Morning Musing: Amos 9:13

“Look, the days are coming – this is the Lord’s declaration – when the plowman will overtake the reaper and the one who treads grapes, the sower of seed. The mountains will drip with sweet wine, and all the hills will flow with it.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Modern imaginings of Heaven – especially in cartoons – are generally terrible. The common caricature is that we will be sitting in the clouds with wings and harps and halos doing…nothing. That doesn’t sound like an exciting place I long to spend eternity. It sounds like a boring waste of time. I’ll take the fun of sin and whatever bit of torment Hell offers over that, thank you very much. At least, that’s how the all-too-often and totally understandable reaction to that image goes. The devil got a win when he inspired that vision. Yet this vision is nowhere found in the pages of Scripture. Let’s talk about what we do see and why it is so much better.

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Morning Musing: Ephesians 2:1-3

“And you were dead in your trespasses and sins in which you previously walked according to the ways of this world, according to the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit now working in the disobedient. We too all previously lived among them in our fleshly desires, carrying out the inclinations of our flesh and thoughts, and we were by nature children under wrath as the others were also.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

I was having a conversation with my Student Minister the other day that started when I played for him a song I have discovered recently that captures the story of Scripture and the Gospel better than any other I’ve ever heard. Over the course of the conversation, he made the observation that Ephesians 2:1-10 is one of the best statements of the Gospel in the whole of the Scriptures. I’ve read the passage several times, but not recently. So, when I started a new Bible reading plan and the very first passage was Ephesians 2:1-10, I took it as a good sign I should re-familiarize myself with it. I’m glad I did, because he was right. Let me take you through it over the next few days. It starts grim here, but gets a whole lot better really quickly as the Gospel does. Here goes nothing.

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