Book: Exodus

God wants to gather us in His arms and quiet our crying – wiping away every tear from our eyes; he is not reluctant to save us, but eager and joyful to do so!

The temptation in our hearts is always to worship things, places, and circumstances. The Israelites in Exodus 17 were preoccupied with things and circumstances. The Samaritan woman worshiped the place of Jacob’s well, and not the living God. The Israelites asked, “Is the LORD with us here?” The Samaritan woman asked Jesus, “Is the LORD with us anywhere else?” Just as Jesus challenged the woman, he challenges us daily to examine ourselves for anything which impedes our true worship of him.

Beloved, the Church is the only place where people can find true healing and refuge from the failings of a fallen world. We have an obligation to stand as outposts of truth and sanity amid a culture that is losing its collective grip on reality. This requires the Church to no longer abandon her simple duty to point out what is right and wrong, even when it is “controversial.” Our call to embrace the incarnate life, then, is to accept our duty as the Church - to be the hands and feet of Christ in our communities.

God spoke the universe into existence. God created all we can and cannot see. This same Divinity broke into time and space, born of a Pure Virgin, to save all of humanity. But we in our folly refuse to accept this glorious truth while at the same time believing we will make science fiction a reality. This contradiction must not be so for the professing Christian.

With the passing of Queen Elizabeth, we lose one of the final links in the chain of history which binds us to the storied history and tradition, and indeed the greatness of Western Civilization, blessed by God and founded on Judeo-Christian principles, to which we owe nearly every comfort and luxury which we enjoy today. Listen as the Rector reflects on the life of Queen Elizabeth II.

Our innermost desire is to be fully known and yet fully loved, and that can only be satisfied by the eternal love of God. No one can know you more fully, and love you more perfectly, than God can. You are not a creature of your own self-definition; rather, you are a being made in the perfect image of God, and therefore deserving of dignity from conception to final breath. Watch as the Rector celebrates the glory of Christ’s Resurrection.

We are assaulted every day by anxieties about our own lives and everything going on in the world. In Psalm 46, the LORD tells the Psalmist, “Be still, and know that I am God.” In these words we can find great comfort, but we must first be willing to be still. We can take confidence knowing that God is in control as the great I AM.

We spend so much of our lives self-focused, but almost none of that time self-aware. We convince ourselves of lies about how we want people to see us, but we never confront the reality of who we really are in our sinful state. The Transfiguration of Christ gives us the perspective of God’s holiness, our depravity before Him, and our need for Jesus’s saving grace. When we fall prostrate before the Lord, we gain true perspective on how messed up we really are.

Many of us today look around and no longer recognize the world we live in. We see that truth no longer matters, facts no longer matter, and the rule of law is only applied preferentially. Our civilization now runs on the fumes of the faith held by our fathers. Watch as the Bishop-retired discusses how as Christians, we must recognize faith is an action, requiring us to carry on the Faith no matter what, just as our fathers did.