I spoke last night on Job 28:1-11 from the NASB, and I was amazed how the Holy Spirit opened the passage up so that I saw Jesus saving and seeking the lost through His church, as though He were mining for precious metals and precious stones deep within the earth.

 How He mines for the silver and the gold in our souls in the most remote places. Verse 3 shows how he carries light into the darkness, to the farthest limits, He searches in the hardened rock like soul, lost in gloom and deep shadow.

Vs. 4 tells of His search in far off habitations forgotten by all.

Vs. 5 tells how the simple needs are found at the surface, where our elementary appetites are met, but the deep spiritual things are deep within where they are melted and refined as by fire and He melts the hard rock of our heart that has been oppressed and forsaken because within there are precious sapphires!

And even in the dust, the pulverized parts of our soul He sees the gold! Oh what a searching and seizing Savior!

Vs. 7 The vultures and birds of prey will never seek our true soul needs; they are concerned with sensual appetites and care not for our true goodness.

 Vs. 8,9  Nor do the proud and violent ever look deep within us but Christ puts his hand on the flinty, angry, sparking soul, and He goes to all lengths to reach us, even to the moving of mountains in search for anything precious.

Vs. 11 Oh, and He dams up the streams of weeping, and finds what is hidden in darkness and brings out to His precious light! Oh what a Savior Divine!

  After the service last night, a thirtyish woman, covered in Tattoos, hesitatingly, in a self restrained manner, having never heard the message of Christ's searching, seeking  love, approached me, wanting to keep her distance, with walls and defenses up, but she simply had to ask me how I saw those things in the passage, it was as if her parched heart was given a deep, cool, drink of water and she had to know the source! It was if she was looking for a way to dismiss God but her heart was so moved she had to find out more, Oh it was the very moments one longs for: prays for!

 This picture of Christ at Gethsemane demonstrates His anguish so well.

"In everything give thanks." 1Thess. 5:18

 Surely this is a hard saying! Am I too thank God for everything? Am I to thank Him for bereavement, for pain, for poverty, for toil?

Must I lift up my hands over my dead and say, "Father, I thank You that you have taken away my friend"? Is it possible? Is it human? Is it desirable? Is it the will of Love that love should violate its own law? Is it pleasing to my Father that loss should be pleasant to me?

  Be still my soul; you have misread the message. It is not to give thanks for everything, but to give thanks in everything. It is not to praise God for the night, but to bless Him that the night is not deeper.

Consider, you have never reached the absolute depth of any darkness; you have never come to the step which has no step below it.

I read of Jesus that He gave thanks over the symbol of His broken body. What does that mean? That He rejoiced in being sad? No, but that He was not perfectly sad. It tells me that even the Man of Sorrow had not reached the uttermost sorrow.

In your hour of sorrow, give thanks like Jesus. Keep your eye, not on the step above, but on the step below-- the step to which you have not yet descended. Look not up at the height you have lost; look down on the depth you have not fallen too.

Your Father has never allowed the uttermost deep of misery to any human spirit. God never fills the cup of Jesus to the brim; there is always a vacant space reserved for light and air.

Is it not written that He has put my tears into His bottle; the quantity of your grief’s are measured; there is a line which they cannot pass? Thank God for that boundary, oh, my soul." George Matteson.

When God is silent

"The Voice of God's Silence." 

  "There is a revelation in the silence. There are times when the voice of God dies upon our heights, and there is no testimony from the mountain. We call, but it answers not: we question, but there is no reply. Yet there is a substitute; the voice of God is followed by the form of man. I come down from the Divine speculation to the human sympathy. God hides himself that I may see my brother.

It is a glorious descent. On top of the mountain earth seems very small. Its crosses dwindle in the light of eternity. I am in danger of becoming unsympathetic to common pain. The cries of the weary are lost in the songs of the redeemed. Therefore, betimes my Father comes to me in a chariot of silence. He veils Himself from my sight. He shuts the doors of the upper sanctuary. He throws a cloud over the former glory. He forces me to look down instead of up. He shows me Jesus alone - without His retinue, without His pomp, without His kingdom - sinking with pale visage under the weight of human woe. The silence of God reveals man.

God's silence is a voice. It forbids you to stand gazing up into heaven. It calls you back from the mountain to the plain - from the Divine search to the human pity." Matheson.

     "I am only inspired when I have aspired." Matheson.

 Never let me lose the desire for you Lord, because that desire becomes a pledge that you will answer me. You never frustrate true aspiration and desire to have more of you, it is the desire you love to answer. 

  This is another quote by Arthur Benson describing his father and the affect he had on his kids. I see this a lot in fathers within the church. 

  "His father was a man of almost passionate affections; there was nothing in the world that he more desired than the company and the sympathy of his children; but he had, besides this, an intense and tremulous sense of responsibility towards them. He attached an undue importance to small indications of character; and thus the children were seldom at ease with their father, because he rebuked them constantly, and found frequent fault, doing almost violence to his tenderness, not from any pleasure in censoriousness, but from a terror, that was almost morbid, of the consequences of the unchecked development of minute tendencies." 

This quote is by Arthur Benson and he is describing his brother and his interest in religion when a boy. I think it's the case of many: certainly it was of mine.

  "Yet religion was wholly unreal thing to the child. He learnt his Bible lessons and psalms; he knew the liturgy by heart; but the religious idea, the thought of God, the Christian life of effort, were all things that he merely accepted as so many facts that were taught him, but without the least interest in them, or even the shadowiest attempt to apply them to his own life. It seemed strange to Hugh when, in years long after, religion came to have so deep a meaning to him, that it should have been so entirely a blank to him in the early days. God was no more to him than a far-off monarch; a mighty shadowy person, very remote and powerful, but the circle of whose influence never touched his own."

  The following is from my sermon notes about Mary Magdalene. 

Mary Magdalene - Who is she? -- Mary was from Magdala, probably a woman of wealth because she helped support Jesus' ministry as well as ministered to Him with others.

Legend has it she was early twenties, beautiful and poised.

But afflicted with 7 evil spirits. We don't know what the spirits were.

I can only speak from my experience about possessing spirits.

7 Evil Spirits -  The symptoms of the 7 demons of Abuse

Anxiety, fearful, unable to forecast hope

Risky behavior, exposing oneself to danger

Self harm including cutting, anorexia, bulimia, obesity, promiscuity

Rage, fury and panic: extreme insecurity, unable to self-soothe

Depression,

Addiction

Suicide

 Evil spirits rob and destroy 7 basic things.

Pride in ourselves is replaced with toxic shame and guilt  

Our ability to trust makes it hard to believe God loves us

Security is lost to fearful expectations, forecasting catastrophe

Peace is replaced by a deep sense of hopelessness.

Relationships are lost to terminal aloneness

Contentment and joy of living is replaced with despair

Robbed of the will to live, failure to thrive

Mary's results

Deliverance,

Healing - her faith is a monument to the healing power of Jesus

Restoration to society, she was included in the band of women

A friend of Jesus: She was the first person that Christ revealed Himself to. When entering the tomb, the angels called her woman, but Christ called her by name,

And she was the first to carry the message" I have seen the Lord!"

Immortalized, she was mentioned 14 times in the Bible

Given eternal life in heaven as well as the Bible