On the Tablet of My Heart

Has God given you a promise? A word of prophecy, perhaps? Or a scripture that transcended the page to become written upon your heart?  Maybe it was spoken in silence, an intimate dialogue between His Spirit and yours. If you're anything like me, you've clung to that promise. Oh, how you've clung! You've waited. You've hoped. You've pondered.  Eventually, you've second-guessed.  Why?  Because time passed. God's promise didn't come when you thought it would.  It didn't come how you thought it would. So, like the Israelites wandering in the wilderness, you started to wonder, "Did I miss it?" Let me assure you today, the promise still awaits!  Once God speaks, he will fulfill, "...for God's gifts and his call are irrevocable" (Romans 11:29, NIV).  Some of you are even now at the edge of your promised land; it is for you that I am writing today. You see, as uncomfortable as the "wilderness" is, some of us...

"We've got to get rid of her. She's changing things." A dear friend of mine recently overheard a couple of women in the church talking about her new leadership role in worship service. I'm sure you can imagine how this hurt. What is it about change that causes us to turn on one another?  Why do we resist it so violently? To answer this, I want to examine a passage found in the book of John.         Now there is at Jerusalem by the sheep market a pool, which is called in the Hebrew tongue         Bethesda, having five porches.  In these lay a great multitude of impotent folk, of blind, halt,         withered, waiting for the moving of the water.  For an angel went down at a certain season into          the pool, and troubled the water: whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in          was made whole of whatsoever disease he had ...