Advent Devotional The Child Immanuel

It is All Hallow’s Eve and my mind prepares for All Saint’s Day, as it should, by turning to the departed saints. The annual time to consider those who have gone before leaves me with an unusual collection of memories. This Christian “New Year\u27s Eve” is peopled with thoughts of friends and loved ones and their part in my own spiritual heritage and pilgrimage. Thoughts of those from our own fellowship give way as others crowd in, a parade of faces that stretches back across half a century to my earliest recollection of death’s reality and finality. I think of one of my father’s greatest gifts as a pastor—his special ability to comfort those who mourn, and turn their eyes to God’s promise that just as the grave yawns to receive a loved one’s mortal remains, so it also opens into life eternal

First Sunday of Advent I Will Not Test God

Isaiah juxtaposes his sublime vision, call, and response with the less sublime story of his first mission. God sends him to Ahaz, the good Uzziah’s godless grandson, a man who ignored his heritage, defiled the Temple with an Assyrian altar, “sacrificed and burned incense on the high places and on the hills and under every green tree,” and even “made his son pass through the fire.

Advent Devotional Darkness

Our small group obediently turned off our flashlights and plunged with our surroundings into absolute blackness. We were not far beneath the earth’s surface, but we were deep enough in Sanders Cave to encounter that sensation familiar to anyone who has experienced absolute darkness. In the years following that initial foray into spelunking, I visited other caves. On a 1955 trip west, our family visited Carlsbad Caverns. My mother read an October, 1956 National Geographic story about archaeological discoveries at Russell Cave, in my native Alabama’s northeast corner, so we traveled there the next year. And over half my younger son Andrew’s lifetime ago, we toured Blanchard Springs Caverns in the Arkansas Ozarks. Though I had been a Scout during my first cave experience, I discovered myself unprepared for each successive one

Advent Devotional Full of Wisdom

What must those ancient Hebrews have thought of Isaiah’s words about the shoot from the branch of Jesse? In Him would be unified, Isaiah promised, all three traditional divisions of Hebrew thought: law, which presented God’s claims on human action; prophecy, which proclaimed God’s judgment upon human actions; and wisdom, which encompassed human understanding of God’s revelation. Did they, like we, inwardly scoff at the naivete of anyone who would actually believe that such a person of completed potential could exist

The Second Tuesday Advent What Will This Child Be?

Luke’s account of John’s birth evokes the two central questions at a child’s birth, the practical and the philosophical—“what will we call the child?” and “what will the child be?

Untitled

This artwork featuring African currency stems from both a hobby of collecting and a desire to display some of the most colorful currency in the world in a media that is intriguing and informative