At the women’s Jail service last night, the first to arrive was a woman in her fifties with a spreading smile and a twinkle in her blue eyes. 

She looked Irish to the core from her ruddy skin and flaming red hair, set off by a burnished brown ski hat and coat, that I’m sure you could count on to keep you warm down to sub-zero temperatures! 

She had a commanding presence with a “don’t-mess-with-me” look, or so she struck me. Sadly, she lacked all her teeth but she didn’t appear to be self-conscious about it. 

One by one, four other women entered and our “church” congregation was complete. 

Four of the women were Christians and one held to Pantheism, where God is not a separate, personal, or supernatural creator standing outside the world, but rather the sum total of all physical and spiritual reality. 

Pantheists aren’t uncommon, and I’m pleased to have other faiths join us. 

The direction I take is to simply go through passages that are potent for the marginal Christians and those unfamiliar with Christ’s words. Last night’s topic was the Sermon on the mount, the first nine verses. 

Simply put, I let Jesus speak for Himself, and with each sentence I would ask how it struck them? 

In small groups usually some are eager to speak and that opens the way for all to talk. 

The Pantheist was struck by each verse and had some interesting insights which led to all feeling comfortable and willing to open up.

In these meetings the presence of the Holy Spirit is almost palpable, creating immediate connections with the group and…… well, words fail me. 

When the meeting came to an end, and after prayer the women filed out, but one lady stopped and asked if she could have the papers I taught from with all the scriptures and the notes. 

I had my head down gathering up my Bible and notes, and when I looked up to hand them to her, I realized it was the Pantheist that wanted them! 

“And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” John 12:32 

 “My work here is not to satisfy people’s appetite for speculation,

but to serve practical needs:

to preach to the weary,

to comfort the sick,

to help the repentant,

to challenge the overconfident,

and to strengthen weak hands and feeble knees.

I have little else left to me by which to give alms or practice the kind of charity by which we will be judged on the Day of Judgment.

It is enough for me to be a lowly builder in God’s house, and I take pride in the work.

I labor on the foundations,

so the work needs no apology for being plain,

as long as it is strong and well laid.

But, my Lord, humble as it is, I must thank God for the desire and the strength....”

Jeremy Taylor.

 

“Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. 

It happens to nearly everyone. 

You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. 

It is a feeling in the stomach,

a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. 

The skin tastes the air, 

and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. 

Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes.

 A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, 

and the land and trees of him dark and somber. 

The events, even the important ones, 

may have trooped by faceless and pale. 

And then-the glory-

so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, 

the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, 

and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. 

Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, 

and yet he is not diminished. 

And I guess a man's importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. 

It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. 

It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men.”

I think Steinbeck is suggesting that the measure of a life is not simply what a person accomplishes, accumulates, or experiences outwardly, 

but how deeply he has awakened to life itself.

 Jesus said - “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” 

I think the most abundant experiences like those described by Steinbeck 

are found in the realm of faith.

 No doubt there are experiences like this in romantic infatuation, in moments of creative inspiration, but none so profound as moments of spiritual clarity. 

“A person can possess great wealth, education, position, and achievement and still live in the gray.  Another person may possess very little materially but experience life with extraordinary richness.

“There is also an interesting spiritual parallel here. 

What Steinbeck describes resembles those moments when the Holy Spirit opens our eyes to something we had previously understood only intellectually. 

A familiar Scripture suddenly becomes alive. 

A person we might otherwise overlook becomes precious. An ordinary moment becomes sacred. 

We find ourselves filled with something that makes us want to pour love into others.

Perhaps the most beautiful thought in the entire passage is this:

There are moments when life becomes so full within us that we cannot help but pour it outward. 

And in giving ourselves away, 

we discover that we have become richer, not poorer.

That, I think, is one of the great paradoxes of both human love and Christian discipleship.”

This quote is from Steinbeck’s book, “East of Eden” and serves as a warning to us all –

The glory of love can transform our experience of life,

even when it rests upon an illusion.

Adam's love awakened something beautiful within him, though the woman he loved did not possess the goodness he imagined.

“Adam Trask grew up in grayness,

and the curtains of his life were like dusty cobwebs,

and his days a slow file of half-sorrows and sick dissatisfactions,and then, through Cathy, the glory came to him.

It doesn't matter that Cathy was what I have called a monster.”

Perhaps the deeper warning is this:

We must learn to recognize the capacity for both good and evil in ourselves, while being careful not to confuse the goodness we see in someone with the goodness that actually resides in them.

I’ve included the balance of the quote here if you want to read it.

“Perhaps we can't understand Cathy, but on the other hand we are capable of many things in all directions,

of great virtues and great sins.

And who in his mind has not probed the black water?

Maybe we all have in us a secret pond where evil and ugly things germinate and grow strong.

But this culture is fenced, and the swimming brood climbs up only to fall back.

Might it not be that in the dark pools of some men the evil grows strong enough to wriggle over the fence and swim free?

Would not such a man be our monster, and are we not related to him in our hidden water?

It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them.

Whatever Cathy may have been, she set off the glory in Adam.

His spirit rose flying and released him from fear and bitterness and rancid memories.

The glory lights up the world and changes it the way a star shell changes a battleground.

Perhaps Adam did not see Cathy at all, so lighted was she by his eyes.

Burned in his mind was an image of beauty and tenderness, a sweet and holy girl,

precious beyond thinking, clean and loving,

and that image was Cathy to her husband, and nothing Cathy did or said could warp Adam's Cathy.”

-East of Eden by John Steinbeck (chapter 13)

 There's an old country song that says - 

"All the girls get prettier at closin' time

They all begin to look like movie stars." 

When I saw this meme I didn't exactly know where I was going with it, but even if you’ve never had so much as a sip of alcohol or a single puff of anything, the devil's crafty wiles can cast a spell that even the most devout will find hard to resist. It may be as simple as twilight, “The hour when ordinary things turn quietly enchanted.”  “Betrayal rarely arrives with a knock. It slips in through the door we left unlatched while we were busy surviving. A kindness offered at the right hour can feel like grace, and still be a door that shouldn’t be opened.”

“The fall is rarely a leap. It is a series of small permissions. Guard the gate when you are strong, because you will not be able to when you are weak. The stranger is rarely the cause. The stranger is the occasion. The cause was the unattended need. Faithfulness is not only refusing the last step. It is refusing the first, quiet one.”

1 Corinthians 10:12: “Wherefore let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall.”

 

 “Now as I look back a little,

I see that some of my worst experiences have not hurt or injured me at all.

I do not claim more than my share of troubles,

but "I have had trouble enough for one," as Browning says, —bereavements, disappointments,

the illness of those I have loved, illness of my own,

quarrels, misunderstandings,

enmities, angers, disapprovals, losses;

I have made bad mistakes, I have failed in my duty,

I have done many things that I regret,

I have been unreasonable, unkind, selfish.

Many of these things have hurt and wounded me,

have brought me into sorrow, and even into despair.

But I do not feel that any of them have really injured me, and some of them have already benefited me.

I have learned to be a little more patient and diligent,

and I have discovered that there are certain things

that I must, at all costs, avoid.

But there is one thing which seems to me to have always and invariably hampered and maimed me,

whenever I have yielded to it,

and I have often yielded to it;

and that is Fear.” Arthur C. Benson.

‘Do not fear, for I am with you;

Do not anxiously look about you, for I am your God.

I will strengthen you, surely I will help you,

Surely I will uphold you with My righteous right hand.’ Is. 41:10

Have you divorced your child?

One of the least-talked-about sins is

the fear of, or failure to,

earnestly work at restoring a shattered relationship with your child.

Pride whispers that the first move belongs to them, and fear warns that reaching out will only invite more rejection.

So, parents wait, convincing themselves that silence is safer than vulnerability.

But a parent is called to love first and love longest.

Restoration rarely arrives through a single grand gesture;

it is built through humble, persistent steps:

a sincere apology without excuses,

a letter or call that asks nothing in return,

and a willingness to listen without defending yourself.

The door may not open right away,

and the outcome is not entirely yours to control.

But the sin lies in never knocking at all.

Better to risk the pain of rejection than to carry the unceasing regret of having never tried.

For a child to believe they are unloved and forgotten is the most destructive thing we can bequeath them.

Every child needs to know they matter to their parents.

Even if the relationship is weak and never reaches the depth of affection or connection one hopes for, to abandon a child with no effort at reconciliation is among the greatest of sins.

The wound is not the child’s alone; it hurts the parent as much as the child.

In essence, we hand them a lifelong weight of self-doubt and sorrow, one that can haunt them for decades and affect every relationship they will ever have.

But it does not have to end that way.

A child who knows their parent kept trying, even imperfectly, even without success, carries something priceless:

the knowledge that they were worth the effort.

So reach out. Apologize without excuses. Write the letter, make the call, and keep the door open.

You may not be able to repair everything, but you can make sure your child never has to wonder whether they mattered. 

“You stiff-necked Christians! Must you forever resist the Holy Spirit?" Acts 7:51 abridged for the church.

"One of the most telling blows which the enemy ever struck at the life of the Church was to create in her a fear of the Holy Spirit.

No one who mingles with Christians in these times

will deny that such a fear exists.

Few there are who without restraint will open their whole heart to the blessed Comforter.

He has been and is so widely misunderstood that the very mention of His name in some circles is enough to frighten many people into resistance. The source of this unreasoning fear may easily by traced, but it would be fruitless labor to do it here. Sufficient to say that the fear is groundless.”-A. W. Tozer,

Martyn Lloyd-Jones said it this way:

“Got it all? Well, if you have ‘got it all’ I simply ask in the name of God, why are you as you are?

If you have got it all, why are you so unlike the New Testament Christians?

Got it all! Got it at your conversion! Well, where is it, I ask?”

If the teachings of Calvin, or of more recent teachers such as John MacArthur, John Piper, J. Vernon McGee, or other influential voices within Reformed theology, have caused you to “resist the Holy Spirit” for whatever reason, I urge you to reconsider.

We must be careful not to let our theological convictions become barriers to the very work of God we long to see accomplished in our lives.

We may disagree about the nature, purpose, or continuation of certain spiritual gifts, yet still remain humble and receptive to the Spirit's transforming presence.

Paul's exhortation remains worthy of our attention: “Quench not the Spirit” (1 Thessalonians 5:19).

Whatever your theological convictions, do not let fear of excess, suspicion of others, or loyalty to a particular system of doctrine cause you to withdraw from the Spirit's sanctifying work.

Let your heart remain open to all that He desires to accomplish in you, always testing what you hear against Scripture and seeking to glorify Jesus Christ.

The question is not simply what we believe about the Holy Spirit, but whether we are willing to yield ourselves to His work within us.