Book: Exodus

If we are not willing to love when it is difficult, or inconvenient, or when it requires us to show charity to those we do not particularly like (perhaps even to love our enemies!) then we have not love at all, and our relationships will suffer as a result. The evidence is of course abundant in the breakdown of marriage and the family, but the same is true of our relationship with God – we face similar temptations to reduce it down to a feeling or a transaction.

Disquietude is an unusual word, is it not? Certainly not one you hear every day. Disquietude refers to a state of anxiety or uneasiness. Understood this way, today we together pray for eyes of Faith to behold the Transfigured Christ, in light eternal, to transport us from the anxieties and trials of our daily lives, the darkness of our temporal world.

What things are distracting you from the Gospel today? Which distractions are holding you back from sharing the Gospel with your friends and family? Our mission is short, the harvest is plentiful, and the laborers are few. Pray how God may use you as a laborer in His harvest, that He may help us lay aside every weight which clings so closely, and run the race He has set before us.

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.