Mission Faithwalk

                 Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her   to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church— for we are members of his body. “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will b

                 And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years. She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better she grew worse. When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak,   because she thought, “If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed.”   Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering. At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, “Who touched my clothes?”   “You see the people crowding against you,” his disciples answered, “and yet you can ask, ‘Who touched me?’ ” But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it. Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth.   He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suff

                 Open my eyes that I may see wonderful things in your law . (Psalm 119:18)           Recently, there has been pictures on Facebook that – if you squint, the picture changes from one thing to another. There are also posts in which someone shares with you something you might have missed in a book or movie. I have read books more than once, including the Bible, and gotten something out of them the second or third time. I know others who have as well.           So while we may hear (or even think) that reading the Law is a long list of boring “Thou shalt nots…” that take all the joy out of life. But this prayer is about finding life in the Law instead. It takes looking at things differently. Our eyes need to be opened. It is like what C. S. Lewis says about Christianity: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”           I have to chuckle a little about this. Many people seem t

                                He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds .  (Psalm 147:3) Broken hearts can heal. I know that it’s unempathetic of me to even suggest that healing is possible, but according to Scripture, God heals the brokenhearted. Scripture does not tell us what method He’ll use or how long it will take. I suspect that we can not even remember the heartbreak while God is still working on it. Other times, we may be going about our day and suddenly realize that we’re not in pain anymore. We might even feel guilty for not being in pain. Speaking of guilt, I must mention that feeling guilty for not feeling heartbroken is no more noble than feeling the pain of heartbreak. Just as there isn’t nobility in feeling or not feeling the pain of a sprained ankle or a broken arm, there is no nobility in feeling heart pain. It does not prove your love for someone who is gone or show you to be superior for continuing to ache over someone’s callousness. There is no gre

                 For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God. He was put to death in the body but made alive in the Spirit . (I Peter 3:18) Today’s verse is another of those “obvious” things for which we should be thankful. Veteran’s Day was this past Monday, and many of us thanked our veterans, who risked their lives in defense of the lives of another. We sometimes think to thank police officers, firefighters, EMTs, and doctors and scientists. We cheer as we watch videos in which people rescue animals, and say “Ahhh” when the animal appears to understand and show gratitude.  I have no doubt that our lives have been saved scores of times this year because other drivers have responded quickly even when we didn’t realize our lives were in danger. The difficulty is that it’s possible, and possibly likely, that while our lives have been saved at great cost to someone else’s, we aren’t connected with the incident. We may not be aware, o

                 For it is God’s will that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish people. Live as free people, but do not use your freedom as a cover-up for evil; live as God’s slaves. (I Peter 2:15-16) The elections are over. Most (perhaps all) of the winners have been announced. Now, too many democrats will decide they have the spend the next four years being nasty and hateful, working harder than ever to shove their wishes down everyone’s throats. And too many republicans will decide either to sit back and let the government shove their wishes down everyone’s throat, or that they have the right to work harder than ever to shove their wishes down everyone’s throat. After all, “they” won. In so far as the democrat or the republican believes that God exists, they are likely to claim that God is on their side. But today’s Scripture says that God rejects that sort of thinking. It is God’s will that we – each – individually do good. Some may claim that we can d