Gloria Jacobs

During the early hours of Monday, November 26, 2018, Gloria Jacobs, my dear friend, went to be with Jesus. This is a great loss to Vickie and me. While I have known Gloria since around 1989 or 1990, during the past seven years Gloria and I became exceptionally close as business colleagues and friends – as I reflect back on this, when I began working with her in 2011 we became instant friends – it was as if we had a shared history and already knew each other.

Gloria touched hundreds, if not thousands, of lives. The tears that were shed when news of her passing was relayed were many and they are still flowing.

Her relationship with Jesus Christ entered a new depth after her retirement; she read the Bible through and then said to me, “Why did I wait so long to do this?” Then she started to read it through again. While we worked together (we had adjacent offices) we had many times of prayer. These times continued during her retirement, and then mine, over the phone. I used to talk to her at least once a week; usually calling her after my Tuesday- morning men’s group. This past Tuesday felt different with no Gloria to call.

Gloria was always looking out for the disenfranchised, the people without a voice. She cared for her employees deeply, and while holding them accountable was kind and generous. If you worked for Gloria you were pretty much adopted into her family.

Gloria had the ability to interact with wealthy clients, and to politely but firmly ask drug dealers to move their business off her properties. She had properties in some of the most dangerous areas of Richmond; the good people were glad to see her and the bad people gave her room and moved away from her.

There is so much more I could say, some of which I’ll share at her memorial service this Saturday. She loved her husband Jake and daughter Susan, and was devoted to them. I am blessed that she also loved Vickie and me and that she adopted us into her family.

As you view the photo, Gloria is on my left, Deb Eure on my right. This was taken at my retirement luncheon about a year ago. Both of these women have had a powerful impact on my life - all three of us love Jesus. 

Lina and Her Tree

You may recall that last year our basset-mix Lina developed an affection for one of our Christmas trees. Well, the tree is back and so is Lina (photo below).

It’s hard to see puppies grow old, you know it’s going to happen and you enjoy the time you have with them, but you know what’s ahead and they don’t. Lina will be 14, the Lord willing, in April. We have been blessed to have dogs who live long, and we always grieve with others who lose their pets before their life expectancies.

Not too long ago we visited friends and asked, “Where is Betsy?” Betsy was a sweet yellow Lab around four years old. They told us that Betsy died of cancer. As I heard the words I could imagine the pain of our friends; the tears, the sorrow, the hurt.

Lina can’t see well anymore; her cataracts have gotten worse. Thankfully she can still hear well and we talk to her a lot so she’ll know where we are. When we had Mitzi years ago, her eyesight held up in her senior years but her hearing didn’t so we learned to speak loud and make a little noise when we entered a room she was in so we wouldn’t startle her if her head was turned away from us.

Lily turns ten in a couple of weeks. When we got Lily, Lina was almost four. Lina thought Lily an intrusion – we had recently lost Darby and it was obvious that Lina missed her, every morning she checked out the place where Darby had slept. Darby and Lina were always together, and often they were touching. While Lina and Lily are often together, they aren’t as inseparable as Lina and Darby were.

Well, in a world of insanity it’s nice and comforting to have puppies (they are always puppies to us).

Who knows, when we get to Narnia we may recognize that our relationship with puppies was one of the great miracles of life here in the Shadowlands – or we may realize it now.

An Agony of Soul On Thanksgiving

Parades and football games and turkey and pumpkin pie. A national celebration – to write or not to write?

Here is a Biblical text for today, speaking of Abraham’s nephew Lot, Peter writes, “…and if He [God] rescued righteous Lot, oppressed by the sensual conduct of unprincipled men (for by what he saw and heard that righteous man, while living among them, felt his righteous soul tormented day after day by their lawless deeds)…” 2 Peter 2:7 – 8.

If we are disciples of Jesus Christ, if we are living in union with the Trinity, then while as individual sons and daughters of God, and as families and churches within the Kingdom of God, we ought to be giving thanks to God for His mercy and goodness and kindness toward us – but how can we possibly do anything but sorrowfully repent on behalf of our nation when we think of this day, Thanksgiving Day, as a national holiday?

We live in a nation which, along with the rest of the West, has codified the rejection of the image of God. The attack against God’s image extends from the highest levels of academia to primary education; to government, to business, to the arts, to science, to sports – there is no area of our society that is not under coercion and ever-increasing pressure. The Scriptures begin with the image of God, we then see the image of God desecrated, then we see the Image of God come to earth to restore God’s image in mankind, then the Scriptures reach their crescendo with the image of God restored in and through Jesus Christ.

If we have not become a nation worshipping the beast then what have we become?

We live in a nation that now makes no pretense of morality and justice. When money is the overt determining factor in our foreign relations then our leaders have sold our collective soul.

Make no mistake, we, as all peoples, have always had much to repent of and it has been in the best interests of our leaders to perpetuate one-sided ideals and myths to maintain our social fabric. Let us not deceive ourselves in this, as with individuals, so with nations, there is “none righteous, no not one.” However, a fair reading of the Bible teaches us that nations are nevertheless weighted in the inscrutable Divine scales of justice and that God’s mercies and blessings are worked out in history, as are His judgments. Our nation has been both a blessing and a curse in the world – this is the state of human affairs.

I think the distinction between today and yesterday lies in the stripping away of pretense and the overt attack on the image of God, morality, justice, and righteousness. It has always really been “America First”, but at least there was typically some acknowledgment of America’s duty to maintain morality and to help others – again, let us not deceive ourselves, we often cloaked our appetite for power and economic growth with manipulative myth – our sins have been many, but those who sought a better way were usually given room to speak and serve within “reason”.

But now pretense has been stripped away; Administration after recent Administration, with the cooperation of our elected representatives, and the support and fiat of our judiciary, along with the concurrence of our citizenry, has frankly made a policy of pulling down the image of God, economically and otherwise destroying those who resist, offering our children on the altar of pornographic demons in the guise of curriculum, and making the dollar the arbiter of foreign and domestic policy without apology.

Give us parades, give us sports, give us food, give us drink and weed, give us electronic cocaine – and we’ll give you our children, we’ll give you our vote, we’ll give you our hearts and minds…we’ll give you our souls to mold them as you will.

This ought to be a National Day of Mourning.

Man’s Significance – He Is A Sinner!

“And this is the very proof of Christianity’s being the highest religion, that none other has given such a profound and lofty expression of man’s significance – that he is a sinner. It is this consciousness that paganism lacks.” Kierkegaard.

Dignity is bestowed upon men and women when they are recognized as sinners outside of Jesus Christ. This is one of the great tragedies of our churches – in becoming places of entertainment, whose highest function is to make us feel good, they (certainly not all) have robbed us of our significance. For when we affirm that outside of Christ we are sinners, we also affirm that we are created in the image of God and that we are now alienated from the life of God (Ephesians 2:1 – 10; 4:17 – 24).

When we justify our sins, when we explain away the evil in the world which is in us, when we are such fools as to believe that we can educate evil away, or that money and food will eliminate evil (just look at how many of the rich and powerful and famous live and die and exploit humanity) – when we look at ourselves as products of time plus matter plus chance – when we do these things we strip away the image of God within us, we desecrate the Divine image, we enslave our fellow man making them less than they are – we snuff out any vestige of Divine Dignity that shows a glimmer of life, of light, of sympathy, of decency. We offer ourselves and our children on the altars of demons – yes, I wrote demons. For what other than the demonic can possibly account for the self-destruction we see around us?

As Pascal taught, only Christianity accounts for the fact that mankind can be angelic one moment and evil the next – this is not the way it was meant to be. We are broken, we are sinners, and only in Christ and by Christ can we experience and discover and begin to understand what it is to live in intimate relationship with God and with one another – only in Christ can the true measure and fulness of our significance be restored.

Are We Uncomfortable?

Here is a fine piece by Brett McCracken that ought to challenge us. What do these "vital signs" look like in our lives? In our churches?

https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/8-signs-your-christianity-is-too-comfortable/

The Nature of Our Salvation

P.T. Forsyth writes, “The absolute nature of our salvation brought to our faith can only be secured by the absolute nature of him who brought it.” (From The Person and Place of Jesus Christ). 

To many professing Christians, the nature of salvation is contingent. It is contingent on their own performance, on their own measuring up to their own standard of holiness and righteousness. Now you may be thinking, “Oh no, it is not my standard of holiness and righteousness that I must live up to, it is God’s.”

But how can such a thing be? For to truly “see” God’s righteousness and holiness is to also truly “see” that we can never attain (nor maintain) that which is God’s and God’s alone. With Isaiah we must cry, “Woe is me, I am a man of unclean lips” (Isaiah 6:5). With Peter we must cry, “Go away from me Lord, for I am a sinful man!” (Luke 5:8). 

If we must live according to our own efforts, if we must base our sense of righteousness on our own behavior – then we must conjure up our own set of standards, for God’s Law is designed to bring us to our knees in repentance, confession, and to an utter realization that in and of ourselves we can produce nothing acceptable to God (Romans Chapter 3). It is a fool who makes the nature of his salvation contingent upon himself. 

On the other hand, if God was made flesh and lived among us, and if that same God died to bring us back to Himself, and if that same God called us to Himself – then the nature  of our salvation is the nature of God; in completeness, in assurance, in certainty, in essence. Indeed, our salvation is “secured by the absolute nature of him who brought it”.

Thought Article by Patrick Schreiner

Michael Daily left a comment on Friday's post that included a link to a thoughtful article by Patrick Schreiner, here is the link - I encourage you to read it. We really should learn to be a distinct people.


https://erlc.com/resource-library/articles/why-we-should-follow-pauls-example-in-our-political-moment

Who Are We In This Political Season?

The Epistle to Diognetus was written most likely in the second or third century A.D. by an unknown (to us) Christian to those outside the church - it is a “tract”, a witnessing tool.

Here is a quote, “For Christians are not distinguished from the rest of humanity by country, language, or custom. For nowhere do they live in cities of their own, nor do they speak some unusual dialect, nor do they practice an eccentric way of life. This teaching of theirs has not been discovered by the thought and reflection of ingenious people, nor do they promote any human doctrine, as some do. But while they live in both Greek and barbarian cities, as each one’s lot was cast, and follow the local customs in dress and food and other aspects of life, at the same time they demonstrate the remarkable and admittedly unusual character of their own citizenship. They live in their own countries, but only as nonresidents; they participate in everything as citizens, and endure everything as foreigners. Every foreign county is their fatherland, and every fatherland is foreign…in a word, what the soul is to the body, Christians are to the world.” [italics mine]. (The Epistle to Diognetus, in Michael W. Holmes, the Apostolic Fathers in English, (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006), 295-96.

The very word “church” speaks of the followers of Jesus Christ as a people “called out” from the world, a distinct people. Paul tells the Philippians that their citizenship is in heaven (Phil. 3:20), and Peter teaches that we are a “holy nation, a people for God’s own possession” (1 Peter 2:9).

Every nation-state wants the hearts of its people to be totally devoted to the state. This simply cannot be the case with those who follow Jesus Christ. In order to serve the state and our neighbors we must first be citizens of the Kingdom of God. We must learn to view ideas and events through the Kingdom of God, seeking God’s Kingdom first (Matthew 6:33). And we must never lose sight of the fact that he who would love the world-system and be a friend to the world-system is an enemy of God (James 4:4; 1 John 2:15 – 17). We are to love the people of the world but not those systems which enslave them – and there is no system that is without the toxicity of total depravity.

The above words of the early-Christian writer to Diognetus, along with the words of the Holy Spirit through Peter and Paul, ought to challenge us. Where are our hearts and minds? Where are they really? Are we (the church) truly a “city set on a hill” (Matthew 5:14), or are we bound up (and in) political, social, and economic systems that have robbed us of our love for Jesus Christ, our love for our fellow man (including our witness), and our true service to the lost men and women around us?

Do We Mourn?

"Those who cannot find time to mourn for their sins also lack time to mend." Fulton Sheen

I wonder if confessing sins, when we do stop to do so, is more like using a drive-thru bank, with God as the teller, than a deliberate pondering and repentance. Or perhaps God is the traffic cop who writes us a ticket and we mail the fine to the court - never having to appear before the judge. 

How can the Holy Spirit work His conviction and deliverance and mending in a people who believe in cheap grace, cheap confession, cheap forgiveness, and cheap deliverance and obedience? 

If sin were cheap Jesus Christ would not have given His life. We were not cheaply redeemed...why do we cheaply confess? Why do we cheaply live?