This Week With Jesus

Someone defined forgiveness as the sweet smell given by a rose as it is crushed!  What a powerful expression of forgiveness. In our experience, the closest expression to it that  we have experienced is that of Graham Staines.  In 2003, Australian missionary Graham Staines and his family were evangelizing in a remote part of the world, when one night, as Staines slept with his two sons in the back of their vehicle, some people set fire to the car and burnt the three of them alive. Staines was survived by his wife and one daughter. The murderers were caught and went on trial. When Mrs. Staines was asked for her comments, she simply said, "I forgive (them)" !  In 2005, she was awarded the fourth highest honor a civilian can receive in that country  in recognition for her work . In 2016, she received the Mother Teresa Memorial International Award for Social Justice. I cannot ever imagine what Mrs. Staines and her daughter must have gone through and what coura...

 

You trust God. Can God trust you? “But not with my servant Moses. Of all my house, he is the one I trust.” (Numbers 12.7). That’s God speaking, by the way. Very clearly differentiating between those of His people He can trust those He can't. There is a lot of discussion and talk around the fact that we need to trust God and have faith in Him at all times. Very true. But very clearly, we need to have God trust us as well!, which may not always be the case as we can see from the opening verse. This is a game changer! Think about how God can build His trust in us. But first let's think about how we can lose Gods trust. Let's talk about Trust Breakers and Trust Builders. What are they ? Trust Breakers A. Broken promises when we were down in the dumps praying for God's helping hand? And have we kept that vow? If we haven't that's a trust breaker right there. Did not the Israelites, Gods own people, break His trust and wander around in circles for 40 years? B. God a...

"You shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins." (Matthew 1:21) What is your name?  Shakespeare debunked the name theory when he said what's in a name? to quote "What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet" ; Biblically, names of people were important. So important that God chose them at times. So now, the question is do you determine your name or does your name determine you? Biblically, God changed names of people to determine who they would be. Consider Abram becoming Abraham, Jacob becoming Israel, Simon becomes Peter the rock. Names are deeply important to human beings, a crucial way of understanding not just the world around us, but each other.  A surname roots us in history and family tradition. For example, the name 'Adam' is so common in Western society now that one might not think to enquire about its meaning. However, the Hebrew word Adam doesn't simply mean 'generic f...