They’re also having a special limited-time sale on their Mac and PC base packages and upgrades. Check it out!

I thank God for your prayers. I trust that God would have given me the frame of mind and disposition of heart to praise him, whether or not I was offered the position.

God has once again surprised me by his plans, which are always better than my plans. I applied for an internship position and was offered a staff ministry position. I officially started today, serving in the Family Discipleship Department of Bethlehem Baptist Church as Pastoral Assistant for Young Adult Discipleship. I am so excited to be serving the body in this new capacity, and I am keenly aware of my need for God’s empowering grace.

I am reminded of my first post on this blog, in which I shared my disspointment after not making the cut for a job that I applied for. The same God who closed that door 2 years ago has opened another one for me now. He gives and he takes away. When the blessings pour in, I praise him for it. When the darkness closes in, still I will praise him.

I prayed that…

• If I would best serve the church in this internship, I would get it. If there is someone else applying that would better serve the church, I wouldn’t get it.
• If my private worship and service to my wife and family would be increased as a result of this internship, I would get it. If my private worship would suffer more, or my service to my wife and family would suffer more, I wouldn’t get it.
• I would be utterly transparent in my interview, not putting on a show or weaseling my way in. I would be honest, not exaggerating the good or down-playing the bad. It would truly be, “what you see is what you get.”

I believe God was extremely faithful in answering my third prayer. I think they know what to expect if they take me on board. I trust God will also answer my first two prayers. Today, will you pray for me to this end?

My brother Joe has a strong desire to teach in the inner-city public school system. This video helped me to dream with him. Praise God for teachers like this. Even though Lindsay (the teacher in the above film) isn’t necessarily teaching the gospel to her students, she is gospel teaching. She is striving to do all she does as a teacher from a gospel life. These students are better equipped to understand the gospel because of her influence. They can understand concepts like unconditional acceptance, sacrificial love, unmerited favor, and loving discipline; concepts that formerly had no meaning to many of them. When a student now hears that God fully accepts them, regardless of any of their works, by faith alone; when they hear that God loves them more than any human has ever loved them, they can say, “God loves me and accepts me even more than Miss Lindsay.” Let it be God. Let it be that Lindsay’s students go to embrace the gospel, being welcomed by you in Christ, through faith alone. May many gospel teachers like this saturate the schools in our nation.

Psalms 119:91 By your appointment they [heavens and earth] stand this day, for all things are your servants.

All things… the Middlemist Red Flower, 11688 San Ysidro Drive, wasps, clouds, fortune cookies, eBay, Johnny Cash, the billiard hall down the street, public radio, 3M, green olive pizza, stars, thermometers, MTV, my 3rd grade science text book, Freemasonry, the television show Alf, sweetened condensed milk, placemats and Walt Disney are all servants of God. They are not servants in the same way that the Apostle Paul or C.S. Lewis are servants of God, but they serve the ultimate purposes of God nonetheless. They only exist by his appointment, and they only don’t exist at any given time and at any given place, by his appointment. Marvel!

“One of the greatest misconceptions of heaven is that it is static, unchanging, and immutable, as if to say that all we get we get all at once, at the beginning. The idea many have is that we are transformed at its inception as much as we ever will be. No. But to think that the happiness of heaven is unchanging minimizes its glory…

The basis for knowing this to be true is the biblical reality of God’s inexhaustible plenitude.

We must never forget that even in heaven only God is immutable or unchanging. WE are ever subject to greater transformation and improvement. But it is always a change from one stage of glory and knowledge and holiness to the next higher stage of glory and knowledge and holiness. It is one thing to be free of imperfection, but another to experience perfection perfectly. We will be perfect in heaven from the first moment we arrive in that we will be free from defect, free from sin, free from moral corruption and selfishness. But that perfection is finite, because we are finite. It is alway subject to expansion. There is change, but always for the better!

Heaven is not simply the eradication of earthly sin and imperfection. To say that in heaven I will no longer hate God is not the same as loving him perfectly. My love can be free from corruption and selfishness without being as perfect and intense as is possible. To say that my love for God is absolutely perfect and cannot be improved upon implies that I know everything that can be known of him and that I know it in exhaustive detail.”

- Sam Storm; Joy’s Eternal Increase, pages 173-175

Dedication to God; Hosanna and Hope Lacine from Jeff Lacine on Vimeo.