More Pictures...

As you gave the ring to one another and have now received it a second time from the hand of the pastor, so love comes from you, but marriage from above, from God. As high as God is above man, so high are the sanctity, the rights, and the promise of love. It is not your love that sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Letters and Papers from Prison, 27–28

Pictures are from Anita Wilson... In Due Season

Going to the chapel...

AND WE GOT MARRIED!!! As Beth and I left the house on Saturday morning @ 6:30, we sang with my mom that song...in (of course) 3 part harmony. It has been on all of our phones since March...it was GREAT! Now it has to come off! :-)

We had SUCH a great time! Leave it to my mom and her team to make things as easy as possible. The wedding day was an example of how a wedding should be...calm! Mom had several comments of "I have never seen such a calm mother of the bride!" That's my mom! She worked so hard to have her "team" in place so that the day of...it was peaceful. A peaceful MOB makes a peaceful bride! It was a GREAT service...God was glorified and now Beth Riley is now Mrs. Paul Kay! YAY! Beth and Paul left for Hawaii yesterday morning and I am assuming they made it! I will post some pictures later but I will leave you with this one. Beth wanted something different for when they left! I think the wedding wands turned out GREAT!!! Anita Wilson is the photographer...her blog is http://in-due-season.blogspot.com/ She does a GREAT job, not only as a photographer but as a mother and wife!

I am His

Of First Importance today..


“I am His by purchase and I am His by conquest; I am His by donation and I am His by election; I am His by covenant and I am His by marriage; I am wholly His; I am peculiarly His; I am universally His; I am eternally His.

Once I was a slave but now I am a son; once I was dead but now I am alive; once I was darkness but now I am light in the Lord; once I was a child of wrath, an heir of hell, but now I am an heir of heaven; once I was Satan’s bond-servant but now I am God’s freeman; once I was under the spirit of bondage but now I am under the Spirit of adoption that seals up to me the remission of my sins, the justification of my person and the salvation of my soul.”

- Thomas Brooks, Heaven on Earth

Have a GREAT weekend with this in mind!

A Love for God's People

“By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers.” 1 John 3:16

What does it mean to have a love for the body of Christ? Does it mean just praying for them? Does it mean that we have to be at their beck and call? And how does that fit in with loving God. Lately I have been struggling with how all of this fits together...love for God and love for the brethren. I have a natural tendency to want to serve and to "do good" to people only sometimes I do that at a cost of neglecting my own family and also my own soul. I also tend to not understand when others do not desire to serve their brothers in Christ. I know there has to be a balance and I am praying that God will help me balance them both. And if you pray for something, God hears and in His time has shown me some things about what it means to love.

Two weeks ago, at my parents church, their pastor preached on 1 John 4:17-21, God's Perfect Love. His fourth point (from v. 20) was "God’s Perfect Love Stands Over Against Spurious Professors of Love!" Vs. 20 says “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.” Pastor Quinn goes on to say "In verse 12, for someone to claim they’ve seen Almighty God and in verse 20, for someone to claim they love God, and yet both times, they are found not to love others, whom they do see and could actually minister to, they are liars on both counts. They have neither seen or love God because they fail the human love test!" WOW - if we are not ministering to the very believers that we see on a daily, weekly basis then how can we love God? Pastor Quinn goes on to say... "Are you genuinely reaching out in love toward others? Or, are you one of these spurious professors of love? The difference between the two actually reveals the true nature of your relationship to God. I didn’t say it is the basis of your relationship with God, but it does reveal it to you and others."

Then, pressing on in my attempt to find out what it means to love, I came upon a sermon by John Piper entitled "Savoring God by Serving the Saints". I knew this would shed some more light on my dilemma. Mr. Piper's main Scripture is Hebrews 6:9-12. What of the questions that he seeks to answer is "What is the relationship between serving the saints and showing love to the name of God?" In Hebrews 6:10 it says "serving the saints, as you still do" and Piper goes on to explain this... "Virtually all the translations agree that the relationship here is between the end you are pursuing and the way that you go about pursuing it. The end pursued is showing love to God's name, and the way to go about pursuing it is to serve the saints." He goes on to say (and I'm paraphrasing) is that a lot of churches and ministries stop here and say "well there you go, by serving you are proving your love for God!" Well that is wrong. That just puts a guilt trip on people...that's not showing the love of God. From the rest of that sermon I gain that loving the saints should flow out of an overflowing heart of satisfaction in God and we share that with the saints. Pastor Piper closes the sermon by saying the following "The point is to encourage us that when we serve and keep on serving, even in the small and seemingly unnoticed ways, God will never forget. Every note you write, every call you make, every visit, every gift, every late night conversation, every turning the other cheek, every unrequited kindness, every service out of love for his name God sees and he will not forget them to all eternity. So let us love the Lord with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and for the sake of his name let us serve one another! He will not forget. His justice guarantees it."

I guess in writing all of this is that I want to challenge you to love the brethren. Whether that means putting aside your own liberties to come along side a struggling brother or if that means praying for them on a consistent basis. How are you serving your church? I will leave you with 1 Peter 4:10-11 that says "Each one should use whatever gift he has received to serve others, faithfully administering God’s grace in it various forms. If anyone serves, he should do it with the strength God provides, so that in all things God may be praised through Jesus Christ." I know the prayer for my life and for my church is that as we serve one another, God will be glorified in our service but also that our body will grow in unity as we administer God's grace to each other. How are you serving and why?

"The Knife of the Heavenly Surgeon" by Charles Spurgeon

This sickness is not unto death. John 11:4

From our Lord's words, we learn that there is a limit to sickness. In all sickness, the Lord says to the waves of pain, "Hitherto shall you go--but no further!" His fixed purpose is not the destruction of His people--but the instruction of His people. Wisdom hangs up the thermometer at the furnace mouth--and regulates the heat!

1. The limit is encouragingly comprehensive. The God of providence has limited the time, manner, intensity and effects of all our sicknesses. Each throb is decreed, each sleepless hour predestinated, each relapse ordained, each depression of spirit foreknown, and each sanctifying result eternally purposed. Nothing great or small escapes the ordaining hand of Him who numbers the hairs of our head!

2. This limit is wisely adjusted to our strength, to the end designed, and to the grace apportioned. Affliction does not come by 'chance'--the weight of every stroke of God's rod--is accurately measured. He who made no mistakes in balancing the clouds, and measuring out the heavens--commits no errors in measuring out the ingredients which compose the medicine of souls. We cannot suffer too much--nor be relieved too late!

3. The limit is tenderly appointed. The knife of the heavenly Surgeon never cuts deeper than is absolutely necessary. "He does not afflict willingly, nor grieve the children of men." A mother's heart cries, "Spare my child!" but no mother is more compassionate than our gracious God. When we consider how self-willed we are--it is a wonder that we are not driven with a sharper bit!

The thought is full of consolation--that He who has fixed the bounds of our habitation, has also fixed the bounds of our tribulation.

February 24th

Some "God" sightings of His Faithfulness...

• My sister is engaged to the love of her life, Paul and they are getting married on June 6th!!!
• A "blogworld" friend just got news that her husband's final severance check will come on graduation day in May!
• My friend Catie and her husband are moving to MI, their first pick for med schools!

These are just a few of the exciting things we have seen God do in the first 8 weeks of 2009!

A few that we are praying through, trusting that God is faithful to His people, praying that we will be content with what God does in these situations...

• Steve and Ronda in their making the decision to possibly amputate their 4 year old son's left foot.
• Erin and David as they wait on their first child to be born in August after much waiting.
• 6 applications that we sent to Law Schools last Saturday.

“The man who has faith is the man who is no longer looking at himself, and no longer looking to himself. He no longer looks at anything he once was. He does not look at what he is now. He does not [even] look at what he hopes to be as the result of his own efforts. He looks entirely to the Lord Jesus Christ and His finished work, and he rests on that alone. He has ceased to say, ‘Ah yes, I have committed terrible sins but I have done this and that…’ He stops saying that. If he goes on saying that, he has not got faith… Faith speaks in an entirely different manner and makes a man say, ‘Yes, I have sinned grievously, I have lived a life of sin… yet I know that I am a child of God because I am not resting on any righteousness of my own; my righteousness is in Jesus Christ, and God has put that to my account.’”

- D. M. Lloyd-Jones, quoted by Timothy Keller in The Message of Romans (Redeemer Presbyterian Church, 2003), 59.

Magdalena Grace Roberts

This morning this sweet little 5 month old girl left this world. She had Trisonomy 18. I do not know the Roberts personally but have grown to love their faith in our BIG God! Through this whole experience they have remained confident that God was, is and will forever be SOVEREIGN! Please keep Noah and Julie in your prayers as I am sure their heart is very sad today!