The Adonai's Crescent

A Prayer to the God of my life Reference: Psalm 42:8 (AMP) - Yet the Lord will command His lovingkindness in the daytime, And in the night His song will be with me, A prayer to the God of my life. David was in a difficult situation and difficult circumstances. Yet he was declaring words to his soul, to see beyond the situation he was in, by His Grace, Kindness, and Mercies. He isn't in the temple when he writes this. He's far from it, cut off, surrounded by memory instead of presence . And in that distance, he does something remarkable: he turns and speaks to his own soul instead of just feeling what it feels. He doesn't wait for the ache to lift before choosing hope. He commands himself toward praise while still in it. That's the real shape of trust: he remembers God "from the land of Jordan and the heights of Hermon." Those aren't random landmarks. Jordan is where Israel crossed into everything God had promised, the river of breakthrough, where impossibl...

If God were not in on it Reference Jn 3:12-18 The discussion between Jesus and Nicodemus is very interesting. God knows everything but acts to test us for a moment. This is a controlled dialogue to keep Nicodemus and his views pointing to God; But he was struggling to tune into Jesus's view point. There's something to this. Jesus doesn't dump everything on Nicodemus at once. He moves from new birth (v.3) to wind (v.8) to the bronze serpent (v.14) to the love of God (v.16). He's meeting Nicodemus where he is and drawing him forward—which is exactly the pattern we are experiencing in our own lives , if we let Him to interact. Jesus isn't trying to win an argument; He's trying to bring a man from darkness into light, one step at a time. It's a good catch about the testing dynamic — and there's actually a passage later in John that names it explicitly. In John 6:5-6, Jesus asks Philip where they can buy bread for the crowd, and John tells us directly: "...

Was and Now Ephesians 2:7–10 (MSG) Now God has us where HE wants us, with all the time in this world and the next to shower Grace and Kindness upon us in Christ Jesus. Saving is all His idea, and all his work. All we do is trust HIM enough to let HIM do it. It’s God’s gift from start to finish! We don’t play the major role. If we did, we’d probably go around bragging that we’d done the whole thing! No, we neither make nor save ourselves. God does both the making and saving. He creates each of us by Christ Jesus to join Him in the work He does, the good work He has gotten ready for us to do, work we had better be doing!! Paul describes two themes from this chapter- 1) Death to Live 2) Division to Unity - It tells us who we were and who we now are — and the distance between those two is entirely the work of Grace. we were dead, Paul says, not struggling or striving, but dead — and yet "God, being rich in mercy," made you alive together with Christ. That word "together...