On this twelfth day of Christmas our true Love, Jesus gives to us the abiding presence of God. Emmanuel, God with us, is still with us. Together, we return to his table. The calendar year has changed. Will we? How shall we greet the God who cared enough to send the very best? With wise men of old we go to him rejoicing and give him our best in worship. Message based on Matthew 2:1-12.
Quotes:
Frances Chesterton: How far is it to Bethlehem? Not very far. Shall we find the stable-room Lit by a star? Can we see the little child? Is he within? If we lift the wooden latch. May we go in?
John Stott: Grace is God loving, God stooping, God coming to the rescue, God giving himself generously in and through Jesus Christ.
Duane Brooks: The star they had seen when it rose, went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was. And when they saw the star, they were overjoyed.
Duane Brooks: For instance, we don't know if there were 3 of them. We just know that there were 3 gifts. If you read it closely, it doesn't say anywhere in the scriptures that they were kings, but it does describe them as Magi.
A.W. Tozer: To have found God and still pursue him is the soul’s paradox of love, scorned indeed by the too easily satisfied religionist, but justified in happy existence by children of the burning heart.
Karl Barth: Christian worship is the most momentous, the most urgent, the most glorious action that can take place in human life.
William Temple: Worship is the submission of all our nature to God. It is the quickening of conscience by His Holiness; the nourishment of mind with his truth; the purifying of imagination by his beauty; the opening of the heart to his love; the surrender of will to his purpose—and all of this gathered up in adoration, the most selfless emotion of which our nature is capable and therefore the chief remedy for that self-centeredness which is our original sin and the source of all actual sin. Yes—worship in spirit and truth is the way to the solution of perplexity and to the liberation from sin.
Dallas Willard: Obedience is an essential outcome of Christian spiritual formation.
#epiphany #worship #duanebrooks
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