They relied on God as the chief supplier of their needs, the one who fueled them to move forward. They were [literally] dying as part of the supply chain in God’s battle for truth. They saw this line about pastures as closely connected to the adjacent promise they would lack nothing. They were soldiers in the army of the King, not residents at his retreat center. Their life experiences provided a certain filter for the words of Psalm 23.

Corruption still lives today as we find ourselves standing on the brink of forgetting the final covenant between God and mankind. We must learn from the last precipice as the prophet of a dying age leaned over his own Nebo to glimpse the coming Messiah. Today’s church still needs Malachi. Your church still needs Malachi.

For those struggling to feel closer to God, another baptism may not be the solution you are searching for. But it is good that you are searching. God promises that he is not hard to find for those willing to look.

When I watch others enter the baptistry, I can appreciate that I am already on the other side. Much like the Lord’s Supper, the corporate ordinance of baptism is another act done in remembrance of Christ.

The book of Ruth begins in brokenness. The time of the Judges had seen people go from obedient and devoted followers of God to fickle and nameless wanderers who came to Him temporarily in their times of greatest distress. The first chapter records how one family even leaves God’s “Promised Land” to seek life elsewhere. The book of Ruth is short but deep. We see suffering, but we see restoration. The hope of the Gospel is very much alive even centuries before the arrival of the Messiah.

In Esther, God doesn’t save the heroine from many of her difficulties like He does in Daniel, but He is faithful to walk through them with her. It is a needed message for today’s church.

You know this passage from a wedding you were in or attended. But what is Paul, a single, tent maker and Old Testament scholar doing writing about love? There must be something more going on than a wedding sermon.

To summarize the national pain, the president quoted from a poem written by a Canadian fighter pilot who had joined the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War II. Born in Shanghai, China in 1922, John Gillespie Magee, Jr. was the son of Canadian and American parents serving as Anglican missionaries to the region. He was an avid writer of poetry as a young adult, and one such poem he titled “High Flight” after composing it in August of 1941.

Death already takes a major toll on faith leaders. Where the average layperson deals with the grief of a lost loved one once every few years, the faith leader may walk through this process multiple times in a single month. One of the traits of a good faith leader is to learn how to deeply love all those under one’s care—including the guilty and hard to love. The depression that can come from losing so many of one’s parishioners is very real.

Today, we must consider how our Christian response to our own time of great calamity will prepare us for future challenges. Like a stone of remembrance to our struggles-past, these spiritual mile-markers stacked during hardship will wait as ready beacons to guide us on our next trek through the Valley of Shadow. Will we forget our unfailing bulwark as we have forgotten so many other lessons? Luther urges us forward with confidence that we have hope on our side: “Christ Jesus, it is He!” Onward into the abyss, our Polaroid-memory snapping away as experience develops into history.

The ongoing heath crisis and cultural and legal events have sent many Christians into confusion and chaos. It has challenged and exposed my deeply rooted problems in American Christianity. Many are choosing to lash out in anger. Others turn to fear. While others double down on politics as their last hope to maintain life as they know it.

However, Augustine (354-430) has some great wisdom on Proverbs chapter 6 that turns the familiar passage used to prod lazy Jamestownians and Pilgrims off their 17th-century log couches into a ballad of spiritual preparation.