limited way, to grasp both the magnitude of earthly losses and the greater magnitude of our Father’s heart.

I am reminded that even our Lord Jesus, within a 24-hour period, uttered both of these prayers:
-“My Father, if this cannot pass unless I drink it, your will be done” (Matt. 26:42).
-“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46).

God heard and answered both prayers of his Son, in his own time and in his own way. And he will do the same for us, followers of that same Son, children of our heavenly Father.

[Kathy McInnis @FerventGrace11]

Amen

[Dominic Done @DominicDone]

Whatever brokenness lurked underneath the surface of people's lives, Jesus met it with compassion. Hurting people don’t need critics. They need a refuge.

[Dominic Done @DominicDone]

Don’t let shame have the last word. What matters more than your mistakes is the trajectory of your heart. Exhale failure. Breathe in grace.

[Chad Bird @birdchadlouis]

Our greatest weaknesses are often the raw material God uses to demonstrate his strength. He uses our losses, struggles, and deficiencies as the vehicles for his kind of success in our life.

So we wrestle with weaknesses. So our closets have enough skeletons to populate a graveyard. So we weren’t voted Most Likely to Succeed or marched home from Sunday school with ribbons for Bible memorization. This is not about us. Neither how good we think we are nor how bad we know we are constitute our identity or empower us for the missions on which God sends us. Our trust is in Christ, who chooses the last and the least over the first and the greatest.

We write our story in a way that draws upon our strengths, our hopes, our plans, and dreams. But he writes our story in a way that highlights our weaknesses, our fears, our deficiencies. Why? Because in so doing he showcases the areas of our lives where he does his best work. Yes, God can and does use our unique talents and abilities, but most often he uses whatever is going to spotlight our nothingness and his everything.

His story in our lives is most obvious when the narrative has taken a turn toward the cross.
The self-image we cultivate tends to work on the false assumption that God desires us to grow more independent. To become better and stronger so that we need him less. We imagine the Lord is waiting for us to spread our wings and make our own way through this life.

But Christian maturity is not marked by independence but dependence. A growing awareness of our incessant need for Christ. The less we are, the more Christ is. Far from being bad news, this is the best news of all. For the more Christ is, the more we are the very people God has created us to be.

-Excerpt from Your God Is Too Glorious (2nd Ed.), available at https://t.co/Tc3bvc4WDB or Amazon.

[Chad Bird @birdchadlouis]

Emmanuel, Our Flesh-and-Blood God

Emmanuel is two words in Hebrew, Immanu (“with us”) and El (“God”). This child is the “with-us-God” or, as we say in better English, “God with us.”

Ages before this God-with-us boy was born, he was already with his people, but not in a flesh-and-blood sort of way. He told the patriarchs Isaac and Jacob, “I am with you” (Gen. 26:24; 28:15). Before he sent Moses into Egypt, he said from the burning bush, “I will be with you” (Exod. 3:12). He repeated this promise to Joshua (Deut. 31:23) and others.

It’s one thing for God to be with us as God, but it’s on a whole different level for God to be with us as a fellow human being who spent forty weeks in utero, learned how to crawl then walk, suffered through puberty, and eventually faced the firing squad of Roman crucifiers. We have that God.

And that human God, Jesus of Nazareth, is also our king and Lord. Just consider what that means. Having friends is good. They can be there for us, in good times and bad times. We can lean on them and seek their advice. But our regular friends, well, they have their limitations. They have their own problems, of course, and their own lives, so they can’t be there for us 24/7. Nor can they, if necessary, move heaven and earth to do something for us.

Our flesh-and-blood God can. He is king. He is Lord. All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to him. And all that authority he exercises for us, his friends, his brothers, his sisters, at whose side he always sticks close.

Just imagine if you had the phone number of the most powerful person in the world, could call or text him anytime, ask him to help you, no matter what, and he would do it in a heartbeat. What we have in Jesus makes that seem like child’s play. He is the creator of heaven and earth. He is king of all nations. He is Lord of all.

Most importantly, he is your Emmanuel, the God with you and the God for you.

We have a God who knows intimately what it is to feel a heart breaking, hot tears running down his cheeks, and blood flowing from gaping wounds. He knows what it’s like to be both loved and hated, as well as betrayed. There is no human emotion foreign to his experience. There is no human need that he has not felt pressing into his soul.

Jesus is our fully divine and fully human God. The image-maker made into the image. The creator become creature.

If you’ve ever wondered just how far the Lord of heaven and earth would go to make sure you were his own, peer down into the manger and look up onto the cross. There’s your answer.

[Dominic Done @DominicDone]

Unless God is enough, nothing else ever will be.

[Dominic Done @DominicDone]

When you’re face-to-face with life's hardest questions, don't bury them, lean boldly into them. Cry out to God. Eugene Peterson said, “Pain entered into, accepted, and owned can become poetry.” Your doubts can diminish you, or they can push you into a deeper, more resilient faith

[Kathy McInnis @FerventGrace11]

@garonnevik Perfect analysis 👌 👏 👍

[Kathy McInnis @FerventGrace11]

@DianeLangberg I needed that reminder today.

[Jared C. Wilson @jaredcwilson]

Salvation is totally of God. And this is good, because if God does all the saving, you can know you're all the way saved.

[Jared C. Wilson @jaredcwilson]

At your last breath, when all else fails, when all you can’t take with you must be left behind, his love will carry you even deeper into himself. When you have no more need for food, for water, for shelter, his love will still be all of that for you, and more.