Upon returning home...
I’ve been out on a trail ride this week through the beautiful mountain of southern Colorado. My dad did not get to make the trip this year. Hopefully, Padre will rejoin the group next September.
On this ride I get to talk with men whom I consider to have become good friends of mine. Most of them call Colorado home, but they are from all walks of life. As we ride, eat, and talk each day we share what is going on in our families. We also talk about the joys and concerns we have with respect to our work, our nation, and our world.
While this ride astride good mounts takes us through fields and forest with awesome vistas, we know there are challenges in this world as well as challenges with our mounts. It’s a “slice of heaven”, some might say, but it’s only a slice. Horses get riled up, they’re irritated with one another from time to time and they are irritated by the girth. This can happen with the Roof Top Riders, too.
That’s what brought to mind a quote from C. S. Lewis: “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.” We definitely are made for another world - a world which our sin has not tainted as it has this one. Thankfully, we have been remade for that world in our baptism - a world which our Savior, Christ Jesus, purchased with His blood shed on the cross. A world He will usher in upon His triumphant return.
Until then, a ride on the “Roof Top” of the world, a return to a loving family, and gathering with God’s people on the Lord’s Day will have to do. And it most certainly will!
One of the ways God has worked through history
God loves a good mess if it helps us get the message. And he’s OK with things breaking sometimes, especially when it allows him to break through to us. Matthew Warner Messy & Foolish
From a favorite magazine, Touchstone, in its most recent edition.
The Acts of Jesus
by Donald T. Williams
If the Gospel According to Luke (the “former treatise, O Theophilus”) is about what Jesus “began to do and to teach,” then Acts is about what Jesus continued to do and to teach, through the Holy Spirit and the apostles, after his ascension. Compare that beginning to the way Acts ends, with Paul under house arrest but nothing resolved. The narrative doesn’t really end. It just stops. And that is the point.
We live in Acts chapter 29. We tend to think of the gospel as what Jesus did (rightly), and of church history as what we have done (rightly, up to a point). But Jesus is still doing things. Every time the Holy Spirit calls a person to faith and regenerates him and makes him a new creature, Jesus is still acting through his personal Agent and Emissary. And whenever we proclaim the gospel faithfully and back it up with sound apologetics, Jesus is still teaching.
If we think of church history as what Jesus is still doing through us, and of ourselves as living in Acts chapter 29, we will be thinking of things the way Luke did.
Donald T. Williams Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus of Toccoa Falls College and the author of Deeper Magic: The Theology Behind the Writings of C. S. Lewis (Square Halo Books, 2016) and Ninety-Five Theses for a New Reformation: A Road Map for Post-Evangelical Christianity (Semper Reformanda Publications, 2021).