a highly recommended gift

...be filled with the Spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart, giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ... -Eph 5:18-20

ryan and i have been waiting anxiously patiently for this to arrive in the mail. we finally received it and listened to this cd together tonight, and it was a great tool to spur us on to worship and adore Christ. if you're in need of a christmas gift, this is a great one.

Click here to get it: Together for the Gospel Live

A little valley.

At present it is a day of small things with me,
I have light enough to see my darkness,
sensibility enough to feel the hardness of my heart,
spirituality enough to mourn my want of a heavenly mind;
but I might have had more,
I ought to have had more...
thou has always placed before me an infinite fullness
and I have not taken it...

O recall me to thyself, and enable me to feel my first love!

-"Mortification," The Valley of Vision

Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?
Thanks be to God through Christ Jesus our Lord! -Romans 7:24-25

secrets to fighting holiday crowds

1. PRAY for patience before you leave the house and remember Jesus.
2. Bring this with you:

















That way, when you get stuck in traffic jams, wait in extremely long check-out lines, get disappointed because the store is sold out of what you wanted to buy, etc, IT WILL ALL BE OK because you have Jesus who atoned for your sins and ICEDREAM* from Chick-fil-a. Its like eating patience! Or maybe it just gives you some sweet things to focus on.

*ICEDREAM may also be subsitited with cinnamon rolls, chocolate chip cookies, a smoothie, milkshake, anything that tastes good, however, Jesus cannot be substituded for any other "god" or idol.

Reference Rainbow

I found this on the Boundless Line Blog this morning. It's pretty amazing...

Christianity Today has posted an image of biblical cross references:

When Christoph Römhild, a Lutheran pastor in Hamburg, Germany, sent Carnegie Mellon Ph.D. student Chris Harrison a list of 63,779 cross-references between the Bible's 1,189 chapters, the two became enthralled with elegantly showing the interconnected nature of Scripture. Each bar along the horizontal axis represents a chapter, with the length determined by the number of verses. (Books alternate in color between white and light gray.) Colors represent the distance between references.

Larger Image here

Too Many Husbands in the Bed...

Sometimes I like to sit up in bed...read, blog, snoop around on facebook, etc. I like to have something more to lean on than just your average pillow. So, I have a "husband." See here:



It functions well. Serves its purpose. And it just happens to be called a "husband."

The other night I was leaned up against "the husband" in bed next to my real hubby. He was reading a book, and I was reading blogs, and I invited him a bit closer. He eyed the husband. I lovingly stated, "I'll share it with you."

He gave me the evil eye.

I knew exactly what he was thinking...

Flashback:

The day my old roommate and I moved into our old apartment, we invited some friends over to hang out. My now husband came (Note: We had just went out a few times and I had told him I wasn't ready to date). We had no furniture moved in yet except for our beds so we had to sit on the floor. Trying to be nice, I asked Ryan if he'd like to have "the husband" and his reply was, "I don't want to sit on anything called a husband."

Back to bed:

So I couldn't help but laugh and ask him if he was jealous.
"I'm not going to be usurped by a pillow. It is not an acceptable substitute for a husband. It doesn't hold you or kiss you or hug you. It just sits there."

So, laughing hysterically, I tossed out the "husband" and confessed my unwaving love and devotion to my hubby and affirmed that, yes, he is a much better husband than the pillow.

Lesson learned. My pillow needs a new name...

Blessings of the Body

At church, our pastor is taking us faithfully through the book of Ephesians. This past Sunday we were in Ch 1 v. 7:

"In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace (which He lavished upon us...)"

After faithfully preaching the gospel, our pastor read us Josh Harris' The Room: My Dream.


Though I'd read it before, It effected me again as much as it did the first time and lead me to treasure Christ all the more. Its a great tool to help count the cost Jesus paid for our sins.




It is such a blessing to be a part of a healthy church where Christ is exalted and His gospel preached every week, where doctrine is sound and protected by faithful and godly elders, and where God has gathered a humble flock.

Praise God for His faithfulness to His bride the church, "which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all." !!!

Mystery of Christ

After attending a Southern Baptist Church for the first 6 years of my faith, I now am attending a reformed Presbyterian church (Presbyterian Church in America) of which I'm about to become a member with my husband. Going through membership classes and learning about the church, I am faced with a spiritual dilemma regarding baptism, which has made the wheels turn in my mind over covenant theology and dispensationalism.

Though I tend to side with covenant theology most of the time (and with what our new church believes), I'm not convinced at this point that infants should be baptized. But I have, through the study of God's word regarding the promises and election of Israel and the church, stood in awe of the mystery of Christ:

"that the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel."

As I've read and re-read Romans 9, 10, & 11, I have rejoiced with Paul and understood (at least in some small way) Paul's bursting out in praise in 11:33 & 36,

"Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgements and how inscrutable his ways!"

and,

"For from him and through him and to him are all things. To Him be the glory forever. Amen."

What a privelege I have in this "mystery of Christ which was not made known to the sons of men in other generations as it has now been revealed to his holy prophets and apostles by the Spirit" (Eph 3:4-5).

It is such a blessing that the Lord has purposed "before the foundations of the world" for me to live on this side of the cross, having once been "seperated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and [a] stranger to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world," to being adopted into the family of God by His Sovereign grace and good pleasure.

I have a long way to go before I fully understand covenant theology or dispensationalism or for that matter take some stance on infant baptism. But, until then, I will continue to do as Paul says in Romans 9:20 to "stand in awe" as a Gentile believer who has received grace in spite of my depravity.

PS: Feel free to recommend any books or other material that may help in regard to Infant or Believers' Baptism!

Blog.

The husband and I decided to build a blog. Here we are!