Sarah L Erwin

[Chad Bird @birdchadlouis]

The Trinity in the Old Testament

God did not “evolve” into the Trinity. Even before there was a “before” or “after,” when time and space and all creation did not exist, God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

The entire Bible teaches us this, not just the New Testament. Already in the first two verses of Genesis, we meet “God” and “the Spirit of God.”

The Lord is not a unitarian deity; there are distinctions within the Godhead.

Some scholars call this “complex monotheism.” Christians confess this to be the Trinity, whom John Donne famously called the “three-person'd God.”

In two of the chapters we have read from Isaiah in Bible in One Year, we have the Trinity mentioned in a single verse:
-Isaiah 11:2, “The Spirit of the LORD [=Father] shall rest upon him [=the Son].”
-Isaiah 61:1, “The Spirit of the Lord God [=Father] is upon me [=the Son]” (see Luke 4:18-21).

In many passages from the OT, we have the Father and Son mentioned together:
-Psalm 110:1, “The LORD [=Father] says to my Lord [=Son]” (see Matt. 22:44-45).
-Psalm 2:7, “The LORD [=Father] said to me, ‘You are my Son’” (see Acts 13:33).

Throughout the Old Testament, we are taught that there is one God, and this one God is our Father, who sends his Spirit and who promises to send his Son, who is called the Messenger, Word, Wisdom, King, Anointed, Son of Man, and much more.

As Dante confesses in Paradiso, God is one in whom “'is' and 'are' conjoin to eternity” (Canto 24). He IS one God. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit ARE one God.

This is the mystery of the faith, which we confess and in which we delight. Blessed be the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

DISCUSSION for Bible in One Year:
-What are your go-to verses, Psalms, prophecies, or narratives when you talk about the Trinity in the Old Testament?
-Any insights or questions from Isaiah 59-61 you would like to share?

Join our online community of Bible readers and students! For more information and to sign up, visit https://t.co/XxNvEtNH7e

[Chad Bird @birdchadlouis]

There are some stains that stubbornly resist all efforts to clean them. Soap them up. Wash them. Scrub them. They aren’t going anywhere.

Some of these stains are on our souls, too.

Maybe we’ve tried to pray them away or counsel them away. Maybe we’ve tried to drink them away or smoke them away. Yet every time we dare to look, there it is. The Stain. That thing we did that now seems to define us—or rather, brand us. There’s no getting away from it.

But there is. There is One who, no matter how old the stain, how deep and ugly and shameful it is, he not only can but does remove it.

“I, I am he,” the Lord says, “who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins” (Isaiah 43:25).

The Hebrew verb for “blot” is מחה (machah). It was the verb used when God blotted out humanity in the flood (Gen. 6:7). It is used for blotting out someone’s name (Deut. 25:6). It is the verb used when God says, “I will wipe [machah] Jerusalem as one wipes a dish” (2 Kings 21:3). David uses this word when he prays that God will “blot out” his transgressions of adultery and murder (Ps. 51:1).

When our Father blots out our stains, his detergent is the blood of Jesus, which “cleanses us from all sin” (1 John 1:7).

Drop your self-forgiveness projects. Drop your self-atonement schemes. Stop trying to wash away the stain by beating yourself up or drowning your shame in alcohol. None of that will help or suffice.

Rest in the finished work of Jesus, whose blood, shed in love, washes away every stain, every time, now and always.

DISCUSSION:
-In Isaiah 43:1-2, God says, "Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine." How does knowing that God redeems his people shape your understanding of your identity in him?
-Why does God emphasize forgiving sins "for his own sake" in Isaiah 43:25?

Interested in Bible in One Year? Join our online community of Bible readers and students! For more information and to sign up, visit https://t.co/XxNvEtNH7e

[George @BehizyTweets]

Trump just had a mic drop moment with one of the simplest statements to end his remarks at the Economic Club

"We're gonna make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people, and then we'll worry about the rest of the world." 🔥

America FIRST

[Ryan Fournier @RyanAFournier]

BREAKING: President Trump has announced his 20 Core Promises to the American people.

This is 🔥🔥🔥

[Chad Bird @birdchadlouis]

In the Bible, the first recorded prayer (if we can call it that) is lamentation. The blood of Abel, murdered by Cain, is crying out to God: "And the LORD said, 'What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood [literally "bloods"] is crying to me from the ground'" (Gen. 4:10).

Ordinarily, when violence is perpetrated and blood is spilled, Hebrew will use the plural damim ("bloods"), as it does here. The Hebrew verb for "cries out" is tza'aq (צָעַק), which is frequently used in the Psalms for lamentation.

In many ways, lamentation is the ongoing, foundational prayer of believers, from the beginning of human history. We cry out in pain, loss, bereavement, confusion, loneliness, guilt, and shame. Our tears cry out. Our blood cries out. Our shivering bodies, racked with worry, cry out.

If you are reading through the Bible with me this year, we begin to hear the ongoing lamentations of Job in today's chapters (https://t.co/XxNvEtNH7e ).

God's ears can translate the weeping, moaning, screaming, collapsing, or shedding of blood on the part of his children into prayer. The verbs of lamentation are not always human speech.

The acme of lamentation was Christ's cry upon the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Yet even his sweating, bleeding, quivering, dying body was a prayer to the Father.

His prayer was heard and answered in his resurrection. As are our prayers as well, for in Christ, all our prayers -- spoken and unspoken -- reach our Father's ears and heart.

[Chad Bird @birdchadlouis]

Why Am I Still Struggling Against the Same Sins?

If you, as a disciple of Jesus, find yourself, five or ten or even fifty years after you started following Jesus, still weak in the same areas of life, still struggling with lust or anger or greed or hatred, then welcome to the Club of Discipleship, commonly known as The Church.

No, we are not here to excuse one another. But we are here to introduce ourselves, week after week, with the likes of: “Hi, my name is Chad and I’m a sinner.”

“I’ve struggled with (name-your-weakness). I have good days and bad days. Sometimes I have days from hell, where I think the devil must have me in a chokehold. Other days, I seem to do well. But even then, there’s always the nagging temptations, the subtle allurements.

If I find myself outwardly abstaining from this or that wrongdoing, all too often that’s where my heart dwells or my mind daydreams. What’s even more maddening is that when I do well and think I’m making some strong progress, I begin to feel proud of myself and—bam!—all of a sudden now my soul is flexing its muscles of arrogance and self-righteousness.

Good God, it’s frustrating. It drives me nuts. I can’t escape from my own worst enemy—myself.”

Welcome to discipleship. Welcome to the Christian life. Welcome to Jacob’s life.

And welcome, too, to the Jesus who responds to each of us by saying, “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Matt. 11:28-30).

One of the things we will learn from our Savior is that he did not call us to become witnesses to a complete life transformation in which we are now better than other people. Rather, he called us into a living relationship with himself and the Father through the power of the Spirit in which our true identities are now completely secure in Jesus.

Even when we fail? Yes. Even when we sin that same sin again? Yes. Will he continue to call us to repentance? Yes. Will he continue to discipline us as a father does his child? Also, yes.

Every disciple of Jesus wishes for freedom from sin in this life. But we are in this life; thus, we are still at war with ourselves, at war with the sinful nature that doesn’t tuck its tail between its legs and flee when we become Christians. It declares war.

But Jesus has won and, in him, we too have won. In fact, in him, we are more than conquerors. We are beloved. And Christ’s consistent grace over time proves that he is never going to change from being the Friend and Forgiver of Sinners.

(This is an excerpt from my book, Limping with God: Jacob and the Old Testament Guide to Messy Discipleship. For those who are doing Bible in One Year with me, this accords with Romans 7, one of the chapters we read today: https://t.co/XxNvEtNH7e).

[Chad Bird @birdchadlouis]

Things don’t turn out the way we imagined they would. Dream jobs can be a nightmare at times. Even Love Boat marriages can go the way of the Titanic. No one in Hollywood or Nashville knows our name. We never bask in our fifteen minutes of fame. Instead, we settle into a decidedly predictable life that is sometimes happy, often hard, and occasionally quite brutal.

In other words, our lives are exactly the kind of lives that God gets excited about. The more unimpressive our jobs are, the more lackluster our bio, the more we feel like we’re just a name on a list or a face in the crowd, the more we are the perfect venues for God’s ongoing work in this world. If God is anything, he is a God who has a thing for the normal.

The Scriptures are packed with illustrations of this tendency. To begin with, God goes out of his way to handpick the wrong people for his most important missions. The Bible is like the HR Handbook from Hell. Here’s everything you should not do when looking for the perfect candidate for a position.

Need a woman to become the mother of a promised son? Instead of choosing a robust twenty-five-year-old, the Lord taps a post-menopausal, wrinkled, ninety-year-old named Sarah for the job.

Need someone to lead the emancipation of slaves from the most powerful nation on earth, as well as to serve as the spokesperson for these oppressed people? Rather than choosing the ancient equivalent of a Navy SEAL or a quick-tongued Secretary of State, God handpicks a stuttering eighty-year-old shepherd named Moses who’s been on the lam for forty years after beating a man to death.

Book after book, from Genesis to Revelation, the Lord sends men and women on errands they are ill-qualified to fulfill. And nothing has changed in today’s world. He continues to buck our manmade religious systems by inserting men and women into them who don’t meet our qualifications. But they meet God’s. He’s delighted to use them in his kingdom to show all of us that it’s not by brainpower or brawn but by the Spirit of love that the Father gets things done.

-Excerpted from Your God Is Too Glorious (2nd Edition), available at https://t.co/Tc3bvc4WDB or https://t.co/ilKapFuHYd

[Chad Bird @birdchadlouis]

The Eyelid and God

I worked for a farmer named Johnny when I was a teenager. Among other skills, he taught me how to weld—a necessary talent on any farm since equipment is always in need of repair. One day, having completed his weld, Johnny was chipping away at the hot slag over his bead before adding another layer to the weld. I was standing about 10 feet away, looking on, with no safety glasses on.

It was an eerie moment. In a millisecond, my eye registered a tiny piece of metal slag flying through the air like a missile aimed straight at my pupil. Without the least bit of conscious thought, as soon as my eye registered its flight, my eyelid slammed the door over my pupil and that red-hot speck of metal burned into the skin of my eyelid instead of my eye. I experienced a few seconds of burning pain instead of a potentially permanent injury.

In Hebrew, an expression for eyelid is eye-guard (sh‘murah [שְׁמֻרָה]), from the verb shamar (“to guard”), as in Psalm 77:4. When that fragment of hot iron came flying toward my eye, my sh‘murah knew exactly what to do. It took one for the team. It absorbed the pain to protect my eye.

When we pray, “Keep [shamar ‘guard’] me as the pupil of your eye” (Ps. 17:8), what are we asking our Lord to do? We are asking for his intimate, ongoing protection from everything that would bring us harm. We are asking him to be our divine sh‘murah, our divine eyelid, which stands in front of us to shield us from the fiery arrows of the evil one.

Christ, as the word made flesh, is the Father’s answer to our prayer. He stepped in front of us, took the arrows, took the sin, took the pain, took the condemnation, took death itself into his own body in order to save us. He guards us as his very own pupil, as the apple of his eye, for indeed we are.

[Chad Bird @birdchadlouis]

The Object Lesson of Once-Powerful Nineveh

It was rich. It was powerful. It was famous. By worldly standards, the city of Nineveh had everything going for it.

Nineveh, one of the oldest cities in the world, was located on the outskirts of modern-day Mosul, Iraq. When the Assyrians were the alpha world power, Nineveh was their capital. The wall that encircled the city was 7.7 miles long. The ruler Sennacherib, in the late 7th century BC, reorganized the city and laid out streets and squares. He also oversaw the creation of a complex of aqueducts to water his lush palace gardens.

Speaking of the palace, talk about impressive! It contained 70 rooms, with a floor plan of 1650 x 794 feet. The walls were covered with reliefs that depicted the conquests of Assyrian foes. (Imagine the walls of the White House, from floor to ceiling, vividly depicting scenes from the bombing of Hiroshima or the dead bodies of Nazi troops, and you’ll get the idea.) The palace also contained a library. When archaeologists unearthed it, they found tens of thousands of cuneiform texts, one of which turned out to be the ancient flood account known as the Epic of Gilgamesh.

One of the palace reliefs depicted the Assyrian conquest of the Judean city of Lachish during the reign of King Hezekiah (727-699 BC). It is hard to overestimate the impact this would have on Jerusalem’s morale. If the Titanic was the “unsinkable ship,” then Lachish was the unconquerable city. It was built on a 50-foot-high mound with steep sides all around. It was heavily fortified and its city gates were the largest found in Israel.

Yet Lachish fell to the Assyrians. And when it did, you can be sure the hearts of the people of Jerusalem fell also. If Lachish could not withstand the Assyrian war machine, then neither could Jerusalem. Sennacherib memorialized this victory with a relief showing naked Judean soldiers impaled, siege ramps, and lines of the conquered. The infamous brutality of Assyria, including against God’s people, was on full display within the palace.

So, when Nineveh was conquered and burned by a combined force of the Babylonians and Medes in 612 BC, no tears were shed in Israel. The prophet Nahum, who likely wrote soon after the fall of Nineveh, describes in unforgettable poetic images the demise of the once-great metropolis. His closing line says it all, “There is no easing your hurt; your wound is grievous. All who hear the news about you clap their hands over you. For upon whom has not come your unceasing evil?” (Nahum 3:19).

By worldly standards, the city of Nineveh had everything going for it. And yet it also had nothing going for it. Was it rich? Yes. Was it powerful? Yes. Was it opulent and beautiful and even boasted an impressive library, no doubt with a scholarly class of scribes? Yes. All true.

But apart from the brief episode of repentance recorded in Jonah, the city was awash in brutality, idolatry, conquest, and powerlust. Nineveh, like Sodom or Babylon, remains an ugly icon of the soiled soul of rebellion against the true God.

Nineveh is a lasting object lesson for us as Christians. What is impressive in the eyes of the world, what “counts” as important to nations and cities and rulers, is often quite repugnant in the eyes of Christ. The only time Nineveh was actually impressive and worthy of emulation was when it was clothed in sackcloth and crying out in repentance and faith to the true God, who showed mercy.

Nations fall. Cities crumble. Leaders die. Power and prestige and wealth—they all will fade and they all, in the end, cannot satisfy.

But the Word of God will endure forever. His love will endure forever. His truth will never rust, never fade away. Let us stake our very lives on the things of God, the gifts of Christ, for they will always satisfy our deepest needs.

[Chad Bird @birdchadlouis]

What’s Really Wrong with You?

When diagnosing what’s spiritually wrong with us, we tend to act like pseudo-doctors who flunked out of medical school. We dig no deeper than surface symptoms—and therefore prescribe woefully inadequate medicines. Lung cancer gets treated with cough syrup. Shattered femurs with a bandaid and aspirin.

Our real problem—the deep and basic problem of humanity—is not cheating, stealing, or lying. It’s not murdering or hating. Of course, those are bad, but they are all, in truth, symptoms of a profoundly worse problem. These are sins but they are not the capital “S” Sin.

Who we are produces what we do, not vice versa. We sin (effect) because we are sinners (cause). We are not sinners because we sin.

All the outward manifestations of wrong in our lives point to what’s really wrong with us: we are not free but are bound as slaves to sin. Big Sin holds us captive. And there’s nothing, not one tiny thing, we can do about it.

•we can’t practice good works and eventually become good enough to earn freedom.
•we can’t will ourselves into freedom by positive thinking
•we can’t do our part and let God fill in the rest for us. We can’t meet him halfway.

The only way we can be free is this: by God alone setting us free. That’s it. He active, we passive. He giving, we receiving.

In Christ, God hasn’t merely dealt with our sins but Sin itself. “For our sake [God] made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). Jesus was bound to the cross to liberate us from Sin.

The tremendous comfort in this is that nothing in salvation depends on us. Christ does 100% of the work. We contribute nothing and receive everything.

If our only problem had been a list of sins, then with some fervent prayer and moral effort, perhaps we could have cleaned up our act, flown straight, and eventually become spiritually healthy. If that was our only problem, all we’d have needed was an example-Jesus, not a crucified-Jesus. But our plight was profoundly worse. So God worked a profoundly deeper solution in Christ.

Thanks be to God for the blood-bought, freely-given liberation we have in Christ!

[Chad Bird @birdchadlouis]

Color the ordinary black-and-white activities of your daily life with prayer.

While washing your hands or taking a drink: “Thank you, dear Father, for clean water.”

While getting dressed: “Clothe me in your righteousness, O Christ.”

While talking with a friend or stranger, silently pray: “Lord, bless and keep them.”

And, in all circumstances, “Lord have mercy” or “Jesus, help me.”

As a general rule, shorter prayers prayed more often are to be preferred over longer prayers prayed less often.

Punctuating your walking, talking, working, and other plain activities with brief prayers is a discipline worthy of fostering and encouraging.

[Chad Bird @birdchadlouis]

Job said, “The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.”

Job also said, “Let the day perish on which I was born, and the night that said, ‘A man is conceived.’”

Amens, anger, and anguish swirl inside the faithful. And God will accept them all.

[Chad Bird @birdchadlouis]

Counting Your Blessings Isn’t as Easy as I Once Thought

In the Baptist church of my youth, one of our go-to hymns was “Count Your Blessings.” Over the years, I've come to realize that counting your blessings is not nearly as easy as picking up pen and paper and making a list. Sure, we can confidently number many good gifts in our lives: spouses, children, friends.

But if we kept a spiritual scrapbook of “God’s Blessings,” there are many life pictures we’d be loathe to paste. Our typical litmus test that determines whether or not something is a blessing is this: Does it make us happy? If it makes us smile, it’s a blessing. If it makes our lives a little easier, elevates us on the social scale, or simply makes us feel better about ourselves, then it qualifies as a blessing.

On the other hand, if something multiplies problems in our lives, makes us question our ability to maintain control of a situation, sullies our reputation, leads to heightened stress, or generally makes us feel worse about ourselves, then it’s no blessing. We may not label it a curse, but it’s certainly not something we’re going to humblebrag about on Facebook.

Our Father’s blessings, however, are not as easy to spot as brightly wrapped, bow-tied packages under the Christmas tree. They’re often covered in brown paper under the bloody tree of the cross. They often don’t seem good at all but burdensome, perhaps even defeating.

Such “blessings” look like a burned-out bridge on the highway to our personal happiness.

This is an invaluable truth: trials and temptations, burdens and losses, are where God is most active to bring his grace into our lives. Counting your blessings includes counting your crosses, for Christ is hidden in suffering to lead us toward the blessings he desires for us.

-From my book, Your God Is Too Glorious: Finding God in the Most Unexpected Places

Thus we pray:

Lord, we thank you for those disappointments and failures that lead us to acknowledge our dependence on you alone.

Book of Common Prayer

[Sarah L Erwin @sayrah24]

@macklondonmusic

[Chad Bird @birdchadlouis]

For some people, this week was just the ordinary grind of work and home and sleep on repeat.

For others, there were nights of tossing and turning, panic attacks, and that looming sense that something terrible is always around the corner.

For others, this is the week they will forever hereafter use to orient time: "that was the summer before Joe died" or "two years after the hurricane" or "that was about the time I was diagnosed with breast cancer."

Whatever this week held for you, let me tell you what it held for our Father in heaven: it was another week of looking down upon a world of people whom he loves in Jesus Christ. Me. You. All of us.

He saw me, still overwhelmed with grief for my son, waking up from dreams about him, unable to sleep. And our Father loved me through it.

He saw families standing around ruined homes, trembling with fear, sobbing over loss, and wondering what tomorrow will hold. And our Father loved them, and will continue to love them, through it.

He saw a couple sit down with an oncologist to receive news that shook them to the core. And our Father loved them and held them through it.

The God who sent his Son to live, die, and rise again for you, do you imagine he is now going to ignore you or walk away when you need him most? No, he cannot do that. His love leaves no room for apathy or betrayal.

You, my friend, are on God's mind right now.
He is thinking of you. Right now.
He is loving you. Right now.

The empty tomb of Jesus is the full promise from God our Father that nothing and no one can separate us from his love, every moment of every day, no matter what that day might hold.

[Tim Allen @ofctimallen]

See ya soon Woody, you are a sad strange little man and you have my pity. And off we go to a number 5! To infinity and beyond!

[Sarah L Erwin @sayrah24]

@UberFacts Lone Survivor

[Sarah L Erwin @sayrah24]

@coach_jcurtis Bittersweet …. I can’t wait to see what you will do at NCHS 🖤❤️

[Sarah L Erwin @sayrah24]

@dmclendonmusic Boooo