Abigail Adams

Wonderful quote from Abigail Adams, the wife of John Adams, the second President of the United States.

These are times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or in the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues.

–Abigail Adams

One of the privileges of being a Baptist in Delaware is the opportunity to work with Dr. David Jackson.  He is a friend, mentor and colleague and Missionary for Church Multiplication for the Baptist Convention of Maryland/Delaware.

In a post this morning, he tells of a challenge he received at a conference he was at this week.  The challenge is one we need to hear.

Sea of Galilee

An interesting thing happens on the way to the end of the book of Revelation. In chapter 21, where it describes the new heaven and new earth, there is no sea.

The sea was part of the original creation, and like everything else, it was considered good. But by Genesis 6, with the story of Noah, the rising waters of the flood posed a threat to the entire world God had made, from which Noah and his entourage are rescued. From within creation comes forces of chaos harnessed to exact God’s judgment.

There is no more sea until we find Moses and the Israelites standing in front of it, chased there by the Egyptians. God makes a way through the sea to rescue his people and to judge the pagan world.

Then we find the vision of Daniel in Daniel 7. The monsters who make war with the saints of the Most High come out of the sea. The sea has become the dark, fearsome place from which evil emerges, threatening God’s people like a giant tidal wave. For the people of ancient Israel, the sea came to represent evil and chaos, the dark power that might do to God’s people what the flood had done to the whole world, unless God rescued them as he had Noah.

Without the sea in the new heavens and new earth, there is no need for the judgment of God because evil has been destroyed.

The inner or hidden forces latent within organizations, companies, societies, legislative bodies, and even churches are the sum total of the spiritual energies which humans have put into them, abdicating their own responsibility and allowing the organization, whatever it is, to have it instead.

Evil and the Justice of God (NT Wright), page 112.

To insist on one’s place in the scheme of things and to live up to that place. To empower others in their reaching for some place in the scheme of things. To do these things is to make fairy tales come true.

– Robert Fulghum