Podcasts about great creator

Before the Earth was filled with laughter, love, and life, there was only stillness... and Modimo, the Great Creator, watching from the heavens above. In this episode, journey back to the very beginning, a time when rivers ran untasted, trees offered shade to no one, and animals wandered without meaning.Discover the ancient Tswana legend of how humanity was formed from clay and given breath by a divine force. What drove Modimo to descend from the sky? Why did the Creator place a single glowing star in the heavens as a warning and a promise?This isn't just a story of origin, it's a tale of purpose, connection, and divine love that echoes across generations. Press play and uncover the forgotten wisdom hidden in the soil beneath your feet and the stars above your head.

How beautiful is God, the Great Creator and Divine Creditor, to release us from our debt to Him. His love awakens us to the evil around us and constrains us to do something about it.

Send us a textGood morning! Thank you for taking a few minutes to listen. If you are interested in the Daily Bible Devotional, you can find it at the links below:Amazon - (paperback, hardcover, and Kindle)Spiritbuilding.com - (premium quality paperback)Youtube Video Introducing the ContentFeel free to reach out with any questions: emersonk78@me.comMatthew 16As Jesus begins to expand His ministry toward Jerusalem, He lays out some strong and needful teaching for His disciples. Firstly, the Pharisees and scribes are false teachers. They always seek signs because their hearts are not open to the truth. Their teachings are unkind, unlawfully binding, and must be avoided. Jesus then turns attention to “Who do people say the Son of Man is?” His point is that He is the only way, truth, and life. His church is built upon the confession of Jesus as Christ, the Son of God. He follows by explaining that the road to glory would require His suffering, death, and resurrection. The disciples struggle with this, but eternal life requires His sacrifice as well as sacrifices by all who follow Him.  There comes a time when things need to be plainly spoken. Christ was patient with the Pharisees, but it was time to warn the disciples away from their form of teaching. His church would welcome all but would only be enjoyed by those who confess Him as Christ and the Son of God. The path of faith would lead to heaven but would require extreme and total submission to God's will, perhaps even suffering or death. In the judgment, people will be willing to do anything to get to heaven, but the saved will have made that commitment during their lives here on earth. Jesus has extensively spoken to us about discipleship. Are we willing to submit and follow Him? Great Creator and all-powerful God, teach us a form of belief that is willing to make hard choices. There are teachings around us that are false. Help us to reject them. There is a single truth that dominates the Christian: Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. Give us the boldness to stand upon it in every part of our lives. Jesus gave everything to become our Savior. Guide us to be thankful and to put forth our lives as sacrificial offerings to You in gratitude and allegiance. Forgive our failures and strengthen us to be ready when Your Son returns.  Thought Questions:  -       The Pharisees demanded signs, even after Jesus had shown them so much. Has Christ done enough for you to be faithful to Him? -       If the church is built upon the confession that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, what should that statement look like and mean in your life? -       “For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?” (16:26)

Wednesday evening message from the pulpit of Shawano Baptist Church

If we are to be able to complete the good works that God has already prepared for us, we have to first walk in the understanding that we are the direct product of God's irrefutable goodness. The Great Creator designed us. There is no question that we are valuable.  SUBSCRIBE to our sister podcasts:Your Daily Prayer: https://www.lifeaudio.com/your-daily-prayer/Your Daily Bible Verse: https://www.lifeaudio.com/your-daily-bible-verse/ Full Transcript Below: Worth More Than a Picasso  By Deidre Braley  Ephesians 2:10: For we are God's handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.  I once bought a Picasso print at Ikea. It features a handful of his famous animal sketches—single lines formed into dogs, horses, flamingoes. I liked the print well enough, but it was the fact that Picasso had done it that made me want to buy it and hang it on my wall.  It's interesting, yes? That the works of artists like Pablo Picasso are considered to be so inherently valuable—not for their content, necessarily, but rather for their creator. In truth, some of Picasso's drawings are so simple they look like a child could have drawn them; I'm thinking now of such sketches as “Young Peasant Boy” and “Bull.” Still, they hang in museums and are universally applauded, pondered, and revered. At some point, Picasso became a household name; one with such indisputable merit that people would pay fortunes for his work. In fact, one of his paintings—“Femme à la montre”—even sold for $139 million at auction last year.  Just as anything that Picasso put his hand to is considered to have intrinsic worth, so it is with us—the workmanship of God. Ephesians 2:10 says, “For we are God's handiwork…” So it is of no consequence whether the world looks at us and deems us rich in color or interesting in subject matter or worthy of a bidding war. We have been created by the greatest artist in the entire universe, and because of this fact alone, we could be scribbled on a napkin and still be worth an entire fortune.  And not just that. We aren't absent-minded doodles. The verse goes on to say that we are “...created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Ephesians 2:10). We were formed with a purpose in mind. Long before this world could  examine and critique and experience us—long before we were put on display—God crafted us to carry out good works. He put us into the world to make it better. Our value is undeniable.  Intersecting Faith & Life  It's one thing to say we are inherently valuable; it's another thing altogether to believe it. Often, we become so inundated with feelings of shame, inadequacy, and fear that we can hardly convince ourselves that we could be considered anything akin to art.  At times like these, think back to Picasso. His art is considered valuable because it was his hand that created it—not necessarily because the content itself is perfect, stunning, or impressive. It is that way for us, too. We are God's art, and whether we feel worthy of the acclaim or not, the fact is that we are a product of the outpouring of God's mind, hand, and genius. It is indisputable: we are precious.  And if we are to be able to complete the good works that God has already prepared for us, we have to first walk in the understanding that we are the direct product of God's irrefutable goodness. The Great Creator designed us. There is no question that we are valuable.  It is also helpful to remember this when it feels difficult to love others. When you must interact with someone who challenges you, try looking them in the eye and telling yourself, “This person is God's handiwork. They (even they!) have good work set before them. God loves them and made them with a purpose in mind.” Watch to see how your attitude towards them softens. It is impossible to remain entirely bitter-angry-exasperated-critical when you recognize the Artist behind the creation in front of you.  Further Reading  Psalm 139 Discover more Christian podcasts at lifeaudio.com and inquire about advertising opportunities at lifeaudio.com/contact-us.

The magnificent temple Solomon built was opened and dedicated.  Consider the words Solomon used in addressing God!  “Whatever prayer, whatever plea is made by any man or by all your people Israel, each knowing the affliction of his own heart and stretching out his hands toward this house, then hear in heaven your dwelling place and forgive and act and render to each whose heart you know, according to all his ways (for you, you only, know the hearts of all the children of mankind), that they may fear you all the days that they live …”[1 Kings 8 v.38-40]  Does God “know” your heart?  He must, he can give your life real meaning! How can God “know the hearts of all”?  Is this an exaggeration?  During my lifetime clever human beings have discovered more of the ‘magic' of making use of the ‘waves' in the air that were discovered in the 19th Century: they can now transmit words and pictures around the world in an instant, the portraying of the Olympic Games is the latest example of this. The scientists of those earlier days were convinced there was a Great Creator.  The scientist Faraday reasoned that God could not have created air and space with nothing in it!    He, with other scientists of that age, experimented and discovered radio waves of varying frequencies.  Stop and think of the ‘power' you tap into when you pick up a mobile phone and ring any one of countless millions of people in any country in the world within a minute or two – isn't it telling you something?  Isn't it telling you to think carefully about what the Creator can do? Yes, he can “know” the hearts of all human beings!  We live in an age of wonders, but these should and must lead to us to wonder at – and be in awe of – the Creator.  as to what we human beings, that God has created, can do – so should we not be ready to think of how God wants to be involved in our thinking and doing?  Remember Paul's words to the idol worshipping people of Athens.  He told them about the One true God, saying, “In Him we live and move and have our being” [Acts 17 v.28]  Think what those words mean! Paul told them, “that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel their way toward him and find him … he is actually not far from each one of us.” [v.27]  David starts his 139th Psalm with this remarkable observation! “O LORD, you have searched me and known me … you discern my thoughts from afar.”   Awesome!  We ignore God at our peril.  Sadly nearly everyone does – make sure you are not among them. 

Summary In this episode, Benjamin talks about God, Creation, Science, and the Bible! For more podcasts, blogs, books, and workout attire, check out www.benjaminlee.blog --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/benjaminlee/support

PreludeWelcome & News of the ChurchCall to WorshipOpening Hymn - (#1) "For the Beauty of the Earth"Praise SongsConfession, Assurance, and Gloria PatriSpecial Music - "Chariot's Comin'!" arr. Don Besig - Sam Allen & Bryan CichSermon - "Guf: Body" (Psalm 139:13–16) - by Rev. Jason GrifficeHymn of Response - (#389) "Let All Things Now Living" (verse 1)Receiving of Our Tithes and OfferingsOffertoryDoxologyPrayers of the PeopleClosing Hymn - (#9) "Teach Us What We Yet May Be"BenedictionPostludeFor the Beauty of the EarthFor the beauty of the earth, For the glory of the skies, For the love which from our birthOver and around us lies: CHORUS:Lord of all to Thee we raiseThis our hymn of grateful praise. For the wonder of each hourOf the day and of the night, Hill and vale and tree and flower, Sun and moon and stars of light: [CHORUS]For the joy of human love, Brother, sister, parent, child; Friends on earth and friends above; For all gentle thoughts and mild:[CHORUS]For Thy Church that evermoreLifteth holy hands above, Offering up on every shoreHer pure sacrifice of love: [CHORUS]For Thyself, best gift divine, To our race so freely given; For that great, great love of Thine, Peace on earth and joy in heaven: [CHORUS]Let All Things Now LivingLet all things now livingA song of thanksgivingTo God the Creator triumphantly raise, Who fashioned and made us, Protected and stayed us, Who guideth us on to the end of our days. His banners are o'er us, His light goes before us, A pillar of fire shining forth in the night, 'Til shadows have vanishedAnd darkness is banished, As forward we travel from light into light.Teach Us What We Yet May BeGod, who stretched the spangled heavens Infinite in time and place, Flung the suns in burning radiance Through the silent fields of space, We, Thy children, in Thy likeness, Share inventive powers with Thee - Great Creator, still creating, Teach us what we yet may be. We have conquered worlds undreamed of Since the childhood of our race, Know the ecstacy of winging Through uncharted realms of space, Probed the secrets of the atom, Yielding unimagined power - Facing us with life's destruction Or our most triumphant hour. As Thy new horizons beckon, Father, give us strength to be Children of creative purpose, Serving man and honoring Thee, 'Til our dreams are rich with meaning - Each endeavor Thy design - Great Creator, lead us onward 'Til our work is one with Thine. Amen.

Job calls out to God in his pain, what am I to you, only just a puny little human being to the Great Creator? Why do you even bother wasting your time making me suffer?

Can we experience the Divine with both the innocence of a child and the wisdom of an ancient? In this 5th episode of Being & Becoming, Dawn Morningstar and Ellen Slater share their fertile thoughts - and questions - about that which can never be understood: the Great Creator of all that is. Welcome to these authentic, informed, and heartfelt conversations between two women (New World Women Co-Founder Dawn Morningstar and Therapist and LICSW Ellen Slater), at different crossroads of life, sharing perspective and wisdom on some of life's greatest lessons. Covering topics such as Compassion/Self-Compassion, Ecology, Death & Rebirth, Aging, Grief and Trauma, you will surely leave this listening experience with new insights, connection and likely a smile in your heart.   If you're a fan of New World Women's other podcast “Collaboration is Queen,” we invite you to go deeper into your sacred self in this new series: Being & Becoming. You can visit us on NewWorldWomen.com and suggest topics you're interested in. We'd really love to hear from you!   Our special guest for this 12-part series is Ellen Slater. Ellen is a therapist, yoga instructor and mindfulness teacher with 20 years of experience working with adults, couples, children and families.    Ellen's Website: EllenSlater.com New World Women, a women's organization that helps women move beyond an old system built on separation, competition, exclusion, haves and have-nots and women settling for less (or nothing). New World Women co-founders Dawn Morningstar (founder of Venerable Women), Shawn Vougeot (founder of Empowering Women) and Mecca Page (founder of BreakAway Arts) collaborated to create a unique business model that shares profits with women to reward them for expanding their consciousness and nurturing themselves. The three are often overheard saying, “Collaboration is queen!' Sponsored by New World Women - http://www.NewWorldWomen.com

This is a very important topic-Is there a such thing as our Great CREATOR having a permissive Will or not? Listen and make your own decision. This is where you can support us: https://open.firstory.me/join/ckozalmsa4e4f0a36mxz2ix3k Feel free to comment: https://open.firstory.me/story/ckztqbtwf2fks0a06928n5mm7?m=comment 小額贊助支持本節目： https://open.firstory.me/user/ckozalmsa4e4f0a36mxz2ix3k 留言告訴我你對這一集的想法： https://open.firstory.me/user/ckozalmsa4e4f0a36mxz2ix3k/comments Powered by Firstory Hosting

"Basically it's books that we recommend a lot or books that have really changed our practice." Dr. Susanne Evans   In honour of World Book Day and the value of reading Dr. Susanne Evans, David Lee and I recorded a conversation that explores a wide range of reads that have significantly impacted us including personal development, reflective practice, storytelling, neuroscience and touching on historical events such as the Rwandan Genocide. We each share insights on books that have changed our life, practice, or perspective, accompanied by anecdotes and a deeper look into the themes and lessons of selected works. This conversation offers listeners a rich tapestry of knowledge and a massive list of 'must-reads' for anyone looking to expand their understanding of themselves and the world through literature.    The following titles are included in our conversation The Right Questions by Debbie Ford The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds Frequency by Penny Pierce Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl The Joy of Appreciative Living by Jacqueline Kelm Reflective Practice in Medicine by John Launer On Being Certain Robert A. Burton Don't Bite the Hook by Pema Chodron Season of Blood by Fergal Keane Bittersweet by Susan Cain The Long Win by Cath Bishop The Soul's Code by James Hillman Time to Think by Nancy Klein Quiet by Susan Cain Prayer to the Great Creator by Julia Cameron Dealing with a Difficult Co-Worker by David Lee Leading Beyond the Numbers by Susan Ni Chriodain ChangeStories by Dr Susanne Evans   Dr Susanne Evans is an organisation change consultant, trainer, coach and researcher on a mission to change the way that transformations are managed in organisations. She founded Feldspar Consulting in 2007 to help her clients lead change in a more human, effective way. As well as writing and speaking about organisation change, Susanne hosts open storytelling workshops, supporting organisations and individuals in writing a compelling story for themselves, and she is the host of the popular ChangeStories podcast.   David Lee is a coach, consultant, workshop facilitator, keynote speaker, and author, who loves creating a win/win/win relationship between people and the organizations they work for. He helps leaders and leadership teams learn how to become "people whisperers", and by doing so, increase their ability to make their organization THE choice for "A List Talent" and inspire the best in their people.   Connect with Susanne On LinkedIn Through her website: Feldspar Consulting Listen to Change Stories podcast   Connect with David On LinkedIn  Through his website Human Nature at Work  

Heavenly Father, we come to You not on the basis of our righteousness. We come to You not on the basis of our uprightness or our morality. We come to You on the basis of the blood of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. Jesus, we thank You that You made a way for us to have a loving relationship with God the Father, a meaning to experience this Person, to experience His presence and to experience His power. And we thank You, Jesus, because of Your work on the cross, because of Your death, burial, resurrection, Your ascension and You sent us the Holy Spirit. You offer the Spirit of God to each person who humbly asks. I pray, Lord, today, that You do unleash Your great power in our lives, in our homes, in our households, in our families, in our church and in our city. We do believe in You that You are a great God and You long for people to come to know You. You long to adopt many into Your household, to make those who are not Your children, Your beloved children in whom You delight.I pray, if anyone is far from You, far from the household of God today, give them the gift of repentance, give them the gift of faith and draw them to Yourself. And Lord, for the rest of us, I do pray that You embolden us to speak the gospel, give us opportunities to proclaim the gospel, unleash our tongues, to proclaim the gospel, the truth to the people around us. There's so many that don't know You and they haven't experienced Your presence and Your power and we believe on their behalf and we long to bring them to You, Lord. And I pray that You give us much grace in that. Lord, bless our time in the holy scriptures. Bless everyone who's here today. What a great way to start off the brand new year. And Lord, I pray that You prepare our hearts for holy communion, which we'll celebrate later. We pray this in Jesus' name, amen.Well, good morning and welcome to Mosaic on this communion Sunday. We're continuing our sermon series through the incredible Gospel of Mark. We've called it Kingdom Come, the Gospel of Mark and the secret of God's kingdom. And in the gospel, Jesus is revealing, He's unveiling, He is regulating revelation. And those that do believe in Him, they take Him at His word. They begin to see that He really is who He is and His power is unleashed in their life. The title of the sermon today's Great Faith Unleashes Great Power. And what we've seen so far in the Gospel of Mark is that God, who created everything, the great God overall, He takes on flesh. The Son of God is sent by God the Father. He's anointed by God the Holy Spirit to establish the kingdom of God here on earth where God's presence and His peace reigns.And how does Jesus Christ, the Son of God, establish the kingdom of God? He does so with a message. And this is the good news, the gospel. It's the gospel that changes hearts because the kingdom of God is an inside out kingdom. God changes our hearts when we believe in the good news. He changes our desires. We begin to desire prayer. We begin to desire fellowship with God's people. We begin to desire to do the will of God, to live in submission to God out of love for Him and love for neighbor. And what was the gospel that Jesus preached? It was very short. His very first sermon is documented and it went like this.He says, "The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe in the gospel. Repent and believe the good news that the King of the Universe has come to save us, save us from Satan, sin and death by laying down His life on a cross." And we are to repent and believe in Him, believe that He is God, believe that He is the King of the Universe. Now, how many people believed this message? During Jesus' three year ministry, how many people believed this message and how many people were saved? I think, statistically speaking, it was a very small percentage. If you look at First Corinthians 15, it says that the resurrected Christ appear to 500 people. 500 people, what a small percentage of all the people that He ministered to.And who believed? Well, those who were seemingly crazy enough to take Jesus at His word. He spoke, they believed, and all of a sudden, they were saved and God's power was unleashed in their life when they really believed that He was the Great I Am when they humbly believed. Those people experienced the power of God. His family, Jesus' family, we read, they thought He was out of His mind. The good folks back home and His hometown mocked Him as, "Oh, you're just a carpenter. You're just the Son of Mary." And the Pharisees we read that they joined forces with the Herodians to kill Jesus. Some thought Jesus was John the Baptist come back from the dead. Herod Antipas believed that. Some thought He was Elijah even when He fed the 5,000 miraculously. They understood that He was presenting Himself as the Messianic King, but they didn't realize what kind of king He was, the king of people's hearts.The religious establishment said that Jesus was demon-possessed, a sorcerer, a false teacher. And even the disciples we read who saw His power over and over and over had said that they were hardened in their hearts and they had trouble believing. Amazingly, the only ones that truly recognize Jesus for who He is all of the time are the demons. The demons understood. But the few who took Jesus at His word, they experienced His power and they experienced His salvation. And today, we come to such a woman. We come to a woman who amazed Jesus Christ with her faith. To her, Jesus said, "Oh, woman, great is your faith." And her great faith released great power in her life. And great faith does release great power. Why? Because God honors bold faith because bold faith honors God.So that brings us to Mark 7:24-37. Would you look at the text with me? "And from there, He arose and went away to the region of Tyre and Sidon. And He entered a house and did not want anyone to know, yet He could not be hidden. But immediately, a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit heard of Him and came and fell down at His feet. Now the woman was a Gentile, a Syrophoenician by birth and she begged Him to cast the demon out of her daughter. And He said to her, 'Let the children be fed first, for it is not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs.' But she answered Him, 'Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs.' And He said to her, 'For this statement, you may go your way. The demon has left your daughter.' And she went away and found the child lying in bed and the demon gone.Then He returned from the region of Tyre and went through Sidon to the Sea of Galilee and the region of the Decapolis. And they brought to Him a man who was deaf and had a speech impediment and they begged Him to lay His hand on him. And taking him aside from the crowd privately, He put His fingers into his ears, and after spitting, touched his tongue. And looking up to heaven, He sighed and said to him, 'Ephphatha,' that is, 'Be opened.' And his ears were opened, his tongue was released and he spoke plainly. And Jesus charged to tell no one. But the more He charged them, the more zealously they proclaimed it. And they were astonished beyond measure saying, 'He has done all things well. He even makes the deaf hear and the mute speak.'This is the reading of God's holy, inerrant, infallible, authoritative word. May He write these eternal truths upon our hearts. Three points to frame up our time. First, great faith is humble chutzpah before God. Second, great faith is humble hunger for God. And third, great faith is humble bringing and begging. First, great faith is humble chutzpah before God. Chutzpah, it's from the Yiddish. It means nerve. It means courage. It means impudence. It means confidence in action. I like that word. And it definitely perfectly characterizes this woman's posture of heart. She comes boldly with confidence, yet it's humble confidence. So this is point one, the great faith is humble chutzpah before God.We saw the progression from chapter 7 verses 1 through 23 to this one, which is very logical where Jesus said, He called all food clean, meaning He removed the barrier between the Jews and the Gentiles, the barrier of the dietary laws that separated Jews socially from Gentiles. And now Jesus is positioned perfectly to enter Gentile territory, something a Jewish rabbi would have never done because they consider the Gentiles unclean. And Jesus said, "It's not what comes from the outside that makes you unclean. It's that which comes from the inside that makes you unclean and Jesus can cleanse all.So now He comes into Gentile territory. This is verse 24. From there, He arose and went away to the region of Tyre and Sidon and He entered a house and did not want anyone to know, yet He could not be hidden. The human, Jesus, God incarnate, He did grow tired at some points. He just had ministered to many people. He's exhausted and now He journeys into Gentile territory, tries to keep Himself hidden. He can't do it because His fame had already proceeded Him. Tyre had a long history of antagonism toward Israel. Josephus, the Jewish historian, he said, "The inhabitants of Tyre were notoriously our bitterest enemies." There was bad blood between these two groups of people, the Galileans and people from Tyre. So that's the context.So this woman who is from the other people, she's from the other religions, she's from the other socioeconomic status, she's from the other-other everything, she comes to Jesus and she comes to Jesus boldly. Verse 25, "But immediately, a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit heard of Him and came and fell down at His feet." The unclean spirit is a demon that's made clear in verses 29 and 30. So here, we meet a mother, a desperate mother. She comes to Christ. She's heard of His explosive power and she throws herself at His feet in an attitude, a posture of heart, of self-abasement and supplication. She prostrates herself before Him, which shows the level of her distress, her pain.The pain of her child had brought her to Jesus Christ. The pain of her child had brought her to her knees. And she's interceding for her child. A mother is praying for her child. And whenever I see texts like this, just a reminder that we are to intercede for our loved ones. We are to intercede in prayer for our children and for our siblings and for our families and for our neighbors, and for our city. We are to pray. And when we intercede, God hears those prayers, especially when they're prayed with this posture of heart. The mother prayed for her child because the child couldn't pray for herself and the mother persisted until her prayer was granted.We see that this woman is very similar to the woman that was suffering 12 years from a hemorrhage in chapter 5. The likeness has seen that they were both ritually impure. They both needed miraculous power from the Lord. And despite her impurity, the Syrophoenician, like the woman with the hemorrhage, comes boldly hoping for healing from Christ. Verse 26, "Now the woman was a Gentile, a Syrophoenician by birth, and she begged Him to cast the demon out of her daughter. And He said to her, 'Let the children be fed first, for it is not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs.'" The Matthew parallel calls her a Canaanite woman. The word for Gentile here, it's a word that means that she was Greek speaking or Hellenized. So she's a Greek-speaking pagan Gentile from Tyre and the woman hopes that Jesus is going to heal her. She asks, she begs, she pleads. And it seems like He says no. It seems like Jesus' response dashes her hopes in a very hard way. And what is Jesus doing here? Jesus is showing that He ... First of all, there was an order to the salvation process. There was an order to the revelation that, first of all, He came to the children of Israel. Romans 1:16 says, "For I'm not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes to the Jew first and also to the Greek, to the Jew first and also to the Gentile, but it's for anyone who believes."Or 1 Corinthians 1:22, "For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God." Why the Jews first? Because the Jews became the first rebellious children of God. He chose them as His people. They rebelled against Him. He sends His Son into this vineyard, so to speak, to then save them, save the elect from Israel. And Isaiah 1:2-3 explains or opens, reveals the Father's heart, "Hear, O heavens and give ear, O earth, for the Lord has spoken. Children have I reared and brought up, but they have rebelled against Me. The ox knows its owner and the donkey its master's crib, but Israel does not know. My people do not understand."The word first is used in our text proton. It's always used in order to explain that in the eschatological timeline of God's revelation, there is progress. The coming of Elijah was supposed to come before the Messiah. The binding of Satan needs to happen before despoiling of His house. Jesus' ministry to His fellow Jews was first, but He's in Gentile territory, meaning He's there to bring home the elect as well. Jesus expands His gospel ministry beyond Israel even when He was here. Only after these events have occurred in their divinely ordered sequence can the end come. As Mark says in chapter 4, "First a shoot, then an ear, then full grain in the year." There's a pattern here.The word proton and the thought behind it are similar to those of Paul in Romans 1 and Romans 11. Jesus did come for the Jew first but also for the Gentile. And here, it seems very derogatory if you think about it. He's calling her a dog. He's like, "I'm going to feed the children first and then you don't feed the dogs before the children." And you read the commentaries and they're like, "Well, it's not that offensive. It's the diminutive. He's calling her a little dog." No, that's offensive. You call anyone a little dog in that ... In our context, we love dogs. Dogs are domesticated. I have a daughter that prays on just as persistently as a Syrophoenician woman for a dog and ... Long story.But in our context, we love the dogs. People even consider themselves dog parents. Back then, they didn't domesticate dogs. Dogs were wild. Dogs lived outside of cities. Dogs were considered unclean and the New Testament continues this negative attitude. St. Paul says, "Beware of the dogs." In Philippians, Jesus says, "Don't throw what is holy to the dogs or the pigs." In Revelation 22:15, "The dog is an outsider to the community of God's grace." So using the terminology dog, he's calling her a dog, is an insult. That's what's happening. He's insulting her so to speak.And the question really is, how is she going to respond? Is she going to say, "No, I reject your verdict. I reject your bad news. I don't want your good news because I reject your bad news about my current state"? She doesn't do any of that. She hears it and she desperately continues in her persistence. Despite Jesus' seeming cool indifference and silence, she got His no. And she's like, "Okay, great, but I still ask for Your yes." Matthew 15 in the parallel context, in Matthew 15:22, "And behold, a Canaanite woman from that region came out and was crying, 'Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David. My daughter is severely oppressed by a demon.' But He did not answer her a word. And His disciples came and begged Him saying, 'Send her away, for she is crying out after us.' He answered, 'I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.' But she came and knelt before Him saying, 'Lord, help me.' But He answered, 'It is not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs.'"You'd expect her to get angry. You'd expect her to call Jesus all of the isms and call him all of the ist names, but she doesn't get all huffy. She's not too proud to accept the verdict. She doesn't say, "How dare You? How dare You mock me? How dare You belittle me?" She could have said, "I didn't choose to be a Gentile. I didn't choose to be born here. I didn't choose to have a daughter that suffers. I'm not even asking for myself, Jesus. Do You know how much we've suffered together? We deserve something from You." She doesn't do any of that. She realizes that she cannot stand before Jesus, before Christ, before the Son of God, before God Himself on her rights, on her moral record.Even on the basis of her own suffering, she understands that God owes her nothing. She understands who she is in relation to the God of the universe. She remains humble. Even when she hears really hard words from Jesus, she gets a really hard no, but she continues asking. She continues believing, humbly believing, humbly understanding that she has absolutely zero grounds upon which to claim His favor. She says, "Yes, I am a dog. In relation to God, I am a dog. I'm unfit for the Father's favor. I have transgressed commandments. I have lived as though God does not exist. I have broken the first commandment, it's because I've broken the first one, I've broken them all. The first commandment is, 'Thou shall have no other gods before me.' I haven't worshiped Yahweh. Yes, I am a dog. Yes, I'm outside, but, but I see Your house is big enough even for me, but I see that there's enough bread on Your table even for a dog like me." That's her posture of heart.And when we present the gospel, we say, "Look, it starts with the bad news." The bad news is we have broken God's sovereign law. Whenever you break any law, there are to be consequences for the breaking of the law, especially when it comes to God. Whoever transgresses even one law deserves death. The word of God says, "Deserves eternal damnation." The word of God says, "That's the bad news. Apart from God, we are not children. Apart from God, we are sinners." "And yes, Lord, I am a sinner. I am a filthy, wretched dog. I am a dog. Can I be Your dog? I hear You're a good master." That's what she's saying. That's why I use the word for chutzpah, it's nerve, it's brass, it's confidence and actions gall. It's audacity.And this brings us to point two, great faith is humble hunger for God. And you see this, you see what she's doing. She's not just asking for the miracle. She's relating to Jesus. She's conversing with Jesus. She wants more of God in her life. She's hungry for God. Verse 28, "But she answered Him, 'Yes Lord, yet even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs.'" The Syrophoenician woman, she's like, "Yes, I am a dog," but all of a sudden, she's so smart, she switches everything. She puts the dog in the house. I don't know if you notice this. She's like, "I am a dog, but I'm a dog in Your house under Your table." That's what she's doing.And this reminds us, this whole encounter with a Gentile woman, a Gentile woman's daughter, it reminds us of Elijah. Elijah the prophet was sent to the people of Israel, but the people of Israel didn't obey. They didn't believe in God. So then he goes to the Gentiles. And Jesus, when He started His ministry in His hometown, He goes to the synagogue and He reminded them of that story. He said, "Look, I've come here to the children of Israel, but the children of Israel refuse to believe. So I'm going to the Gentiles, just like Elijah was sent to the Gentiles," Luke 4:24, "And he said, 'Truly I say to you, no prophet is acceptable in his hometown. But in truth, I tell you, there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah when the heavens were shut up three years and six months and a great famine came over the land. And Elijah was sent to none of them, but only to Zarephath and the land of Sidon to a woman who was a widow. And there were many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elijah and none of them was cleansed, but only Namaan the Syrian.When they heard these things, all in the synagogue were filled with wrath and they rose up and drove Him out of the town and brought Him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, so that they could throw Him down the cliff. But passing through their midst, He went away." And you say, "Why did they get so mad? Why do they get so angry?" They got so angry because He reminded them that God loves Gentiles as well. And it's not your birth, it's not your DNA, it's not your ethnicity that makes you right with God. It's your humility. It's your humble repentance where you say, "God, I don't deserve to be Your child. God, I don't deserve a relationship. God, I don't deserve cleansing in Your power, but I'm going to ask anyway."After His rejection at Nazareth, Jesus gives a clear warning of the coming mission to the Gentiles that He's going to the Gentiles. And it is in light of this background that we must read the initial response to this woman. He went to the children of Israel who said, "We don't want You. Jesus, we don't need You. We're children of Israel by birth." And Jesus said, "No one's a child of God by birth. You can't be born into the Family of God physically, only spiritually. You need to be born again." And they didn't want to hear that. They didn't want to hear that they needed to repent, that they needed to follow God.And yet this woman, she's told, "You're not a child of God. You're a dog," and she doesn't get huffy. She continues the conversation. She calls Him Lord, "Yes, Lord. Even the dogs on the table eat the children's crumbs." She says, "Yes, Lord, but there's plenty on that table even for me." She lays hold of Christ's word and bases her plea upon Him. The woman's response transforms the dog of Jesus metaphor into a domestic dog in the house. She, here in the stories, part of the household of faith. One translation says, "Since then, I am a dog. I'm not a stranger. I'm not outside." Another translation, she says, "Let me be a dog. I'll accept that I am, but even a dog has his day or her day. Yes, I'm a little dog, but can I still have some crumbs from the table? Yes, I'm a little dog, but I'm Your dog and You're my master."She calls him, "Lord, I am a humble part of the household. I don't deserve to be here, but I'm just asking for a crumb. I'm just asking for a little bit of your grace." And Jesus hears that. Jesus hears her plea and her plea is actually based on a promise from the Old Testament, a promise that God gave to Abraham. When He blesses Abraham, He says, "I'm going to extend the blessings I'm giving you to the rest of the world." Genesis 12:3, "I will bless those who bless you and him who dishonors you, I will curse. And in you, all the families of the earth shall be blessed. All of the families. All of the families shall be blessed. All of the families, all of the people that come to God and say, "God, I don't have any rights to assert, that I'm coming to You with a right less assertiveness. I'm not coming to You on the basis of my goodness. I'm coming to You on the basis of Your goodness and Your generosity."Thomas Cranmer, in The Book of Common Prayer, he says, "We do not presume to come to this thy table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy table, but thou art the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy." Jesus hears her and He likes her response. In verse 29, He said to her, "For this statement," another translation says, "Good answer. Good answer." I wish I was there to see the twinkle in His eye, "Good answer." "For this statement, you may go your way. The demon has left your daughter," and she went home and found the child lying in bed and the demon gone.In response to the woman's audacity, her impudent faith, She wrestles a blessing from Christ. And in this, she reminds us of someone else's scripture. She reminds us of Jacob. Jacob, when he wrestled with God, when he took hold of God, and most likely, that was a Christophany because it says that he wrestled with God and it said that he wrestled with a Man. It was a Man God, the God Man, Jesus Christ. This woman is much like Jacob in her persistence, her refusal to take no for an answer. She's content to get the no, "Yes, I am a dog," but she still keeps asking for the yes.And Jacob did the same thing. Jacob in Genesis 32, he was a man in need. The next morning, he was going to meet his brother, Esau, his estranged brother, Esau, and he thought he was going to meet Esau with murderous intent, that Esau wanted to kill him. He feared for his own life, Jacob did. He feared for the lives of his wives and children. So he prays. He sends them ahead and he prays with God. And the Lord appears to him as a man and wrestled with him through the night. And of course, the Lord was play wrestling. He's not really wrestling with Jacob. Jacob thought He was wrestling. Jesus was playing.This is Genesis 32:24, "Jacob was left alone. And a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day. And when the man saw that He did not prevail against Jacob, He touched his hip socket and Jacob's hip was put out of joint as He wrestled with him. Then he said, 'Let me go for, the day has broken.' But Jacob said, 'I will not let You go unless You bless me.' And He said to him, 'What is your name?' He said, 'Jacob.' Then He said, 'Your name shall no longer be Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men and have prevailed.' Then Jacob asked Him, 'Please tell me Your name.' And He said, 'Why is it that you asked My name?' And there, He blessed him. So Jacob called the name of the place Peniel, saying, 'For I have seen God face to face, yet my life has been delivered.'"And you say, "Why did Jesus tell a woman no in the beginning? What is He doing? Did she change His mind from a silent indifference to helping her?" I don't think that's what's happening. When He says for this statement, He's not saying, "Because you have said this or because you have changed My mind," He's saying, "Because you've passed the test." He was testing her. He said, "No," to test her. "Is she going to persist? Is she going to continue asking?" It was a ploy designed to evoke even greater levels of faith on her part. Martin Luther commenting on this text, he said, "Christians need to persist in trusting God even when He seems to turn His back on them. We must learn to see the yes hidden in His no."I think that's really powerful, especially if you meditate on or you apply it to your life. We must work to see His yes and His no. If He says no, now He has a better yes for us. So we keep asking, we keep asking, we keep asking, and obviously, in all the Lord's will. Matthew 15:28, "Then Jesus answered her, "O woman, great is your faith. Be it done for you as you desire. And her daughter was healed instantly." Her faith delighted Jesus Christ. My daughter, sometimes they come to me and they test me to see how strict I am regarding grades. And they're like, "Yeah, but if I get an A-, is that okay?" "Oh, yeah, that's fine.""What if I get a B+?" "You're pushing it. You're pushing it." "What if I get a B ..." And my conversation is, "Look, I don't care about your GPA honestly. I can't tell you that I just did, but I really don't care. I don't care. I do. Do your best in your sports. Do your best. I care about your soul above all else. I care about your faith. I care that you grow in your relationship with the Lord. I care about you growing in wisdom." And Jesus is in the same way. He's delighted by this woman's faith. May your faith and may my faith delight the Lord in the same way. She took Christ at His word, and when He said, "You're dog," and then He blesses her like a child.And this is really how God speaks of salvation, that when we repent of our sins and turn to Christ, we get regenerated, we get a new heart, but we also get a new identity. We become a child of God. God adopts us into His family. God says, "You are not My children, but I'm going to make you My children," and it's all because of His Son, Jesus Christ. Hebrews 11:6, "And without faith, it is impossible to please Him. For whoever would draw near to God must believe that He exists and that He rewards those who seek Him." He rewards those who seek Him. Do you seek Him with the same posture of heart persistently, "Lord, I want more of You. Lord, I want more of Your presence. Lord, I want more of Your power."And that's why Jesus is called the Bread of Life, and we are to hunger, our souls are to hunger for Jesus as the Bread of Life. "Lord, I'm starving. I am famished for You." What do you do when you're hungry? You can't stop thinking about food. You're just salivating. You're thinking about that next meal that's coming and this is ... What is humility? It's recognizing, "Lord, apart from You, I'm starving. My soul is starving. Lord, I seek you." And the word of God says, "Whoever seeks God will be found. He will be found by them." Her faith is dramatically contrasted with the heartened unbelief of the Pharisees who were Jewish. They consider themselves children of God, but they weren't because they had no faith in Christ. And her faith even outshines the understanding of the disciples whose hearts were hardened at times. And God loves persistent pursuit of Him and He rewards this lavishly.Matthew 11:12, "From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence and the violent take it by force." What does that mean? He's talking about John the Baptist. John the Baptist, he sacrificed everything to proclaim that Jesus Christ is God, to proclaim that, "Jesus Christ is here. He's willing to save people." John the Baptist sacrificed everything for the kingdom of God to expand. The violent, he took it by force. It took effort. It took work on his part and the same way, if you pursue God, if you sacrifice to pursue God. And yes, this does take sacrifice like, "Rain, snow, whatever, I'm going to church." That's who you are. I commend all of you. You're here at first service. Praise be to God.I had a phone call from a pastor and he's like, "Are you guys canceling church?" I was like, "This isn't public school. We don't believe in snow days. Forget that. We're going to church." Yeah, we'll get a little wet. That's fine. We do close church if the tea's not running. That's because of the temple situation. But what I'm saying is, yes, it does take effort. You want to experience more of God? It takes effort to wake up just to study the scriptures. It takes effort to pray. It takes effort to pursue the Lord. Like the paralytic friends, remember that the house is full, they couldn't get through to Christ. They climb into the roof. They break through 18 inches of sod and branches in the roof lowering the man and the man is healed and Jesus forgives him of his sins as well.Jesus delights in persistent faith like that of this woman. Another example is Luke 18 and Luke 18, there's a woman who keeps returning to a judge, pleading her case over and over and over. And verse 4 of Luke 18 says, "For a while, he refused, but afterward, he said to himself, 'Though I neither fear God nor respect man, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will give her justice, so that she will not beat me down by her continual coming.'" And this is a comparison, opposites of course, that God, He wants to give us mercy, He wants to give us justice, He wants to pour out His power in our life, but do we keep coming to him persistently, doggedly, voraciously, yet humbly like this woman does?She depended on Christ's goodness, not her own, so she finally understood grace. She understood grace. "It's not because of anything in me, Lord. I plead Your mercy. I plead Your grace. And faith is such a picture. It's not this bloodless, flaccid, distracted, half-hearted acceptance of certain propositions or theorems of theology about God. No, you realize that God is a person and that God does bless those who pursue Him. Faith is driven. It's determined. It's an unyielding grip upon God Himself and that's why hunger is such a good metaphor. Psalm 51:17, "The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart, O God, You will not despise."Matthew 5:3-6, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied." And we continue the text, point three is great faith, humble bringing and begging. And verse 31, "Then He returned from the region of Tyre and went through Sidon to the Sea of Galilee and the region of the Decapolis. And they brought to Him a man who was deaf and had a speech impediment and they begged Him to lay His hand on him." Who are these people that brought this man that needed healing to Jesus? We're not told. We just know that these people heard about Christ. They heard that Christ has power to help, so they bring their friend and they beg God on behalf. They beg Christ on behalf of their friend."Lord, just Your hand, one hand touch our friend. Heal him." Verse 33, "And taking him aside from the crowd privately, He put His fingers into his ears, and after spitting, touched his tongue." Why does Jesus do this? I think the simplest explanation is probably the best one. He's speaking with this man, communicating with this man in the only language the man can understand. He puts His finger in his ears as though He's saying, "I'm going to do something to your hearing. I'm going to do something with your tongue, with your speech." Jesus is entering the man's world, the Great King of heaven, the Great Creator of heavens and the earth. The Sinless Lamb of God is coming down. He's identifying with this man and his condition and all of its wretchedness and all of its agony and angst. Jesus is coming right down to where the man is.Verse 34, "Looking up to heaven, He sighed and said to him, 'Ephphatha,' which is an Aramaic, "that is, 'Be opened.'" He looks up to heaven, so he's invoking God's power. He sighs. Why does Jesus sigh? And this is a sign of His deep feeling, His compassion for the sufferer. If you remember when He comes to Lazarus' tomb, He knows He's about to resurrect Lazarus, but before He does, He reveals His emotion in John 11:33, "When Jesus saw her weeping and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, He was deeply moved in His spirit and greatly troubled. And He said, 'Where have you laid him?' And they said to Him, 'Lord, come and see,' and Jesus swept." So the Jews said, "See how He loved him."The phrase for deeply moved or greatly troubled, that phrase is a word used in another context to describe a horse snorting. One translation says, "He gave way to such distress of spirit, has made His body tremble." One commentator says, "This great sigh came out of His wounded heart." So what's happening? Jesus is moved by Lazarus' condition. He's moved by this man's condition. It offends Him, "This is not the way the world was supposed to be. The world was created and it was perfect and we were supposed to live in perfect harmony, perfect shalom, but we rebelled against God and sin entered the world and the ravages of sin, the consequences of sin are felt by each one of us." And when Jesus dies, He knows, this isn't the way it's supposed to be and everyone knows this.If you ask even an unbeliever, someone that doesn't believe in God, you ask them, "Is the world the way it ought to be? Are you the way you ought to be?" And everyone says, "No, because everyone knows deep down inside there's something wrong, something wrong with us, something wrong with the world." Where does that knowledge come from? The knowledge of a perfect reality and knowledge of a perfect world. It's written on our hearts. This is not how creation was meant to be in all of its beauty and all of its glory and now it's marred with sin. This man was made to reflect the image of God, the glory of God, and here, he's a poor wretch of a man suffering and Jesus is moved by that. He sighs and he says, "Be opened," and this is called a divine passive. He says, "Be opened by whom? By God." That's what he's saying. He's invoking the power of God. In verse 35, "His ears were opened, his tongue was released and he spoke plainly." The ears were opened. That's another divine passive. His tongue was released by whom? By God. His tongue was unshackled, so to speak. The bond of his tongue was released.Jesus is creating a new world. That's what bringing the kingdom of God into the world means, that He's recreating things from the inside out and it starts with the message of the good news and it transforms our hearts from the inside. And then everything in the world, little by little, becomes transformed. Verse 36, "And Jesus charged them to tell no one. But the more He charged them, the more zealously they proclaimed it. And they were astonished beyond measure saying, "He has done all things well. He even makes the deaf hear and the mute speak. He has done all things well."And this echoes Genesis 1:31 where God creates, He sees everything He's made and he says, "It is good." They say, "He even makes the deaf hear and the mute speak," and that's an illusion to Isaiah 35, talking about the Messianic kingdom, verse 5 of Isaiah 35, "Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped and shall the lame man leap like a deer and the tongue of the mute sing for joy. For waters break forth in the wilderness and streams in the desert." Of course, Jesus' miracles weren't just miracles for miracle's sake. His miracles were always a sign, a sign of a deeper reality, a sign of who Jesus is, a sign of what Jesus has come to accomplish, which is to redeem people, to redeem the world, to save souls. And this motif of the opened ear is a symbol for revelation.Same people hear the same message and someone's ears are opened and they believe and they know that this is the truest truth in the universe. This is the truth beyond any truth, underneath every single truth. And some people, they hear the same message and they walk away and they're like, "That was nice. That was a good message. What's for lunch?" The opening of the man's ear is meant to be understood as a symbol of the way in which a person is made receptive. So this is the miracle, the greater miracle. It is a great miracle that the woman's child is freed from the demon. It is a miracle that this man is healed of his deafness and his muteness, but the greater miracle is the miracle that these are pointing to and that's the miracle of the ears being opened and you hear the good news, "Oh, yes, I am a sinner. Oh yes, I have transgressed the law of God. Yes, I am guilty as charge. Yes, I accept that verdict, and yes, Jesus Christ is the only one who could save me."The problem was that Jesus wasn't clear in His teaching. You say, "Why didn't more people get saved?" The problem wasn't that His message was confused or complicated. The problem was that these people's ears were not receptive to the message. That's why Jesus often said, "If anyone has ears to hear, let him hear." He means that there was a kind of supernatural hearing or understanding that many people are incapable of. The unbeliever certainly hears the words physically spoken, certainly maybe even understands them to an extent. They're perfectly ordinary words. We have done wrong. A great deal of wrong. We do need forgiveness and God will forgive you for all of the sins that you have ever committed only if you believe in His Son who is sent into this world to die on a cross precisely to secure forgiveness for those who trust in Him. Those who are in Christ will go to heaven when they die and only those.Nothing in those English sentences is difficult to understand, but the unbeliever does not understand them not in a way that saves them. Why? Because the unbeliever doesn't understand that they cannot come to God whenever they want. They can't come to God on their own timetable. It happens as a miracle. When you hear the Holy Spirit speaking to your heart, when you hear the Holy Spirit saying, "Repent of your sin. Come to Christ," at that moment, do not stop up your ears. At that moment, say, "Yes, Lord, I believe. Yes, Lord, I repent. Yes, Lord, save me."Therefore, it's important for us, for those who have been given ears to hear to bring people to Christ. We're not the ones that can save. Just like the friends that brought the deaf person to Jesus, they brought Him, they begged Him, but it's Jesus that does the work, not them. Verse 32, "They brought to Him a man who was deaf and had a speech impediment and they begged Him to lay His hand on him." And that's our job as believers. We are to bring people to Christ. We are to have gospel conversations with people. Any opportunity I have to speak about the Lord, I am going to use, I'm going to take. That's our job, but I can't transform a heart. I can't give ears to hear. Only the Lord can do that.In the same way that this man's tongue was unshackled, in the same way that this man's ears were opened, that's what the Lord has done for believers. Some of you have had your ears opened. You understand the gospel, you love the gospel and you love sermons, you love church, but your tongue is still shackled when it comes to sharing the good news of Jesus Christ. You've heard it, you understand it, but you can't really speak about it. And I'm telling you why, because you feel a little ashamed. There's just a shame like, "I don't want them to think I'm a believer Christian like those Christians."I pray that the Lord unshackle our ... You know how Jesus tells these people, they saw the miracle and he's like, "Don't tell anyone," and then they go and they tell the whole world? And now I'm like, "Jesus, why do You do it? Is it like reverse psychology?" It's like in the great commission, Jesus went to us and said, "Do not go and make disciples of all the nations. Do not do that. We'd be making so many more disciples." Whatever it takes, this is our job. We are to unshackle. We are to speak. We are to bring people to church. We are to bring people to community. We have to bring people to read scripture together. We are to bring people to have conversations about the Lord. We are to pray for people.If you have unbelievers in your life and they have needs, ask if you can pray for them. So easy. So easy. And pray to Lord and like, "Lord, can You please flex? Lord, reveal Yourself to these people." And in the same way that these friends, anonymous, they drag their friend to Christ, the friend gets the miracle. We are to do the same here. We're meant to see the Lord's power to heal the spiritually deaf and He can give the chief of sinners even, that was what Paul called himself, a hearing ear. He can save absolutely anybody. When Jesus pours forth His Spirit, nothing is impossible and we must never despair of others. We must never regard our own hearts as too bad to be changed.You are not too much of a sinner for Jesus. Every single one of us can receive grace, can receive the crumbs from the Lord's table. All we need to do is ask. All we need to do is what this woman did. Matthew 15:2, she comes to Jesus, gets on her knees and what does she say? "Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David." May that be the constant cry of our hearts, "Lord, have mercy on me." And if you pray that today, if you pray to Jesus Christ, "Lord Jesus, have mercy on me," the word of God says that you are saved, that you have received eternal life. Now, follow the Lord Jesus Christ the rest of your days.This woman asked for a crumb from the Lord's table and she received what she received. She received power of God in her life. For the power of God to be unleashed in our lives, for the crumbs to fall from the Lord's table, what did Jesus Christ have to do? The Bread of Life had to come into this world and that His body was broken. And that's what today we're celebrating in the holy communion, we are remembering the suffering of Christ. His body was broken, so that we could get the crumbs from the Lord's table to be saved. His blood was shed in order to cleanse us, to redeem us, to ransom us from our sins.With that said, I'm going to transition to holy communion. For whom is holy communion? It is for repentant believers in Jesus Christ. If you are a believer in Jesus Christ, if you've repented of your sin, you are welcome to partake, even if today for the first time you repented and believe in Christ. If you do not believe in Christ, we ask that you refrain from this part of the service, or if you are living in unrepentant sin, also please refrain. I'm going to read 1 Corinthians 11:23-32, and while I do that, if you would like to partake and you haven't received the elements, please raise your hand and one of the ushers will bring them to you.1 Corinthians 11:23, "For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when He was betrayed, took bread, and when He had given thanks, He broke it and said, 'This is My body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of Me.' In the same way also, He took the cup after supper saying, 'This cup is the new covenant in My blood. Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of Me. For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until He comes. Whoever therefore eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in unworthy manner will be guilty concerning the body and blood of the Lord. Let a person examine himself then and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup, for anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body, eats and drinks judgment on himself. That is why many of you are weak and ill and some have died, but if we judged ourselves truly, we would not be judged. But when we are judged by the Lord, we are disciplined so that we may not be condemned along with the world."Would you please pray with me over communion. Heavenly Father, we thank You that You, the Great God of the Universe did not leave us in our sins and trespasses and You sent Your Son, Jesus Christ. Jesus, we thank You that You live that perfect life. You obeyed the Father's will perfectly from the heart at all times, every second of Your incarnate life. And Lord, You were sacrificed. You sacrificed Yourself on the cross. You gave Your life in order to save us. We thank You that on the cross, You took our sin upon Yourself. You became our sin so that we might become the righteousness of God.Lord Jesus, we thank You that You offer us mercy. You offer mercy to whoever would plead Your name, the name of Jesus Christ. Lord, have mercy on us and You extend it graciously, willingly. And I thank You, Holy Spirit, that You are with us and I pray that You help us meditate now in the suffering of Christ to remember that His body was broken and His blood was shed in order for us to be healed from the inside out and given new hearts in order for us to be cleansed from shame and guilt. Lord, bless our time in the holy communion now. We repent of any sins, known sins and unknown sins, and we come to You with complete contrition of heart, asking for mercy and grace as we remember Your sufferings in our behalf. We pray all this in Christ's name. Amen.If this is your first time taking communion with us, there's two lids. If you open the top one that opens the cup and then the bottom one opens the bread. On the night that Jesus Christ was betrayed, He took the bread, and after breaking it, He said, "This is My body broken for you. Take, eat and do this in remembrance of Me." He then proceeded to take the cup and he said, "This cup is the cup of the new covenant of My blood, which is poured out for the sins of many. Take, drink and do this in remembrance of Me."Lord Jesus, as we meditate on Your sufferings and we think of what a great miracle that was, the Son of God, Son of Man dying on our behalf, we also thank about the great miracle of the resurrection, incredible that You rose from the dead verifying everything that You taught to be true. And Lord, we think of our own conversions, our own regeneration, our own salvation. What a miracle that is, that we were given faith, we were given ears to hear. And we pray that we don't take that for granted, Lord, and we pray that You, in the same way that You've saved us, in the same way that You made the great miracle of our salvation, I pray that You save many around us. Save them miraculously. We believe in a great God. We believe in your great power.And with our faith, Lord, we believe, help our own belief, but we pray that you pour out Your Spirit upon our city and upon this region, upon New England. Pour out Your Spirit in a way that the world has never seen, that I pray save hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands and more. And Lord, as this woman pleaded with You, we plead, Lord. We plead for our neighbors. We plead the blood for our loved ones. We plead the blood of Jesus Christ for our city. Lord, we thank You in advance for the great revival that is coming and we pray all this in Jesus' name, amen.

Heavenly Father, we come to You not on the basis of our righteousness. We come to You not on the basis of our uprightness or our morality. We come to You on the basis of the blood of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. Jesus, we thank You that You made a way for us to have a loving relationship with God the Father, a meaning to experience this Person, to experience His presence and to experience His power. And we thank You, Jesus, because of Your work on the cross, because of Your death, burial, resurrection, Your ascension and You sent us the Holy Spirit. You offer the Spirit of God to each person who humbly asks. I pray, Lord, today, that You do unleash Your great power in our lives, in our homes, in our households, in our families, in our church and in our city. We do believe in You that You are a great God and You long for people to come to know You. You long to adopt many into Your household, to make those who are not Your children, Your beloved children in whom You delight.I pray, if anyone is far from You, far from the household of God today, give them the gift of repentance, give them the gift of faith and draw them to Yourself. And Lord, for the rest of us, I do pray that You embolden us to speak the gospel, give us opportunities to proclaim the gospel, unleash our tongues, to proclaim the gospel, the truth to the people around us. There's so many that don't know You and they haven't experienced Your presence and Your power and we believe on their behalf and we long to bring them to You, Lord. And I pray that You give us much grace in that. Lord, bless our time in the holy scriptures. Bless everyone who's here today. What a great way to start off the brand new year. And Lord, I pray that You prepare our hearts for holy communion, which we'll celebrate later. We pray this in Jesus' name, amen.Well, good morning and welcome to Mosaic on this communion Sunday. We're continuing our sermon series through the incredible Gospel of Mark. We've called it Kingdom Come, the Gospel of Mark and the secret of God's kingdom. And in the gospel, Jesus is revealing, He's unveiling, He is regulating revelation. And those that do believe in Him, they take Him at His word. They begin to see that He really is who He is and His power is unleashed in their life. The title of the sermon today's Great Faith Unleashes Great Power. And what we've seen so far in the Gospel of Mark is that God, who created everything, the great God overall, He takes on flesh. The Son of God is sent by God the Father. He's anointed by God the Holy Spirit to establish the kingdom of God here on earth where God's presence and His peace reigns.And how does Jesus Christ, the Son of God, establish the kingdom of God? He does so with a message. And this is the good news, the gospel. It's the gospel that changes hearts because the kingdom of God is an inside out kingdom. God changes our hearts when we believe in the good news. He changes our desires. We begin to desire prayer. We begin to desire fellowship with God's people. We begin to desire to do the will of God, to live in submission to God out of love for Him and love for neighbor. And what was the gospel that Jesus preached? It was very short. His very first sermon is documented and it went like this.He says, "The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe in the gospel. Repent and believe the good news that the King of the Universe has come to save us, save us from Satan, sin and death by laying down His life on a cross." And we are to repent and believe in Him, believe that He is God, believe that He is the King of the Universe. Now, how many people believed this message? During Jesus' three year ministry, how many people believed this message and how many people were saved? I think, statistically speaking, it was a very small percentage. If you look at First Corinthians 15, it says that the resurrected Christ appear to 500 people. 500 people, what a small percentage of all the people that He ministered to.And who believed? Well, those who were seemingly crazy enough to take Jesus at His word. He spoke, they believed, and all of a sudden, they were saved and God's power was unleashed in their life when they really believed that He was the Great I Am when they humbly believed. Those people experienced the power of God. His family, Jesus' family, we read, they thought He was out of His mind. The good folks back home and His hometown mocked Him as, "Oh, you're just a carpenter. You're just the Son of Mary." And the Pharisees we read that they joined forces with the Herodians to kill Jesus. Some thought Jesus was John the Baptist come back from the dead. Herod Antipas believed that. Some thought He was Elijah even when He fed the 5,000 miraculously. They understood that He was presenting Himself as the Messianic King, but they didn't realize what kind of king He was, the king of people's hearts.The religious establishment said that Jesus was demon-possessed, a sorcerer, a false teacher. And even the disciples we read who saw His power over and over and over had said that they were hardened in their hearts and they had trouble believing. Amazingly, the only ones that truly recognize Jesus for who He is all of the time are the demons. The demons understood. But the few who took Jesus at His word, they experienced His power and they experienced His salvation. And today, we come to such a woman. We come to a woman who amazed Jesus Christ with her faith. To her, Jesus said, "Oh, woman, great is your faith." And her great faith released great power in her life. And great faith does release great power. Why? Because God honors bold faith because bold faith honors God.So that brings us to Mark 7:24-37. Would you look at the text with me? "And from there, He arose and went away to the region of Tyre and Sidon. And He entered a house and did not want anyone to know, yet He could not be hidden. But immediately, a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit heard of Him and came and fell down at His feet. Now the woman was a Gentile, a Syrophoenician by birth and she begged Him to cast the demon out of her daughter. And He said to her, 'Let the children be fed first, for it is not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs.' But she answered Him, 'Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs.' And He said to her, 'For this statement, you may go your way. The demon has left your daughter.' And she went away and found the child lying in bed and the demon gone.Then He returned from the region of Tyre and went through Sidon to the Sea of Galilee and the region of the Decapolis. And they brought to Him a man who was deaf and had a speech impediment and they begged Him to lay His hand on him. And taking him aside from the crowd privately, He put His fingers into his ears, and after spitting, touched his tongue. And looking up to heaven, He sighed and said to him, 'Ephphatha,' that is, 'Be opened.' And his ears were opened, his tongue was released and he spoke plainly. And Jesus charged to tell no one. But the more He charged them, the more zealously they proclaimed it. And they were astonished beyond measure saying, 'He has done all things well. He even makes the deaf hear and the mute speak.'This is the reading of God's holy, inerrant, infallible, authoritative word. May He write these eternal truths upon our hearts. Three points to frame up our time. First, great faith is humble chutzpah before God. Second, great faith is humble hunger for God. And third, great faith is humble bringing and begging. First, great faith is humble chutzpah before God. Chutzpah, it's from the Yiddish. It means nerve. It means courage. It means impudence. It means confidence in action. I like that word. And it definitely perfectly characterizes this woman's posture of heart. She comes boldly with confidence, yet it's humble confidence. So this is point one, the great faith is humble chutzpah before God.We saw the progression from chapter 7 verses 1 through 23 to this one, which is very logical where Jesus said, He called all food clean, meaning He removed the barrier between the Jews and the Gentiles, the barrier of the dietary laws that separated Jews socially from Gentiles. And now Jesus is positioned perfectly to enter Gentile territory, something a Jewish rabbi would have never done because they consider the Gentiles unclean. And Jesus said, "It's not what comes from the outside that makes you unclean. It's that which comes from the inside that makes you unclean and Jesus can cleanse all.So now He comes into Gentile territory. This is verse 24. From there, He arose and went away to the region of Tyre and Sidon and He entered a house and did not want anyone to know, yet He could not be hidden. The human, Jesus, God incarnate, He did grow tired at some points. He just had ministered to many people. He's exhausted and now He journeys into Gentile territory, tries to keep Himself hidden. He can't do it because His fame had already proceeded Him. Tyre had a long history of antagonism toward Israel. Josephus, the Jewish historian, he said, "The inhabitants of Tyre were notoriously our bitterest enemies." There was bad blood between these two groups of people, the Galileans and people from Tyre. So that's the context.So this woman who is from the other people, she's from the other religions, she's from the other socioeconomic status, she's from the other-other everything, she comes to Jesus and she comes to Jesus boldly. Verse 25, "But immediately, a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit heard of Him and came and fell down at His feet." The unclean spirit is a demon that's made clear in verses 29 and 30. So here, we meet a mother, a desperate mother. She comes to Christ. She's heard of His explosive power and she throws herself at His feet in an attitude, a posture of heart, of self-abasement and supplication. She prostrates herself before Him, which shows the level of her distress, her pain.The pain of her child had brought her to Jesus Christ. The pain of her child had brought her to her knees. And she's interceding for her child. A mother is praying for her child. And whenever I see texts like this, just a reminder that we are to intercede for our loved ones. We are to intercede in prayer for our children and for our siblings and for our families and for our neighbors, and for our city. We are to pray. And when we intercede, God hears those prayers, especially when they're prayed with this posture of heart. The mother prayed for her child because the child couldn't pray for herself and the mother persisted until her prayer was granted.We see that this woman is very similar to the woman that was suffering 12 years from a hemorrhage in chapter 5. The likeness has seen that they were both ritually impure. They both needed miraculous power from the Lord. And despite her impurity, the Syrophoenician, like the woman with the hemorrhage, comes boldly hoping for healing from Christ. Verse 26, "Now the woman was a Gentile, a Syrophoenician by birth, and she begged Him to cast the demon out of her daughter. And He said to her, 'Let the children be fed first, for it is not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs.'" The Matthew parallel calls her a Canaanite woman. The word for Gentile here, it's a word that means that she was Greek speaking or Hellenized. So she's a Greek-speaking pagan Gentile from Tyre and the woman hopes that Jesus is going to heal her. She asks, she begs, she pleads. And it seems like He says no. It seems like Jesus' response dashes her hopes in a very hard way. And what is Jesus doing here? Jesus is showing that He ... First of all, there was an order to the salvation process. There was an order to the revelation that, first of all, He came to the children of Israel. Romans 1:16 says, "For I'm not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes to the Jew first and also to the Greek, to the Jew first and also to the Gentile, but it's for anyone who believes."Or 1 Corinthians 1:22, "For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God." Why the Jews first? Because the Jews became the first rebellious children of God. He chose them as His people. They rebelled against Him. He sends His Son into this vineyard, so to speak, to then save them, save the elect from Israel. And Isaiah 1:2-3 explains or opens, reveals the Father's heart, "Hear, O heavens and give ear, O earth, for the Lord has spoken. Children have I reared and brought up, but they have rebelled against Me. The ox knows its owner and the donkey its master's crib, but Israel does not know. My people do not understand."The word first is used in our text proton. It's always used in order to explain that in the eschatological timeline of God's revelation, there is progress. The coming of Elijah was supposed to come before the Messiah. The binding of Satan needs to happen before despoiling of His house. Jesus' ministry to His fellow Jews was first, but He's in Gentile territory, meaning He's there to bring home the elect as well. Jesus expands His gospel ministry beyond Israel even when He was here. Only after these events have occurred in their divinely ordered sequence can the end come. As Mark says in chapter 4, "First a shoot, then an ear, then full grain in the year." There's a pattern here.The word proton and the thought behind it are similar to those of Paul in Romans 1 and Romans 11. Jesus did come for the Jew first but also for the Gentile. And here, it seems very derogatory if you think about it. He's calling her a dog. He's like, "I'm going to feed the children first and then you don't feed the dogs before the children." And you read the commentaries and they're like, "Well, it's not that offensive. It's the diminutive. He's calling her a little dog." No, that's offensive. You call anyone a little dog in that ... In our context, we love dogs. Dogs are domesticated. I have a daughter that prays on just as persistently as a Syrophoenician woman for a dog and ... Long story.But in our context, we love the dogs. People even consider themselves dog parents. Back then, they didn't domesticate dogs. Dogs were wild. Dogs lived outside of cities. Dogs were considered unclean and the New Testament continues this negative attitude. St. Paul says, "Beware of the dogs." In Philippians, Jesus says, "Don't throw what is holy to the dogs or the pigs." In Revelation 22:15, "The dog is an outsider to the community of God's grace." So using the terminology dog, he's calling her a dog, is an insult. That's what's happening. He's insulting her so to speak.And the question really is, how is she going to respond? Is she going to say, "No, I reject your verdict. I reject your bad news. I don't want your good news because I reject your bad news about my current state"? She doesn't do any of that. She hears it and she desperately continues in her persistence. Despite Jesus' seeming cool indifference and silence, she got His no. And she's like, "Okay, great, but I still ask for Your yes." Matthew 15 in the parallel context, in Matthew 15:22, "And behold, a Canaanite woman from that region came out and was crying, 'Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David. My daughter is severely oppressed by a demon.' But He did not answer her a word. And His disciples came and begged Him saying, 'Send her away, for she is crying out after us.' He answered, 'I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.' But she came and knelt before Him saying, 'Lord, help me.' But He answered, 'It is not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs.'"You'd expect her to get angry. You'd expect her to call Jesus all of the isms and call him all of the ist names, but she doesn't get all huffy. She's not too proud to accept the verdict. She doesn't say, "How dare You? How dare You mock me? How dare You belittle me?" She could have said, "I didn't choose to be a Gentile. I didn't choose to be born here. I didn't choose to have a daughter that suffers. I'm not even asking for myself, Jesus. Do You know how much we've suffered together? We deserve something from You." She doesn't do any of that. She realizes that she cannot stand before Jesus, before Christ, before the Son of God, before God Himself on her rights, on her moral record.Even on the basis of her own suffering, she understands that God owes her nothing. She understands who she is in relation to the God of the universe. She remains humble. Even when she hears really hard words from Jesus, she gets a really hard no, but she continues asking. She continues believing, humbly believing, humbly understanding that she has absolutely zero grounds upon which to claim His favor. She says, "Yes, I am a dog. In relation to God, I am a dog. I'm unfit for the Father's favor. I have transgressed commandments. I have lived as though God does not exist. I have broken the first commandment, it's because I've broken the first one, I've broken them all. The first commandment is, 'Thou shall have no other gods before me.' I haven't worshiped Yahweh. Yes, I am a dog. Yes, I'm outside, but, but I see Your house is big enough even for me, but I see that there's enough bread on Your table even for a dog like me." That's her posture of heart.And when we present the gospel, we say, "Look, it starts with the bad news." The bad news is we have broken God's sovereign law. Whenever you break any law, there are to be consequences for the breaking of the law, especially when it comes to God. Whoever transgresses even one law deserves death. The word of God says, "Deserves eternal damnation." The word of God says, "That's the bad news. Apart from God, we are not children. Apart from God, we are sinners." "And yes, Lord, I am a sinner. I am a filthy, wretched dog. I am a dog. Can I be Your dog? I hear You're a good master." That's what she's saying. That's why I use the word for chutzpah, it's nerve, it's brass, it's confidence and actions gall. It's audacity.And this brings us to point two, great faith is humble hunger for God. And you see this, you see what she's doing. She's not just asking for the miracle. She's relating to Jesus. She's conversing with Jesus. She wants more of God in her life. She's hungry for God. Verse 28, "But she answered Him, 'Yes Lord, yet even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs.'" The Syrophoenician woman, she's like, "Yes, I am a dog," but all of a sudden, she's so smart, she switches everything. She puts the dog in the house. I don't know if you notice this. She's like, "I am a dog, but I'm a dog in Your house under Your table." That's what she's doing.And this reminds us, this whole encounter with a Gentile woman, a Gentile woman's daughter, it reminds us of Elijah. Elijah the prophet was sent to the people of Israel, but the people of Israel didn't obey. They didn't believe in God. So then he goes to the Gentiles. And Jesus, when He started His ministry in His hometown, He goes to the synagogue and He reminded them of that story. He said, "Look, I've come here to the children of Israel, but the children of Israel refuse to believe. So I'm going to the Gentiles, just like Elijah was sent to the Gentiles," Luke 4:24, "And he said, 'Truly I say to you, no prophet is acceptable in his hometown. But in truth, I tell you, there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah when the heavens were shut up three years and six months and a great famine came over the land. And Elijah was sent to none of them, but only to Zarephath and the land of Sidon to a woman who was a widow. And there were many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elijah and none of them was cleansed, but only Namaan the Syrian.When they heard these things, all in the synagogue were filled with wrath and they rose up and drove Him out of the town and brought Him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, so that they could throw Him down the cliff. But passing through their midst, He went away." And you say, "Why did they get so mad? Why do they get so angry?" They got so angry because He reminded them that God loves Gentiles as well. And it's not your birth, it's not your DNA, it's not your ethnicity that makes you right with God. It's your humility. It's your humble repentance where you say, "God, I don't deserve to be Your child. God, I don't deserve a relationship. God, I don't deserve cleansing in Your power, but I'm going to ask anyway."After His rejection at Nazareth, Jesus gives a clear warning of the coming mission to the Gentiles that He's going to the Gentiles. And it is in light of this background that we must read the initial response to this woman. He went to the children of Israel who said, "We don't want You. Jesus, we don't need You. We're children of Israel by birth." And Jesus said, "No one's a child of God by birth. You can't be born into the Family of God physically, only spiritually. You need to be born again." And they didn't want to hear that. They didn't want to hear that they needed to repent, that they needed to follow God.And yet this woman, she's told, "You're not a child of God. You're a dog," and she doesn't get huffy. She continues the conversation. She calls Him Lord, "Yes, Lord. Even the dogs on the table eat the children's crumbs." She says, "Yes, Lord, but there's plenty on that table even for me." She lays hold of Christ's word and bases her plea upon Him. The woman's response transforms the dog of Jesus metaphor into a domestic dog in the house. She, here in the stories, part of the household of faith. One translation says, "Since then, I am a dog. I'm not a stranger. I'm not outside." Another translation, she says, "Let me be a dog. I'll accept that I am, but even a dog has his day or her day. Yes, I'm a little dog, but can I still have some crumbs from the table? Yes, I'm a little dog, but I'm Your dog and You're my master."She calls him, "Lord, I am a humble part of the household. I don't deserve to be here, but I'm just asking for a crumb. I'm just asking for a little bit of your grace." And Jesus hears that. Jesus hears her plea and her plea is actually based on a promise from the Old Testament, a promise that God gave to Abraham. When He blesses Abraham, He says, "I'm going to extend the blessings I'm giving you to the rest of the world." Genesis 12:3, "I will bless those who bless you and him who dishonors you, I will curse. And in you, all the families of the earth shall be blessed. All of the families. All of the families shall be blessed. All of the families, all of the people that come to God and say, "God, I don't have any rights to assert, that I'm coming to You with a right less assertiveness. I'm not coming to You on the basis of my goodness. I'm coming to You on the basis of Your goodness and Your generosity."Thomas Cranmer, in The Book of Common Prayer, he says, "We do not presume to come to this thy table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy table, but thou art the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy." Jesus hears her and He likes her response. In verse 29, He said to her, "For this statement," another translation says, "Good answer. Good answer." I wish I was there to see the twinkle in His eye, "Good answer." "For this statement, you may go your way. The demon has left your daughter," and she went home and found the child lying in bed and the demon gone.In response to the woman's audacity, her impudent faith, She wrestles a blessing from Christ. And in this, she reminds us of someone else's scripture. She reminds us of Jacob. Jacob, when he wrestled with God, when he took hold of God, and most likely, that was a Christophany because it says that he wrestled with God and it said that he wrestled with a Man. It was a Man God, the God Man, Jesus Christ. This woman is much like Jacob in her persistence, her refusal to take no for an answer. She's content to get the no, "Yes, I am a dog," but she still keeps asking for the yes.And Jacob did the same thing. Jacob in Genesis 32, he was a man in need. The next morning, he was going to meet his brother, Esau, his estranged brother, Esau, and he thought he was going to meet Esau with murderous intent, that Esau wanted to kill him. He feared for his own life, Jacob did. He feared for the lives of his wives and children. So he prays. He sends them ahead and he prays with God. And the Lord appears to him as a man and wrestled with him through the night. And of course, the Lord was play wrestling. He's not really wrestling with Jacob. Jacob thought He was wrestling. Jesus was playing.This is Genesis 32:24, "Jacob was left alone. And a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day. And when the man saw that He did not prevail against Jacob, He touched his hip socket and Jacob's hip was put out of joint as He wrestled with him. Then he said, 'Let me go for, the day has broken.' But Jacob said, 'I will not let You go unless You bless me.' And He said to him, 'What is your name?' He said, 'Jacob.' Then He said, 'Your name shall no longer be Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men and have prevailed.' Then Jacob asked Him, 'Please tell me Your name.' And He said, 'Why is it that you asked My name?' And there, He blessed him. So Jacob called the name of the place Peniel, saying, 'For I have seen God face to face, yet my life has been delivered.'"And you say, "Why did Jesus tell a woman no in the beginning? What is He doing? Did she change His mind from a silent indifference to helping her?" I don't think that's what's happening. When He says for this statement, He's not saying, "Because you have said this or because you have changed My mind," He's saying, "Because you've passed the test." He was testing her. He said, "No," to test her. "Is she going to persist? Is she going to continue asking?" It was a ploy designed to evoke even greater levels of faith on her part. Martin Luther commenting on this text, he said, "Christians need to persist in trusting God even when He seems to turn His back on them. We must learn to see the yes hidden in His no."I think that's really powerful, especially if you meditate on or you apply it to your life. We must work to see His yes and His no. If He says no, now He has a better yes for us. So we keep asking, we keep asking, we keep asking, and obviously, in all the Lord's will. Matthew 15:28, "Then Jesus answered her, "O woman, great is your faith. Be it done for you as you desire. And her daughter was healed instantly." Her faith delighted Jesus Christ. My daughter, sometimes they come to me and they test me to see how strict I am regarding grades. And they're like, "Yeah, but if I get an A-, is that okay?" "Oh, yeah, that's fine.""What if I get a B+?" "You're pushing it. You're pushing it." "What if I get a B ..." And my conversation is, "Look, I don't care about your GPA honestly. I can't tell you that I just did, but I really don't care. I don't care. I do. Do your best in your sports. Do your best. I care about your soul above all else. I care about your faith. I care that you grow in your relationship with the Lord. I care about you growing in wisdom." And Jesus is in the same way. He's delighted by this woman's faith. May your faith and may my faith delight the Lord in the same way. She took Christ at His word, and when He said, "You're dog," and then He blesses her like a child.And this is really how God speaks of salvation, that when we repent of our sins and turn to Christ, we get regenerated, we get a new heart, but we also get a new identity. We become a child of God. God adopts us into His family. God says, "You are not My children, but I'm going to make you My children," and it's all because of His Son, Jesus Christ. Hebrews 11:6, "And without faith, it is impossible to please Him. For whoever would draw near to God must believe that He exists and that He rewards those who seek Him." He rewards those who seek Him. Do you seek Him with the same posture of heart persistently, "Lord, I want more of You. Lord, I want more of Your presence. Lord, I want more of Your power."And that's why Jesus is called the Bread of Life, and we are to hunger, our souls are to hunger for Jesus as the Bread of Life. "Lord, I'm starving. I am famished for You." What do you do when you're hungry? You can't stop thinking about food. You're just salivating. You're thinking about that next meal that's coming and this is ... What is humility? It's recognizing, "Lord, apart from You, I'm starving. My soul is starving. Lord, I seek you." And the word of God says, "Whoever seeks God will be found. He will be found by them." Her faith is dramatically contrasted with the heartened unbelief of the Pharisees who were Jewish. They consider themselves children of God, but they weren't because they had no faith in Christ. And her faith even outshines the understanding of the disciples whose hearts were hardened at times. And God loves persistent pursuit of Him and He rewards this lavishly.Matthew 11:12, "From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence and the violent take it by force." What does that mean? He's talking about John the Baptist. John the Baptist, he sacrificed everything to proclaim that Jesus Christ is God, to proclaim that, "Jesus Christ is here. He's willing to save people." John the Baptist sacrificed everything for the kingdom of God to expand. The violent, he took it by force. It took effort. It took work on his part and the same way, if you pursue God, if you sacrifice to pursue God. And yes, this does take sacrifice like, "Rain, snow, whatever, I'm going to church." That's who you are. I commend all of you. You're here at first service. Praise be to God.I had a phone call from a pastor and he's like, "Are you guys canceling church?" I was like, "This isn't public school. We don't believe in snow days. Forget that. We're going to church." Yeah, we'll get a little wet. That's fine. We do close church if the tea's not running. That's because of the temple situation. But what I'm saying is, yes, it does take effort. You want to experience more of God? It takes effort to wake up just to study the scriptures. It takes effort to pray. It takes effort to pursue the Lord. Like the paralytic friends, remember that the house is full, they couldn't get through to Christ. They climb into the roof. They break through 18 inches of sod and branches in the roof lowering the man and the man is healed and Jesus forgives him of his sins as well.Jesus delights in persistent faith like that of this woman. Another example is Luke 18 and Luke 18, there's a woman who keeps returning to a judge, pleading her case over and over and over. And verse 4 of Luke 18 says, "For a while, he refused, but afterward, he said to himself, 'Though I neither fear God nor respect man, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will give her justice, so that she will not beat me down by her continual coming.'" And this is a comparison, opposites of course, that God, He wants to give us mercy, He wants to give us justice, He wants to pour out His power in our life, but do we keep coming to him persistently, doggedly, voraciously, yet humbly like this woman does?She depended on Christ's goodness, not her own, so she finally understood grace. She understood grace. "It's not because of anything in me, Lord. I plead Your mercy. I plead Your grace. And faith is such a picture. It's not this bloodless, flaccid, distracted, half-hearted acceptance of certain propositions or theorems of theology about God. No, you realize that God is a person and that God does bless those who pursue Him. Faith is driven. It's determined. It's an unyielding grip upon God Himself and that's why hunger is such a good metaphor. Psalm 51:17, "The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart, O God, You will not despise."Matthew 5:3-6, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied." And we continue the text, point three is great faith, humble bringing and begging. And verse 31, "Then He returned from the region of Tyre and went through Sidon to the Sea of Galilee and the region of the Decapolis. And they brought to Him a man who was deaf and had a speech impediment and they begged Him to lay His hand on him." Who are these people that brought this man that needed healing to Jesus? We're not told. We just know that these people heard about Christ. They heard that Christ has power to help, so they bring their friend and they beg God on behalf. They beg Christ on behalf of their friend."Lord, just Your hand, one hand touch our friend. Heal him." Verse 33, "And taking him aside from the crowd privately, He put His fingers into his ears, and after spitting, touched his tongue." Why does Jesus do this? I think the simplest explanation is probably the best one. He's speaking with this man, communicating with this man in the only language the man can understand. He puts His finger in his ears as though He's saying, "I'm going to do something to your hearing. I'm going to do something with your tongue, with your speech." Jesus is entering the man's world, the Great King of heaven, the Great Creator of heavens and the earth. The Sinless Lamb of God is coming down. He's identifying with this man and his condition and all of its wretchedness and all of its agony and angst. Jesus is coming right down to where the man is.Verse 34, "Looking up to heaven, He sighed and said to him, 'Ephphatha,' which is an Aramaic, "that is, 'Be opened.'" He looks up to heaven, so he's invoking God's power. He sighs. Why does Jesus sigh? And this is a sign of His deep feeling, His compassion for the sufferer. If you remember when He comes to Lazarus' tomb, He knows He's about to resurrect Lazarus, but before He does, He reveals His emotion in John 11:33, "When Jesus saw her weeping and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, He was deeply moved in His spirit and greatly troubled. And He said, 'Where have you laid him?' And they said to Him, 'Lord, come and see,' and Jesus swept." So the Jews said, "See how He loved him."The phrase for deeply moved or greatly troubled, that phrase is a word used in another context to describe a horse snorting. One translation says, "He gave way to such distress of spirit, has made His body tremble." One commentator says, "This great sigh came out of His wounded heart." So what's happening? Jesus is moved by Lazarus' condition. He's moved by this man's condition. It offends Him, "This is not the way the world was supposed to be. The world was created and it was perfect and we were supposed to live in perfect harmony, perfect shalom, but we rebelled against God and sin entered the world and the ravages of sin, the consequences of sin are felt by each one of us." And when Jesus dies, He knows, this isn't the way it's supposed to be and everyone knows this.If you ask even an unbeliever, someone that doesn't believe in God, you ask them, "Is the world the way it ought to be? Are you the way you ought to be?" And everyone says, "No, because everyone knows deep down inside there's something wrong, something wrong with us, something wrong with the world." Where does that knowledge come from? The knowledge of a perfect reality and knowledge of a perfect world. It's written on our hearts. This is not how creation was meant to be in all of its beauty and all of its glory and now it's marred with sin. This man was made to reflect the image of God, the glory of God, and here, he's a poor wretch of a man suffering and Jesus is moved by that. He sighs and he says, "Be opened," and this is called a divine passive. He says, "Be opened by whom? By God." That's what he's saying. He's invoking the power of God. In verse 35, "His ears were opened, his tongue was released and he spoke plainly." The ears were opened. That's another divine passive. His tongue was released by whom? By God. His tongue was unshackled, so to speak. The bond of his tongue was released.Jesus is creating a new world. That's what bringing the kingdom of God into the world means, that He's recreating things from the inside out and it starts with the message of the good news and it transforms our hearts from the inside. And then everything in the world, little by little, becomes transformed. Verse 36, "And Jesus charged them to tell no one. But the more He charged them, the more zealously they proclaimed it. And they were astonished beyond measure saying, "He has done all things well. He even makes the deaf hear and the mute speak. He has done all things well."And this echoes Genesis 1:31 where God creates, He sees everything He's made and he says, "It is good." They say, "He even makes the deaf hear and the mute speak," and that's an illusion to Isaiah 35, talking about the Messianic kingdom, verse 5 of Isaiah 35, "Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped and shall the lame man leap like a deer and the tongue of the mute sing for joy. For waters break forth in the wilderness and streams in the desert." Of course, Jesus' miracles weren't just miracles for miracle's sake. His miracles were always a sign, a sign of a deeper reality, a sign of who Jesus is, a sign of what Jesus has come to accomplish, which is to redeem people, to redeem the world, to save souls. And this motif of the opened ear is a symbol for revelation.Same people hear the same message and someone's ears are opened and they believe and they know that this is the truest truth in the universe. This is the truth beyond any truth, underneath every single truth. And some people, they hear the same message and they walk away and they're like, "That was nice. That was a good message. What's for lunch?" The opening of the man's ear is meant to be understood as a symbol of the way in which a person is made receptive. So this is the miracle, the greater miracle. It is a great miracle that the woman's child is freed from the demon. It is a miracle that this man is healed of his deafness and his muteness, but the greater miracle is the miracle that these are pointing to and that's the miracle of the ears being opened and you hear the good news, "Oh, yes, I am a sinner. Oh yes, I have transgressed the law of God. Yes, I am guilty as charge. Yes, I accept that verdict, and yes, Jesus Christ is the only one who could save me."The problem was that Jesus wasn't clear in His teaching. You say, "Why didn't more people get saved?" The problem wasn't that His message was confused or complicated. The problem was that these people's ears were not receptive to the message. That's why Jesus often said, "If anyone has ears to hear, let him hear." He means that there was a kind of supernatural hearing or understanding that many people are incapable of. The unbeliever certainly hears the words physically spoken, certainly maybe even understands them to an extent. They're perfectly ordinary words. We have done wrong. A great deal of wrong. We do need forgiveness and God will forgive you for all of the sins that you have ever committed only if you believe in His Son who is sent into this world to die on a cross precisely to secure forgiveness for those who trust in Him. Those who are in Christ will go to heaven when they die and only those.Nothing in those English sentences is difficult to understand, but the unbeliever does not understand them not in a way that saves them. Why? Because the unbeliever doesn't understand that they cannot come to God whenever they want. They can't come to God on their own timetable. It happens as a miracle. When you hear the Holy Spirit speaking to your heart, when you hear the Holy Spirit saying, "Repent of your sin. Come to Christ," at that moment, do not stop up your ears. At that moment, say, "Yes, Lord, I believe. Yes, Lord, I repent. Yes, Lord, save me."Therefore, it's important for us, for those who have been given ears to hear to bring people to Christ. We're not the ones that can save. Just like the friends that brought the deaf person to Jesus, they brought Him, they begged Him, but it's Jesus that does the work, not them. Verse 32, "They brought to Him a man who was deaf and had a speech impediment and they begged Him to lay His hand on him." And that's our job as believers. We are to bring people to Christ. We are to have gospel conversations with people. Any opportunity I have to speak about the Lord, I am going to use, I'm going to take. That's our job, but I can't transform a heart. I can't give ears to hear. Only the Lord can do that.In the same way that this man's tongue was unshackled, in the same way that this man's ears were opened, that's what the Lord has done for believers. Some of you have had your ears opened. You understand the gospel, you love the gospel and you love sermons, you love church, but your tongue is still shackled when it comes to sharing the good news of Jesus Christ. You've heard it, you understand it, but you can't really speak about it. And I'm telling you why, because you feel a little ashamed. There's just a shame like, "I don't want them to think I'm a believer Christian like those Christians."I pray that the Lord unshackle our ... You know how Jesus tells these people, they saw the miracle and he's like, "Don't tell anyone," and then they go and they tell the whole world? And now I'm like, "Jesus, why do You do it? Is it like reverse psychology?" It's like in the great commission, Jesus went to us and said, "Do not go and make disciples of all the nations. Do not do that. We'd be making so many more disciples." Whatever it takes, this is our job. We are to unshackle. We are to speak. We are to bring people to church. We are to bring people to community. We have to bring people to read scripture together. We are to bring people to have conversations about the Lord. We are to pray for people.If you have unbelievers in your life and they have needs, ask if you can pray for them. So easy. So easy. And pray to Lord and like, "Lord, can You please flex? Lord, reveal Yourself to these people." And in the same way that these friends, anonymous, they drag their friend to Christ, the friend gets the miracle. We are to do the same here. We're meant to see the Lord's power to heal the spiritually deaf and He can give the chief of sinners even, that was what Paul called himself, a hearing ear. He can save absolutely anybody. When Jesus pours forth His Spirit, nothing is impossible and we must never despair of others. We must never regard our own hearts as too bad to be changed.You are not too much of a sinner for Jesus. Every single one of us can receive grace, can receive the crumbs from the Lord's table. All we need to do is ask. All we need to do is what this woman did. Matthew 15:2, she comes to Jesus, gets on her knees and what does she say? "Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David." May that be the constant cry of our hearts, "Lord, have mercy on me." And if you pray that today, if you pray to Jesus Christ, "Lord Jesus, have mercy on me," the word of God says that you are saved, that you have received eternal life. Now, follow the Lord Jesus Christ the rest of your days.This woman asked for a crumb from the Lord's table and she received what she received. She received power of God in her life. For the power of God to be unleashed in our lives, for the crumbs to fall from the Lord's table, what did Jesus Christ have to do? The Bread of Life had to come into this world and that His body was broken. And that's what today we're celebrating in the holy communion, we are remembering the suffering of Christ. His body was broken, so that we could get the crumbs from the Lord's table to be saved. His blood was shed in order to cleanse us, to redeem us, to ransom us from our sins.With that said, I'm going to transition to holy communion. For whom is holy communion? It is for repentant believers in Jesus Christ. If you are a believer in Jesus Christ, if you've repented of your sin, you are welcome to partake, even if today for the first time you repented and believe in Christ. If you do not believe in Christ, we ask that you refrain from this part of the service, or if you are living in unrepentant sin, also please refrain. I'm going to read 1 Corinthians 11:23-32, and while I do that, if you would like to partake and you haven't received the elements, please raise your hand and one of the ushers will bring them to you.1 Corinthians 11:23, "For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when He was betrayed, took bread, and when He had given thanks, He broke it and said, 'This is My body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of Me.' In the same way also, He took the cup after supper saying, 'This cup is the new covenant in My blood. Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of Me. For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until He comes. Whoever therefore eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in unworthy manner will be guilty concerning the body and blood of the Lord. Let a person examine himself then and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup, for anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body, eats and drinks judgment on himself. That is why many of you are weak and ill and some have died, but if we judged ourselves truly, we would not be judged. But when we are judged by the Lord, we are disciplined so that we may not be condemned along with the world."Would you please pray with me over communion. Heavenly Father, we thank You that You, the Great God of the Universe did not leave us in our sins and trespasses and You sent Your Son, Jesus Christ. Jesus, we thank You that You live that perfect life. You obeyed the Father's will perfectly from the heart at all times, every second of Your incarnate life. And Lord, You were sacrificed. You sacrificed Yourself on the cross. You gave Your life in order to save us. We thank You that on the cross, You took our sin upon Yourself. You became our sin so that we might become the righteousness of God.Lord Jesus, we thank You that You offer us mercy. You offer mercy to whoever would plead Your name, the name of Jesus Christ. Lord, have mercy on us and You extend it graciously, willingly. And I thank You, Holy Spirit, that You are with us and I pray that You help us meditate now in the suffering of Christ to remember that His body was broken and His blood was shed in order for us to be healed from the inside out and given new hearts in order for us to be cleansed from shame and guilt. Lord, bless our time in the holy communion now. We repent of any sins, known sins and unknown sins, and we come to You with complete contrition of heart, asking for mercy and grace as we remember Your sufferings in our behalf. We pray all this in Christ's name. Amen.If this is your first time taking communion with us, there's two lids. If you open the top one that opens the cup and then the bottom one opens the bread. On the night that Jesus Christ was betrayed, He took the bread, and after breaking it, He said, "This is My body broken for you. Take, eat and do this in remembrance of Me." He then proceeded to take the cup and he said, "This cup is the cup of the new covenant of My blood, which is poured out for the sins of many. Take, drink and do this in remembrance of Me."Lord Jesus, as we meditate on Your sufferings and we think of what a great miracle that was, the Son of God, Son of Man dying on our behalf, we also thank about the great miracle of the resurrection, incredible that You rose from the dead verifying everything that You taught to be true. And Lord, we think of our own conversions, our own regeneration, our own salvation. What a miracle that is, that we were given faith, we were given ears to hear. And we pray that we don't take that for granted, Lord, and we pray that You, in the same way that You've saved us, in the same way that You made the great miracle of our salvation, I pray that You save many around us. Save them miraculously. We believe in a great God. We believe in your great power.And with our faith, Lord, we believe, help our own belief, but we pray that you pour out Your Spirit upon our city and upon this region, upon New England. Pour out Your Spirit in a way that the world has never seen, that I pray save hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands and more. And Lord, as this woman pleaded with You, we plead, Lord. We plead for our neighbors. We plead the blood for our loved ones. We plead the blood of Jesus Christ for our city. Lord, we thank You in advance for the great revival that is coming and we pray all this in Jesus' name, amen.

"Welcome back Your ban was your ticket out Welcome back to that same old place That you hovered about Well, the card names have all changed Since you flew around But those decks have remained And they've turned around Who'd have thought they'd need you (Who'd have thought they'd need you) Back here where we loot with you (Back here where we loot with you) Yeah, we squeeze him in a lot Cause we got him in the 2 slot Welcome back Welcome back Welcome back Welcome back Welcome back Welcome back"   Johhann Bastion, Kaladesh Thopter Enthusiast   Welcome back to Pioneer Mr. Co(p)ter! I personally was very sad to see you go after such a short time in the then fledgling format, but now I think that Pioneer is ready to take competition to the next level. While the unbanning of Smuggler's Copter was exciting for many of us, that wasn't the only thing that came with last week's Banned and Restricted announcement. After a few short weeks, Geological Appraiser was buried, and after years of wishboarding Karn, the Great Creator was finally unmade.  These bans had created some monumental shifts in the Pioneer metagame and we at the First Pioneers took a first look at all of the new decks that have popped up with Smuggler's Copter in them and the decks that are coming back because Karn is gone. We also discuss where the Pioneer format goes from here and what to look out for down the road as the metagame shifts and adapts to these changes. Be sure to listen before going into your next event or choosing your deck for this season, and if you want to talk more about the current state of Pioneer be sure to join us on Twitter or in our Discord!   Our Discord: https://discord.gg/SBRF8DH Our Twitter: https://twitter.com/MtgPioneer You can find our other episodes on the Untap Leagues website as well! https://untapleagues.com/author/the-first-pioneers/

Today's Promise: Genesis 1:1 If you look at creation, it's hard not to believe there is a God. The beauty of creation is the expression of the creator God. The Bible begins with a promise. You may have never considered it before, but the first verse in the Bible says there is a God, and He is the creator. The world around you is the expression of the great creator God. As the creator, He is involved in the world He created. As your creator, He has a plan for your life.

The mad lads did it! Fury... banned. Up the Beanstalk... banned. Karn, the Great Creator... banned. Geological Appraiser... banned. Smuggler's Copter... once banned, now unbanned. We react to the bombshell B&R, consider which decks win and lose from the announcement, and think about what looks good for RC Atlanta. Our hands shook with anticipation as we vigorously refreshed the B&R URL on Monday morning. Wizards promised bans in Modern & Pioneer, and they practically told us they were banning Fury, Beans, Karn, and Appraiser, but maybe it was an elaborate bit? Turns out, not a bit! And what's this, Smuggler's Copter finally unbanned? There's so much to talk about, and so soon before the Pioneer RC in Atlanta. Become a citizen of The Dive Down Nation!: http://www.patreon.com/thedivedown Show the world that you're a proud citizen of The Dive Down Nation with some merch from the store: https://www.thedivedown.com/store Upgrade your gameplay and your gameday with Heavy Play accessories. Use code THEDIVEDOWN2023 for 10% off your first order at https://www.heavyplay.com Check out our sponsor Barrister and Mann! https://www.barristerandmann.com/ Use coupon code THEDIVEDOWNTWENTYTHREE for 15% off your first order of some incredible fragrances, soaps, beard oils, and more. Get 10% off your first 2 months of ManaTraders! https://www.manatraders.com/?medium=thedivedown and use coupon code THEDIVEDOWN23 And now receive 8% off your order of paper cards from Nerd Rage Gaming with code DIVE8 at https://www.nerdragegaming.com/ Timestamps: 3:20 - Hold your non-banned cards with Heavy Play 6:28 - This week's episode/housekeeping 9:31 - The Break Down begins: We got some bans 13:48 - The B&R schedule moving forward 18:51 - Pioneer bans overall 22:46 - Karn, the Great Creator banned 31:10 - Geological Appraiser banned 33:49 - Smuggler's Copter UNBANNED! 46:56 - Pioneer winners and losers 51:10 - Testing those new scents 54:35 - The Break Down continues: Fury banned in Modern 1:07:56 - Up the Beanstalk banned 1:13:45 - Modern winners and losers 1:26:53 - Where do we go from here? 1:30:39 - Wrapping up Links from this week's episode: https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/announcements/december-4-2023-banned-and-restricted-announcement Our opening music is Nowhere - You Never Knew, and our closing music is Space Blood - Goro? Is That Your Christian Name? email us: thedivedown@gmail.com (mailto:thedivedown@gmail.com) twitter: https://twitter.com/thedivedown

*Please note the views and opinions expressed in this episode are a discussion about personal beliefs and experiences of the host and guest.Christianity and manifestation can indeed go in the same sentence–it's about allowing the positive flow of energy to create abundance, which essentially what prayer is all about.I believe that God is the Great Creator...of all.  And with that, we can take the steps to live in a way that aligns with where we want to be in life, but ultimately it is up to God.  We can't create anything from nothing, it is all God-given.  And yet, there is a way of being or living in this world that also allows for us to create the mindset and open heart to connect with the goodness that the love of God has to offer.In this podcast episode, my guest, Rachel Bayford, and I discuss the compatibility of Christianity and manifesting. We explore the idea that manifesting is about being open to creative possibilities, making intentional requests, and connecting with inner guidance. The episode highlights our personal stories related to manifesting and emphasizes the importance of positivity and faith in this practice, suggesting that it can indeed align with Christian beliefs.Here's what you'll learn in today's episode:What manifesting isWhy it's OK to manifest even if you're ChristianThe steps to manifestWhat manic manifesting is and why it won't work for you.A little about Rachel:Having studied Wayne Dyer's work for many years Rachel believes that “everything is perception and when we change the way we look at things, those things we look at, change!” Rachel prides herself in reframing and turning negative emotions into positive feelings and thoughts. Where you can find her:Instagram: @Life_reframed77Life: Reframed Podcast - https://spotify.link/cTToi130XDbResources:Breathe to Flow Weekly Breathwork ClassMore Episodes Like This One:#74: The Universe's Pace is the Right Pace#75: Gratitude, the Practice of Being "Blessed"#57: Spiritual Does NOT Equal ReligionJoin the Energetic Rhythms for Intentional Living community here. Follow us:Facebook | Instagram | PinterestRate or review this podcast on Apple Podcasts here.

Women have a special place in the heart of The Most High God; they are the ones He has chosen to bring life to Earth. Each human being has a "mother" and this fact alone is evidence of how much our Great Creator wants women to be protected, provided for, loved, adorned... by men. Listen and learn about breaking the curse of abuse and dishonor. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/cherie-hardy/message

Women have a special place in the heart of The Most High God; they are the ones He has chosen to bring life to Earth. Each human being has a "mother" and this fact alone is evidence of how much our Great Creator wants women to be protected, provided for, loved, adorned... by men. Listen and learn about breaking the curse of abuse and dishonor. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/cherie-hardy/message

Pastor Darrell Jones discusses Psalm 19:1 this morning."1 The heavens are telling of the glory of God; And their expanse is declaring the work of His hands."

Great Creator check this out!@thejusticedept WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?? LOOK UP

For more sermon audio and other resources, visit www.trinityws.com

You matter to God Almighty. You matter perhaps far more than you know.You are:UNIQUE,one-of-a-kind, special, individual with different and better talents, capabilities, and above all:POTENTIAL.There is no one like you and you cannot be stereotyped, put in a category, or labeled, especially by age for there is only one:YOU.In the beginning, scripture and the precious book of Genesis tell us, God created them:MALE AND FEMALEMAN AND WOMAN.There are no other categories, no other creation, types whether biological, psychological, or spiritual. There are only two, male and female. You are one or the other and no other.In the eyes of God, the creator, categories, types, stereotypes like Italian, Irish, African American, Russian, English, Kenyan, Caucasian, Hispanic, old or young, all of that matters little or nothing to:GOD THE FATHER – CREATOR.You and only you, a unique creation, matter.It matters not to God whether mankind categorizes you as a BABY-BOOMER, whatever that means, or MILLENNIEL, whatever that means, or GEN-X or GEN-Z, whatever those categories mean, for they can do nothing but prevent you from understanding who you really are, God created, the potential you have to live and serve and be all that you can be for HIM. All such terminology does nothing but distracts and destroy WHO AND WHAT you really are:A ONE-OF-A-KIND, ABSOLUTELY UNIQUE, DIVINE CREATION!How the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ must rejoice when we are all that He intended us to be. And how our Great Creator must grieve when we ignore or fail to live to the fullest potential which our God has given us. What a world this would be, dramatically transformed for the good, if you and I lived as God intended us to live. We matter, we really do, to God the Father – Creator.It is undoubtedly a devil's tool to make you think less of who you are and what you are capable of. There is nothing wrong with living lives mediocre, safe, and average, says the world secular to the core, avoiding risk, growth, challenge, and even opportunity. Accepting and living something else as some other way is A-Okay no matter the potential lost or unused. Devil wins if you or I do not live up to our God-given potential, whatever that is.We know whether or not that is happening, for good (God-given eyes to see) or for worse, we know. For the CALL of God is always on our heart, challenging, and convicting. You, and I, hear that still small voice that no one else hears calling, constantly calling. You and I, individually, and only you and I feel the presence of the Holy Spirit in us, showering us with discontent, calling, constantly calling, YOUR OWN INDIVIDUAL GOD-CALL, for you alone asking that you do more for HIM, that you live to the fullest with the talents, abilities which HE has given to you, you and you alone, uniquely so. I do believe we can never be content unless we heed that call. The Holy Spirit will not be denied, will not leave, and will not give up. You can know that in your head, your heart, your conscience, and as one put it:YOUR SPIRITUAL GUT.There is no greater joy, no greater satisfaction than to fulfill that CALL. The called life lived is energizing, satisfying, joyful, and fully productive. Nothing satisfies like living life the way God intended, nothing. You are not a millennial. YOU ARE HIS! In the eyes of God, you are not Caucasian or African American or Hispanic, you are not old or young:YOU ARE HIS SON OR HIS DAUGHTER.You matter to the God who made everything, EVERYTHING, and everyone. Perhaps our supreme task is to understand who we are, what our potential is, what our God-given talents and abilities are, and work, WORK to be all that He intended us to be.You matter. All lives matter. Every individual male and female whom God created matters. If we who believe in the SON of the Living God understand that, and live that way, we change the world in dramatic fashion. Nothing else will!

We can find life in The Great Creator as we seek for His Salvation amen. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/vashti-g/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/vashti-g/support

If you appreciate this work, consider supporting it - https://www.patreon.com/seekgodtogether Today we will read a lengthier passage in Acts 17. Verses 24-32 say this, “‘The God who made the world and everything in it - He is Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in shrines made by hands. Neither is He served by human hands, as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives everyone life and breath and all things. From one man He has made every nationality to live over the whole earth and has determined their appointed times and the boundaries of where thy live. He did this so they might seek God, and perhaps they might reach out and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us. For in Him we live and move and exist…God now commands all people everywhere to repent, because He has set a day when He is going to judge the world in righteousness by the Man He has appointed. He has provided proof of this to everyone by raising Him from the dead.' When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some began to ridicule him.” Have you ever wondered why life is the way it is, why human power dynamics are such as they are, why you seem to get just a few short years to figure things out then you die, why there's suffering, why God seems distant… Paul tells you, but will you believe him? In this pithy statement, Paul summarizes The Human Condition. Let's walk through it together. There is a God who is creative and has made everything you see and don't see. And while He Himself is immaterial and needs nothing, it is in Him that you and I have the energy of life. And He created a mechanism whereby you arrived on the scene. Trace it back far enough and you get to one man (or in other manuscripts - one blood). We are related then somehow. But there's more, we have appointed times, a start and a finish, and appointed boundaries - limits. You, as jarring as it is to admit, have limitations imposed by the Great Creator. But why? Paul's answer - so that you'd reach out and seek God. But He's not far. He's close, but He requires of you to seek. Your limits, your humanity, your experience with others, this life and breath, is all so that you'd reach out to the great uncreated Creator who is waiting for you. And in Paul's thinking, this is the essence of repentance. But there's even a limit to this paradigm. At some point, God will intervene and bring about righteous judgment. And He has opted to do so by proxy. He will judge via the God-man Jesus Himself. And how can you know that this is so? God has proven it by raising Jesus from the dead. Perhaps there are days when this seems too fanciful or mythical. Certainly Paul's listeners thought so. Some ridiculed him. Have you ever thought, “If only I lived closer to the time of Christ I'd believe easier?” Perhaps you wouldn't. Perhaps I wouldn't. Things are no different now. You and I are here - alive - thinking - and we must choose as everyone must whether to ridicule, or to repent and seek God. That is why you are of course. And it's okay to revisit this line of thinking daily if necessary. This scripture is here for that reason and this time is here for you to seek God. God I believe. I don't know it all, not by a long shot, but I believe You and I seek You. Reveal Yourself to me now.

If you appreciate this work, consider supporting it - https://www.patreon.com/seekgodtogether Today we will read a lengthier passage in Acts 17. Verses 24-32 say this, “‘The God who made the world and everything in it - He is Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in shrines made by hands. Neither is He served by human hands, as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives everyone life and breath and all things. From one man He has made every nationality to live over the whole earth and has determined their appointed times and the boundaries of where thy live. He did this so they might seek God, and perhaps they might reach out and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us. For in Him we live and move and exist…God now commands all people everywhere to repent, because He has set a day when He is going to judge the world in righteousness by the Man He has appointed. He has provided proof of this to everyone by raising Him from the dead.' When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some began to ridicule him.” Have you ever wondered why life is the way it is, why human power dynamics are such as they are, why you seem to get just a few short years to figure things out then you die, why there's suffering, why God seems distant… Paul tells you, but will you believe him? In this pithy statement, Paul summarizes The Human Condition. Let's walk through it together. There is a God who is creative and has made everything you see and don't see. And while He Himself is immaterial and needs nothing, it is in Him that you and I have the energy of life. And He created a mechanism whereby you arrived on the scene. Trace it back far enough and you get to one man (or in other manuscripts - one blood). We are related then somehow. But there's more, we have appointed times, a start and a finish, and appointed boundaries - limits. You, as jarring as it is to admit, have limitations imposed by the Great Creator. But why? Paul's answer - so that you'd reach out and seek God. But He's not far. He's close, but He requires of you to seek. Your limits, your humanity, your experience with others, this life and breath, is all so that you'd reach out to the great uncreated Creator who is waiting for you. And in Paul's thinking, this is the essence of repentance. But there's even a limit to this paradigm. At some point, God will intervene and bring about righteous judgment. And He has opted to do so by proxy. He will judge via the God-man Jesus Himself. And how can you know that this is so? God has proven it by raising Jesus from the dead. Perhaps there are days when this seems too fanciful or mythical. Certainly Paul's listeners thought so. Some ridiculed him. Have you ever thought, “If only I lived closer to the time of Christ I'd believe easier?” Perhaps you wouldn't. Perhaps I wouldn't. Things are no different now. You and I are here - alive - thinking - and we must choose as everyone must whether to ridicule, or to repent and seek God. That is why you are of course. And it's okay to revisit this line of thinking daily if necessary. This scripture is here for that reason and this time is here for you to seek God.

For many of us, paintings, films, and music are simply forms of hobbies and entertainment. It’s easy to passively overlook what’s truly lovely around us. Author Terry Glaspey invites us to cut through the clutter of cheap stimuli and attend to the beauty and creativity of artful expression which draws us nearer to our Great Creator. EQUIPPERS - Our next ZOOM MEETING is TODAY right after the program!REGISTRATION DETAILS ARE IN YOUR E-MAIL INBOX.  Not an Equipper and want to attend?   Become an Equipper Today!

For many of us, paintings, films, and music are simply forms of hobbies and entertainment. It’s easy to passively overlook what’s truly lovely around us. Author Terry Glaspey invites us to cut through the clutter of cheap stimuli and attend to the beauty and creativity of artful expression which draws us nearer to our Great Creator. EQUIPPERS - Our next ZOOM MEETING is TODAY right after the program!REGISTRATION DETAILS ARE IN YOUR E-MAIL INBOX.  Not an Equipper and want to attend?   Become an Equipper Today!

SHOW NOTESTranscripts available at creativepeptalk.com/episodes!Sign up to the newsletter and receive a FREE copy of The Creative Career Path e-book! https://www.creativepeptalk.com/pathCheck out the Creative Pep Talk shop at creativepeptalk.etsy.comSupport the show on Patreon at patreon.com/creativepeptalkGuy Raz's WebsiteThe Great Creators Podcast with Guy RazMark Maron's Interview with Rian JohnsonCALL TO ADVENTUREStudy a creative case study and identify the elixir.Find your story and substance as a creator by first identifying stories that resonate at the same frequency as yours. Try using a guest from Guy's show, The Great Creators, and try to find the elixir in that creators journey.SPONSORS & SHOUT OUTSFONTSELFIf you've ever wanted to make your own font, Fontself makes it both fun & easy. With the Fontself app on iPad, you can start drawing and enjoying your own personal fonts in minutes! Just draw your letters and characters, and Fontself will handle the rest. Search for Fontself on the App Store or visit this link https://apple.co/3hJOw5KJAK PRINTSSuper quality printing and production from Jak Prints, check them out at jakprints.com!

Saturday is review day on The Daily Promise. Every Saturday, we review the promises of the week so we can allow them to go deep into our hearts and lives. Here are the promises we covered this week. Genesis 50:20 - You Meant it for Evil, But God Meant it for Good. 2 Timothy 2:13 - God is Always Faithful. Genesis 1:1 - God is the Great Creator. Romans 5:1-2 - Jesus Helps When You Are Tempted. 1 Samuel 7:12 - So Far, the Lord has Helped You.

We do not need the Great Creator to reject the fruits of our hands. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/vashti-g/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/vashti-g/support

In this second installment of The Brothers' War spoilers, Dave and Shane lament the lack of Stan this week while chatting the plusses and minuses of 20-ish new cards that just might impact Modern and Pioneer. Is Third Path Iconoclast the new Seasoned Pyromancer? Will Woodcaller Automaton get Karn the Great Creator banned? Is Sarinth Steelseeker the sleeper card of the set? I guess we'll find out. But before all that, we spend some time assessing the Nerd Rage Gaming Team Trios $10k and Pioneer $5k that happened in Fort Wayne this past weekend. The Break Down: Devoted to NRG Fort Wayne The Dive Down: Saga Targets, Wishboard Targets, and More! Become a citizen of The Dive Down Nation!: http://www.patreon.com/thedivedown Check out our sponsor Barrister and Mann! https://www.barristerandmann.com/ Use code THEDIVEDOWN15 for 15% off your first order of some incredible fragrances, soaps, beard oils, and more. Get 10% off your first 2 months of ManaTraders! https://www.manatraders.com/?medium=thedivedown and use code THEDIVEDOWN15 And now receive 8% off your order of paper cards from Nerd Rage Gaming with code "DIVE8" at https://www.nerdragegaming.com/ Timestamps: 5:09 - Housekeeping 7:35 - The Break Down: NRG Fort Wayne 10:45 - The Team Trios top 8 20:38 - The Pioneer $5k 35:55 - Get Lavender-y 38:55 - The Dive Down: We continue to BROmance 40:13 - Haywire Mite 41:52 - Mishra's Research Desk 43:23 - Combat Courier 44:10 - Calamity's Wake 45:39 - Brotherhood's End 47:37 - Audacity 49:00 - Forging the Anchor 50:20 - Hostile Negotiations 52:42 - Diabolic Intent 57:17 - Arcane Proxy 59:40 - Third Path Iconoclast 1:03:38 - Obliterating Bolt 1:06:00 - Woodcaller Automaton 1:10:04 - Cityscape Leveler 1:13:16 - Rootwire Amalgam 1:16:02 - Arms Race 1:18:30 - Bladecoil Serpent 1:21:42 - No One Left Behind/Recomission 1:24:55 - Zephyr Sentinel 1:27:25 - Skystrike Officer 1:28:48 - Sarinth Steelseeker 1:30:39 - The most impactful cards of BRO 1:36:00 - We play the pre-order price game 1:38:43 - Closing out Links from this week's episode: NRG Fort Wayne Team Trios: https://mtgmelee.com/Tournament/View/11717 NRG Fort Wayne Pioneer $5k: https://mtgmelee.com/Tournament/View/11718 Our opening music is Nowhere - You Never Knew, and our closing music is Space Blood - Goro? Is That Your Christian Name? This week's ending music credit: Blue Wednesday - Middle School https://chll.to/f6dcacd3 email us: thedivedown@gmail.com (mailto:thedivedown@gmail.com) twitter: https://twitter.com/thedivedown

It's spoilers, spoilers, and more spoilers on this week's episode, but there's certainly a lot to talk about! Brother's War looks like it's really going to shake things up, but the real question is will it be enough to finally get Karn the Great Creator banned? The guys weigh in.Link to our ExtraLife page: https://www.extra-life.org/participant/493856 Looking for more pioneer content? Visit: playingpioneer.comWant to support the show? You can find our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/crew3mtgSaturday Challenge: https://www.mtgo.com/en/mtgo/decklist/pioneer-challenge-2022-10-2912489848Sunday Challenge: https://www.mtgo.com/en/mtgo/decklist/pioneer-challenge-2022-10-3012489852Buy a playmat or used our Inked Gaming affiliate link here: https://bit.ly/3aX4hzOWant to keep up with the show? Join our Discord discord.gg/Wydsb6xcTC or follow us on twitter @Crew3podcastWant more Crew3 content? Check out our YouTube channel or watch our weekly streams on Twitch.If you like the show, please share us with your friends and leave a review! 

How can we tap into our full creative power? Guy Raz, legendary podcast host (How I Built This, Wisdom from the Top, Wow in the World) and NYT bestselling author is on a new mission to explore the source of creativity in his most recent podcast, The Great Creators. He shares why you have to take risks and get out of your comfort zone to grow your creative muscle, how collaboration with others leads to the best ideas, what has kept him motivated over the past 25 years in the broadcast business, and how active listening is the most powerful way to create a deep connection with another person. - Get your ticket to Cathy Heller + Friends Live with a 50% discount! Use code "gather" at Cathyheller.com/friends (good until the end of this week) - Enter the epic giveaway for a chance to win a Macbook Air, a coaching session with Cathy, a free trip to LA, or a $1000 shopping spree! Cathyheller.com/share - Listen to Guy's new podcast, The Great Creators wherever you get your podcasts! (or listen a week early, ad-free on Wondery+ or Amazon Music) - Listen to Guy's other podcasts, How I Built This, Wow in the World, and Wisdom from the Top wherever you get your podcasts - Follow Guy on Instagram @guy.raz  - Thanks Shopify! For a free fourteen-day trial and full access to Shopify's entire suite of features go to shopify.com/dreamjob Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ep 133 | Remember, You are a Creator of your life! If you want to live a fulfilling life, you must know how to harness your own power to create. Here's how to become the creator of your life. 1. Know your power: We're not the spectators, but the creators of our lives. To become a conscious creator of your life, first you need to know that you are one. Realize that the source of creation works within us. The creative matrix exists inside us. If you want, you can change how you think, act, live, and transform your life. Only by genuinely realizing this power, this creation, within each cell of your body, will you be able to dream your life into being. 2. Raise your level of consciousness. What are your thoughts? What are your emotions? Remember, you are not here to be a puppet. Listen to your heart. 3. See with your heart: To create your life, first you must look within to discover your desires and then you must see the future with your heart. Your thoughts and visualizations have more power than you think. The top athletes know how to harness the power of visualization. Here's how positive visualization works. When your vision aligns with your heart, it draws energy from the Infinite Source, the Divine Source, and connects to the vibrational frequency to co-create with the Universe to translate into physical reality. First, discover what you want. You don't need endless thinking to discover your desires. Just listen to your heart. Tune-in and write whatever comes to mind. Soon, you'll find a couple things that you really want deep down. Second, now that you know what you want, see yourself calling it in. Feel it, Sense it, Imagine it, Visualize it, be in Knowingness of it. Then let it go and allow the Universe to co-create with you. Remember, the Universe has the higher viewpoint, so don't get attached to how you think/want it to turn out - just stay in the resonance of the vibration you are attuning yourself to and allow yourself to receive for the highest good. Doubt has killed many dreams in this world already. Don't let it kill yours. You are unstoppable. What stops you? Your thoughts. Learn to let them go and reframe to allow yourself to be the Creator that you are! You let go so you can begin again. You let go of who you are not so you become who you are. You cannot become who you are until you let go of who you are not. You are not anxiety and worry. You are not fear and lack of confidence You are a creator who is always connected to the Great Creator. Tune in!

Hands down, this season just keeps getting better and BETTER! We are back with Season 2, Episode 6, and this week I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing my dear friend and creative mentor D'Nar Young. One of the most top tier creatives I know gave us insight on how he continues to draw inspiration and level up creatively each and every time. What was your favorite gem D'Nar dropped in this week's episode? Thank you all for tuning in and feel free to catch up on past episodes. See y'all next week! Thank you in advance for listening and I hope this week's gem was beneficial. I am excited to share with you all weekly motivational spiels, occasional interviews, and countless tokens of wisdom to help you in this journey called life! #UncutGemsWithSlim #SlimReshae #DrawingInspiration Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/slimreshae/support Connect with D'Nar: @dnar_dnar | @young.creativ Join the #GemSquad on Instagram: @slimreshae and YouTube: Slim Reshae Check out Uncut Gems with Slim on Instagram @uncutgemswithslim and on Youtube HERE! Feel free to check out my website www.slimreshae.com + join the #GemSquad by subscribing to our email list! --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/slimreshae/support

(0:00) Intro(0:38) Releasing the Sam Lessin Episode(6:39) The state of the market(18:58) DataRobot AI(21:22) Zach's take(25:00) DataRobot distinctions(28:11) Tax code is founder-friendly, not employee-friendly(32:49) Not all employees are treated equally(34:03) The market determines what's fair(38:47) Balance of the private markets(40:31) Winding down Web3 debates(42:27) Introducing Molly White(43:48) Starting Web3 is going just great(46:41) The recruiting process(51:48) Considering editorial content(57:31) Who to blame for crypto hype(1:05:57) “Believing” is a core part of the strategy(1:10:06) Split on issues(1:13:58) Most interesting story covered(1:15:37) Dealing with backlash(1:19:27)  Outro Mixed and edited: Justin HrabovskyProduced: Andrew Nadeau and Rashad AssirExecutive Producer: Josh MachizMusic: Griff Lawson 

Our Great Creator God -Part 2-

Our Great Creator God -Part 2-

Our Great Creator God -Part One-

Our Great Creator God -Part One-

In this episode, which originally aired in radio format on July 14th, 2022, I explore some of the ideas presented in the introductory chapters of The Artist's Way, which is both a book (1992) and a twelve-week course for "discovering and recovering your creative self." I will be making my way through the course, and in the next twelve episodes will reflect on my experience of doing the daily morning pages (that's three pages of longhand writing done upon first waking), the weekly artist date (taking myself on a solo outing that will somehow feed my creative spirit), and the various other tasks and exercises that Cameron provides in each week's chapter. Each of us humans is a creation of the Great Creator, and as such we are meant to create things ourselves. The Artist's Way, a "spiritual path to higher creativity," provides tools for allowing us to do just that. 

We are creators of frequencies for the Great Creator, we are like gardeners of an immense garden called the Universe. We are here because we are strong, brave and in the Universe we are known as Warriors of Light. Our DNA emits a melody that is our harmonic signature in the Universe, by which we are known and identified.

If you appreciate this work, consider supporting it - https://www.patreon.com/seekgodtogether Today we will read a lengthier passage in Acts 17. Verses 24-32 say this, “‘The God who made the world and everything in it - He is Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in shrines made by hands. Neither is He served by human hands, as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives everyone life and breath and all things. From one man He has made every nationality to live over the whole earth and has determined their appointed times and the boundaries of where thy live. He did this so they might seek God, and perhaps they might reach out and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us. For in Him we live and move and exist…God now commands all people everywhere to repent, because He has set a day when He is going to judge the world in righteousness by the Man He has appointed. He has provided proof of this to everyone by raising Him from the dead.' When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some began to ridicule him.” Have you ever wondered why life is the way it is, why human power dynamics are such as they are, why you seem to get just a few short years to figure things out then you die, why there's suffering, why God seems distant… Paul tells you, but will you believe him? In this pithy statement, Paul summarizes The Human Condition. Let's walk through it together. There is a God who is creative and has made everything you see and don't see. And while He Himself is immaterial and needs nothing, it is in Him that you and I have the energy of life. And He created a mechanism whereby you arrived on the scene. Trace it back far enough and you get to one man (or in other manuscripts - one blood). We are related then somehow. But there's more, we have appointed times, a start and a finish, and appointed boundaries - limits. You, as jarring as it is to admit, have limitations imposed by the Great Creator. But why? Paul's answer - so that you'd reach out and seek God. But He's not far. He's close, but He requires of you to seek. Your limits, your humanity, your experience with others, this life and breath, is all so that you'd reach out to the great uncreated Creator who is waiting for you. And in Paul's thinking, this is the essence of repentance. But there's even a limit to this paradigm. At some point, God will intervene and bring about righteous judgment. And He has opted to do so by proxy. He will judge via the God-man Jesus Himself. And how can you know that this is so? God has proven it by raising Jesus from the dead. Perhaps there are days when this seems too fanciful or mythical. Certainly Paul's listeners thought so. Some ridiculed him. Have you ever thought, “If only I lived closer to the time of Christ I'd believe easier?” Perhaps you wouldn't. Perhaps I wouldn't. Things are no different now. You and I are here - alive - thinking - and we must choose as everyone must whether to ridicule, or to repent and seek God. That is why you are of course. And it's okay to revisit this line of thinking daily if necessary. This scripture is here for that reason and this time is here for you to seek God. God I believe. I don't know it all, not by a long shot, but I believe You and I seek You. Reveal Yourself to me now. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Episode 221: The Commander Smiths have a list of the worst Planeswalkers you'll face across the table. What would you add? Lowery's #stumpthesmithsavant is confusing for sure. And #StapleVs is a bit different and we are trying to see how peoples play style. Teferi's Protection vs. Craterhoof Behemoth. Enjoy!   Staple vs.  Teferi's Protection https://scryfall.com/card/c17/8/teferis-protection Vs Craterhoof Behemoth https://scryfall.com/card/jmp/385/craterhoof-behemoth   Worst Walkers to play against Huatli, Radiant Champion https://scryfall.com/card/rix/159/huatli-radiant-champion Jace, Wielder of Mysteries https://scryfall.com/card/war/54/jace-wielder-of-mysteries Oko, Thief of Crowns https://scryfall.com/card/eld/197/oko-thief-of-crowns Teferi, Time Raveler https://scryfall.com/card/war/A-221/a-teferi-time-raveler Karn, the Great Creator https://scryfall.com/card/war/1/karn-the-great-creator Teferi, Master of Time https://scryfall.com/card/m21/75/teferi-master-of-time Sorin Markov https://scryfall.com/card/m12/109/sorin-markov Ugin the Spirit Dragon https://scryfall.com/card/m21/1/ugin-the-spirit-dragon Ashiok, Dream Render https://scryfall.com/card/war/228/ashiok-dream-render Narset, Partner if Veils https://scryfall.com/card/war/61/narset-parter-of-veils   A FREE way to support the show is to SUBSCRIBE to our YouTube page and LIKE/SHARE our videos and podcasts https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4mttoLhPuTpOUMsqF1O-og?view_as=subscriber   Follow us on twitter where you will see Proxy of the Week, Not Sharing with Adam, MTG News and any Schedule changes. @CommanderSmiths   Lastly, you can email us at CommanderSmiths@gmail.com with any song suggestions, specs, decks, Questions or just to chat.   Recent Videos from the CommanderSmiths   Commander, 99 or Muff Garbage: New Capenna https://youtu.be/oF6hyx9xiIw   NEW Discord Gameplay https://youtu.be/a7iUsjgFsrQ   NEW Searching For The Spotlight https://youtu.be/qAdqTq_JO8g   NEW MTG Switcheroo Nikya https://youtu.be/VGCaLoCXVGA Yuriko https://youtu.be/6Hu2Wf23paI     NEW Secret Lair Break Point! https://youtu.be/sNtrc3SPcTQ   Proxy Time LIVE! https://youtu.be/sOvW7MdClsc   Proxy Time! #Short https://youtu.be/o5DA_JVDlWU   Curated MTG https://youtube.com/shorts/IIPjz-SJwhs?feature=share   Mail Day! https://youtu.be/a8PlAPuJ2Fk   Fork You! https://youtu.be/c5Svl9zy42Q   Recent Battle Boxes: New Capenna https://youtu.be/2V8rDUpyVJ0   Battle Boxes GIVEAWAY: New Capenna https://youtu.be/U_ZWaQPvEZI   Box Cracking! Adam: Kamigawa Booster Boxes https://youtu.be/TZrnv7iHUX0 Lowery: Kamigawa https://youtu.be/7pIqylOe2a4   Cockatrice Gameplay https://youtu.be/zG--lbeTCt0   How to Make Full Art Proxies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YF2NCnyjMdI&t=   Shipping Mistakes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThYSQCIuc-Q   Shipping for $.05 Cents! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSI5TCY_9I0&t   Shipping PREMIUM for $.25 Cents https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lGc17pTRBA&t

Kevin Cron and Steve Menendian review War of the Spark, for Vintage. 0:01:00: Announcements 0:05:40: VSL Season 9 Finals 0:45:40: Bolas's Citadel 0:53:40: Jace, Weilder of Mysteries 0:57:16: Flux Channeler 1:02:40: Dreadhorde Arcanist 1:19:30: Burning Prophet 1:23:50: Teferi, Time Raveler 1:40:25: Karn, the Great Creator 1:56:03: Narset, Parter of Veils 2:01:57: Saheeli, Sublime Artificer 2:08:36: […]