Tag Archives: faith

Your Shiny New Year

Devotional, Humanity & Sin, Living the Word, Spiritual Health, , , , , , , ,


Following every glittering testimony of faith from one raised in a stable Christian home- learning at an earthly father’s knee to love The Heavenly Father, happily participating in church life with the family, knowing a lifetime of Christian heritage- is a chorus of genuine amens and hearty hallelujahs! And rightly so!

But for many hearers, there’s a whispered, “please Lord, let that be my kid’s witness someday, since it will never be mine.”  There are those thinking of when they were children and rode the church bus alone every Sunday- and still are the only professing Christians in their families.  Many are remembering regular family participation in church- punctuated by long days and nights of familial dysfunction.  Many have no memory of attending church as a child.  Due to the troublesome vines continuously trying to choke it to death, some folks may not be able to distinguish the branches of their family tree.

The Good News is:  If you have kissed a hundred frogs and not one of them turned into royalty, if you are sleeping with pigs and slapping off flies, if you do not know your earthly father- much less your heavenly one, if you are running hard and fast from pain- afraid to slow down and catch your breath; there’s a GOD in heaven who made you, who loves you- and if you seek Him- you’ll find He was willing to take human form and die to redeem you from your natural sinful state and your proclivity to sin.

Sin has many natural consequences.  Some are merely difficult, others are horrid.  Most  important however, is the ultimate price of our sin:  It is spiritual death and eternal separation from GOD, and from all that is good and pure.  Good tidings of great joy:  Jesus Christ has come to buy back his own from the dark side!  GOD in The Son of God has paid in full for our offenses toward Him and for the harm we  have done others!

Now, respectfully, before all you precious theologians on every side of the many fences we’ve built prepare to take me to task- I thoughtfully read the book, too.  The Book says, if anyone wants GOD it is an act of His sovereign grace in that one’s life.  It says, if anyone is willing to trust in and sincerely believes on Jesus Christ, The Only Begotten Son of God, for personal salvation from sin it is an act of sovereign grace.  And if anyone consistently, yet imperfectly, displays the fruits of salvation and of The Indwelling of The Holy Spirit it is an act of sovereign grace.  And if anyone genuinely wants GOD he or she is elect.  And if anyone chooses GOD it is because GOD CHOSE first.  It says, there is not one thing, NO NOT ONE, that any of us lowly humans can do to better ourselves and our position before A HOLY GOD.  We can not even WANT God on our own.  We cannot be WILLING to obey on our own.  There is not one tiny work we can do without God either to save ourselves or to keep ourselves saved.  Everything is ALL of GOD and everything is owed to Him.  Justified- sanctified- glorified, ALL OF HIM! By Him, for Him, and through Him, ALL things came to be, and are coming to be, and will be, and are held together.  These things are in the book.  These things are in His Word.

Therefore, if you are one with a less than sparkling legacy and you truly want God, you will simply look to Him, as did the thief on the cross that solemn day long ago on Calvary’s Hill, and you will be saved! Then, you will go find your new brothers and sisters! You will link arms with them and in the power of The Holy Spirit, embrace the struggle against sin! You will go and celebrate the victory that was hard-won for you! Merry Christmas And A Shiny New Year!

Copyright 2023.    L. L. Shelton.

Carry On

Church Culture, Living the Word, , , , , , , , , ,

A bit of testimony for those of you who are acquainted with trial:

In two thousand nine, I was purposefully tending to my tasks, meeting the day to day challenges sometimes with nothing short of what seemed to me a herculean effort- and managing (for the most part) to do so cheerfully, when “stuff” happened in my personal life that threatened to derail me.

Contrary to popular teachings of church culture, a healthy person rarely forgets, so we must learn to forgive ourselves and others anyway, and expect that past troubles may never be completely finished- in this lifetime.

Therefore, my new stuff piled on top of the old stuff and I began to unravel. The junk threatened to rip out every carefully managed seam. But as my eldest son is fond of reminding me, I am undaunted; and as I am accustomed to doing, I began to cautiously and with as much care, re-ravel.

It seemed a wonder in the beginning that each time I repaired and pieced together a part of my self, a new force (often from a direction I may have never anticipated) popped up, sometimes with true vigor, and made the attempt to rip out my pain-staking work. Oh how I hate being forced to start over…

As a girl I loved to play Monopoly. It was by far my favorite. The game of Life was the only one to run it a close second. A unique aspect of Life was that you could collect children along the way and I thought that the grandest aspect of any game. By the time I was twelve, Baby Island had been my favorite book for awhile, and in fact not even my fifteen- year-old competitors were offered a babysitting gig in my neighborhood unless I had first turned it down. So I spent some time trying to figure a way to incorporate this characteristic play into Monopoly.

These things aside, Monopoly continued to rule from my point of view, and I would do everything short of agreeing to watch my somewhat younger brother set fire to something to entice him into a game. Please, please, please… and to keep him from quitting when we had been hard at it for two days and I owned everything but his skin, I would come up with a million new lending schemes to keep him struggling along.

But though I stood the undisputed Monopoly-loving champion of Branderham Drive, there was something even I despised about the game. I sometimes felt the game creators designed the aspect especially for me. That thing I abhorred in the game, was to be told to return to start. One measly flip of the dice… Go back to the beginning. Do not pass go. Do not collect two hundred dollars. No! No! No! I would reel inside my head, sometimes and probably much to my brother’s chagrin- outside my head.

Maybe I could somehow cheat my way out of this disastrous death to my plans for this turn? After all, going to jail beat the deal hands-down, as first-of-all in any fair society one is there because justice is being served. Certainly not due to circumstances seemingly completely out of one’s control! And there was always the chance one would roll his way out before wasting as much time and distance, and more often than not I seemed to have the fortuitous likelihood of shaking and rattling my way to free parking from there, where our cousins had taught us to keep a five hundred dollar bill waiting for the lucky lander…

But it wasn’t to be, as even then I was insistent on rigorous honesty, feeling certain that the glory of winning at the expense of my integrity was only another way of losing- albeit often carefully veiled. (It is appropriate for me to introduce here the truth that I had no concept of doing anything purely for the Glory of God at this stage of my life- lest we are tempted to give me too much credit for my perspective.)

All this to illustrate, I am putting it mildly when I tell you that this nearly continual necessary re-working of seams has brought me near to exhaustion.

Yet through it all, God Himself did not weary. Many times I confidently told Him that I was sure I couldn’t finish the race- that beyond a doubt I would not finish well, and every time He was there to remind me that I could and I would, but only because I belong to Him and He has my back… And that what I know to be true concerning Him and yet can not see, I should and must trust.

This particular season of accumulating personal loss has not concluded, and maybe it never will… even still I know that I am not to be undone, because I am no longer all there is to me. I may be wounded and I may forever bear the scars of grief but I will not be crushed because God through the death and the life of a part of Himself, his Son, Jesus Christ, has favored me as His own child.

This privileged ownership means also, that today is not all there is, and today will never be all there is… so I will keep mending and reworking those seams by the Grace of God. And I will keep longing for and hoping for and working for tomorrow. And I will continue to pray that by His Grace my brothers and sisters also will retain this very real hope and that it will remain alive and burning in our souls!

Copyright 2017. L. L. Shelton.

Plus-Sized Grace For Wives and Mothers

Bible Talk, Family Life, Living the Word, Married Life, Parenting, , , , , , , , , , , ,

A word for wives and mothers, especially young wives and mothers:

Have you fallen victim to those books and articles that insist that if you simply do this or that- your marriage, your children, your family will become this or that… Burn those. The Bible does not offer any such guarantee.

God through The Bible, His Word to us, gives you and me one mandate: Do your best to learn of me and of my son who stands ready to save you; learn to love me, and to show your love through obedience to me… And you will have my blessing. Everything else is a surprise. Get used to it.  And trust me.

Therefore, if we aren’t sure of what our own obedience looks like, we better dig deep into the Word and become sure; for while God offers no guarantees outside of our own salvation, He does insist that the best chance each of our loved ones has for a blessed and healthy life is to learn of such life and to begin to desire it because we model it for them. He also makes it painfully clear that each one we love may not come to know Him and that the ones who do come to know Him will be made to seek, find, trust, love, and obey on each one’s own private journey of faith. We will not be enabled to give anyone salvation. We will not be invited to directly participate in the inner journey. It is a very private lifetime encounter exclusively designed for the individual soul.

And while I remain convinced that no other work has the potential for greater positive impact on society than that of being a good wife and mother, personally I am truly grateful that by some miracle of grace, every time my job gets harder- I find the strength to pray harder and to work harder; and it is such a sweet surprise to realize that Our Father is working through me to bring about His best will in spite of my own sin, my own lack of this or that, my own lack of perfection. It is an additional gift from a generous Father, and it is available to all of his saved children. ❤️

Deuteronomy 6:1-9
Matthew 22 (22:36-40)

Copyright 2017. L.L. Shelton