Death

Jesus Wept

Jesus wept.

-John 11:35

This verse is a pretty well-known verse. It’s the shortest verse in the Bible (although you can correct me if I’m wrong). But most people don’t really think about everything that this verse really says.

Yes, I know this verse is only two words long. Yes, I know that it just says that Jesus, well… wept. But you know what it also says?

(1) Jesus was human. Crying is something you can’t do unless your human. I’ve personally never seen anything other than a human cry. But you can correct me on that, too.

(2) Jesus had emotions. Jesus was sad. Hey, one of his friends had just died, and some of his other friends, who were also Lazarus’s sisters, were crying, too. Jesus wasn’t some stone-faced, stoic statue. He was real, human, and felt things just like we do.

(3) It’s okay to be sad. When people die, it’s natural for us to be sad. We shouldn’t take that too far, though. After all, if they’re Christians, they’ll be in a much better place with Jesus.

I hope these points have helped you to see what you can see when you look closer at verses and think about them. I pray that you’ll learn something from this and learn to do this with other verses.

Challenge: Study a verse in depth like this and come up with three points about it that aren’t necessarily obvious.

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Just A Few Rambling Thoughts and A Gut-Punch (Hopefully)

Please share this post! I’d love for this to reach as many people as possible and to hopefully motivate them to share with others.

Interesting title, isn’t it? 😀

Last Wednesday, in my small group, one of the girls was talking about a skit she’d seen at a church camp a few years ago. Basically (and this is probably not going to be the best description, sorry) there were two guys talking to each other, and one of them said “I found the cure for cancer!” And the other guy said, “Really? That’s awesome, let’s go tell people about it!” And the first guy said “Well, you know, I’m not so sure, I mean, I’m so small, and young, and insignificant…” etc, etc, etc.

You and I are that first guy.

We have the cure for cancer.

Well, not for cancer, exactly. We have the cure that can save people from having to spend hundreds and thousands and millions and billions of years in hell. All of eternity in hell. Which is kind of hard to wrap your mind around.

That cure is Jesus.

Also mentioned during small group was this: If you, knowing about that someone isn’t a Christian, don’t share the gospel with them, you’re refusing to give them eternal life.

So why aren’t we sharing it?????

The Sign of Jonah – Superhero Sunday

Nope. This isn’t going to be a Sherlock Holmes The Sign of the Four (or Three, for you BBC fans). Sorry.

Tony Stark: JARVIS, have you heard the tale of Jonah?

Jarvis: I wouldn’t consider him a role model.

[Iron Man flies through a Leviathan]

-The Avengers

Have you heard of the sign of Jonah? In Matthew 12:40, Jesus says: “For as Jonah was in the belly of the great fish for three days and three nights, so will the Son of Man be in the heart of the earth for three days and three nights.”

Jesus was predicting his death and resurrection, and relating it back to Jonah. He was telling the Pharisees that this would be the sign that he would give them. (Matthew 12:38-39)

Jesus predicted his death and his resurrection. Don’t harden your heart like the Pharisees did. Believe.

It’s a Baby

You saw me before I was born. Every day of my life was recorded in your book. Every moment was laid out before a single day had passed.

Psalm 139:16

• The first moment-the very first nanosecond-of your life determined whether you would be a boy or a girl.

• In the first hours of your life, your eye color, hair color, and other features were decided.

• When your heart began beating, you were so small you would have fit on your mother or dad’s fingernail-with room to spare!

• Before your mother even knew you were growing inside of her, you could hear and could even perform full flips inside her womb!

• About seven months before you were born, your fingers and toes looked much like they did at birth, though you were only two inches long!

• You started to grow hair in your fourth month of life (before birth) and may have even sucked your thumb!

• You first heard your mother’s voice-and began kicking and stretching-three or four months before you were born!

• In the final two months before your birth, your weight tripled, you began sleeping and waking, and you used four of your five senses: sight, sound, taste, and touch-all before your mother went into labor.

You were a baby when you were first conceived. It’s a baby.

“And yet our opponents tell us not to interfere with abortion. They tell us not to impose our morality on those who wish to allow or participate in the taking of the life of infants before birth. Yet no one calls it imposing morality to prohibit the taking of life after a child is born. We’re told about a woman’s right to control her own body. But doesn’t the unborn child have a higher right, and that is to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?”

–Ronald Reagan

List taken from Josh.org’s youth devotional.

Is He Dead Or Not?

Caution: There may be a few spoilers in this post, or, if you’re like Sherlock Holmes, you could deduce spoilers from things I say in this post. Just sayin’.

Have you ever noticed that it’s impossible to believe that people are actually dead in superhero movies?

I’ll admit that the same problem occurs in other movies, too, and in books fairly often. Or is that just my imagination? It’s not.

Sherlock Holmes, for example. He “died” in the books, and he “died” on the BBC Sherlock show (Which I have not watched, but I know quite a bit about thanks to a few friends. *wink* And a past post I reblogged.)

And then, of course, there’s all those minor characters in the superhero movies that supposedly die but don’t. Sometimes main characters, too, like Captain America, although we know that something’s up from the beginning of the movie. You can almost never believe that people are actually dead in those movies.

But you know what’s cool? That’s happened in real life before, too! All those people that are raised from the dead, like Lazarus. (We don’t know the names of most of them.) But the best coming-back-to-life episode? Jesus.

Unlike in superhero movies, Jesus really died. And then he came back to life. He conquered our sin by suffering the worst death the Romans could invent, and then he rose again, conquering death itself. He love us that much.

 

One-of-a-kind Son of God

“This is how much God loved the world: He gave his Son, his one and only Son. And this is why: so that no one need be destroyed; by believing in him, anyone can have a whole and lasting life. God didn’t go to all the trouble of sending his Son merely to point an accusing finger, telling the world how bad it was. He came to help, to put the world right again. Anyone who trusts in him is acquitted; anyone who refuses to trust him has long since been under the death sentence without knowing it. And why? Because of that person’s failure to believe in the one-of-a-kind Son of God when introduced to him.

-John 3:16-18 The Message

Like Sheep

All of us, like sheep, have strayed away.
We have left God’s paths to follow our own.
Yet the Lord laid on him
the sins of us all.

Isaiah 53:6

Everyone has strayed from God. None of us deserve to be saved, but God still laid all of our sins on Jesus. Jesus died such a horrible death. For you.

Treasures

A poker chip. A pair of dice. A screwdriver. A rock. All hidden in an old, rotten box shoved in an old, rotten tree.

The collection wasn’t much. Just a boy’s favorite treasures, dirty and smudged. The woman traced the A. H. carved on the lid of the box. A tear slipped down her cheek as she fondled each f her son’s precious memoirs.

“Goodbye, Alex,” she whispered softly, stroking the smooth rock. “I’ll take care of your treasures, and I’ll see you again in heaven someday.”

The little girl next to her looked down into the box.” I hope he’s got better treasures in heaven than he left us down here.

~~~~~

“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal.”

Matthew 6:19-20