If anyone out there is feeling inclined to add to their fabric stash, I’m giving away 2 1/2 yards of my fabric over at the Amoretti blog! (Come on – you know you want to sew something . . . . )
It’s true! Baby number six has been making its tiny presence known in this house for the last many weeks. I just read the other day that hormone is the Greek word for impact. SO insightful. I mean, I try to be a pretty mellow person. But give me one whiff of a pregnancy-related hormone, and my body goes off like a bottle rocket of over-reactions. Luckily for me, there is a houseful of children here to sprinkle humor all over life. Blaire pretends to puke, rushing off to the bathroom, making everyone else howl with laughter. The bigger kids love to hush each other up whenever some kind of food is mentioned, “DON’T TALK ABOUT FOOD OR MOM WILL PUKE!!!” And we are old enough now to know that we forget about this phase later. We know that the baby at the end is worth anything in the middle, and more than anything we know that this baby is a gift. So, happy times all around! Continue reading ‘Baby Time.’
Yesterday my husband finished preaching through 1 Samuel, and we came to the close of the book as well as the close of Saul’s life and reign. The final conclusion was an exhortation to us all regarding envy. James says that our spirits veer toward envy. And if you think about it for a minute, you have to agree. Our spirits naturally go there. And if we think we are free from envy, it may be because we know others envy us. There really are no exemptions. It affects all of us some way or other.
Envy is a deadly sin. It destroys households and friendships and marriages. Saul envied David. That envy didn’t destroy David, but it did destroy Saul in the end. When we nurse envy, we are nursing a viper. When we tolerate envy, we are giving it a hand in our own self-destruction.
Envy, like all sin, doesn’t make sense. So rather than trying to understand it, we should simply repent of it. Envy is a universal sin. It is not whether we will envy, but what we will envy. It is sneaky. It creeps in easily.
We can’t reason with envy because it is unreasonable. The only thing we can do with envy is crucify it, and we can’t even do that. But we can take it to the Cross where Jesus dealt with envy once and for all. We can’t crucify our own envy, but if we are in Christ, He crucified it for us. And that is good news!
Kicking the anger can a little further down the road, I thought I’d write something about where this anger comes from in the first place. I doubt any of us gets up in the morning hoping to get angry at someone, especially someone near and dear to us.
The Bible is very clear about where our words come from: they come straight up from our hearts. So if something nasty comes out of our mouths, then our hearts have got some nastiness in them. No way to dodge this. In Matthew 12:4, Jesus says, “O generation of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things? for out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks.” And again in Luke 6:45, “A good man out of the good treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is good; and an evil man out of the evil treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is evil; for of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaketh.”
Now how can a sweet Christian woman get angry and say “evil” things to her children? Does that mean she has “evil” in her heart? Unfortunately, that’s what it means. We all have evil in our hearts. No one is good. So we all need gospel grace day in and day out.
Here are a couple of suggestions Think about when you are most likely to be tempted to be angry. Is it Continue reading ‘Wise Hearts’
This morning’s sermon included a quote from Thomas Watson: God scatters pardons. It almost makes me want to add willy nilly.
It’s true. God is lavish with His mercy toward us! He is the ultimate Gift-Giver, and His central gift to us is His unbounded mercy. What a lovely thought for the week. As we begin another week, built on the foundation of worship, let us all contemplate His mercies. When we wake up, when we go about our duties, when we sit down at the table, when we finish the day and lie down to sleep. Mercies crowd us on every side.
When we recognize God’s mercies, we can only respond with gratitude. And if our eyes are at all open to even a fraction of these mercies, we will be busy being grateful all day long. Imagine the consequences of such a day, busy with gratitude.
And when we overflow with gratitude to our good and gracious and gift-giving God, it follows that we will extend that grace and mercy to others — lavishly. We can do nothing else.
My husband just preached on anger this last Sunday, so it’s been a topic of conversation around our house lately. And since it seems to be a bit of a topic in the comment sections here, I thought I’d weigh in with two small cents . . . on anger as it seems to manifest itself in wives and mothers.
Let’s just say (hypothetically of course) that you have just completely lost the bubble with your children. (That would never happen, right?) You got tweaked all the way out because they were being loud and rambunctious and they woke up the baby. And, (this is the vitally important part), you TOLD them not to be loud or they’d wake up the baby. You said it plainly and in English, and now they’ve gone and done it. This is clearly a flagrant disregard of your authority, of God’s law, of the ten commandments, of all the laws of nature, of house rules, of all human decency, and now you’re not going to have your calm moment to sit down and sip your tea and look at Pinterest. Or fold your laundry. Or get caught up on your email. Clearly (you tell yourself) you need to show the children the full weight of their offense. What better way to do this, than to pack all the punch you can into your frown, ramp up the tone of voice, raise the level of sarcasm to previously unscaled heights, and grab them (too tightly) by the shoulder and frog march them to the bathroom? All of this, you reason, is to show them how badly they have offended God – you are clearly obligated to show them how grievously they have transgressed.
If you don’t have a baby, then change the above scenario to the one where your daughter used up more minutes on her phone than she was allotted, or sent more texts than she was supposed to, or didn’t get her chores done. You draw yourself up, put your hands on your hips, and commence an outraged speech, littered with tasteful phrases like, “Why can’t you ever LISTEN TO ME???!!!” Continue reading ‘Masking Anger as Justice’
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