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With all the snow we’ve had in the last few weeks which has prevented us from meeting as a Body, I’ve had some interesting conversations with the Lord—mostly while shoveling—and have asked Him to show me the things He wanted me to understand through all of this.  For whatever it’s worth, here are some of things I learned.
First off, and probably the easiest to see, is the fact that no matter how technologically advanced man is, or thinks he is, God can bring things to a paralyzing standstill any time He wants to get our attention.  When He does that, we need to listen and seek Him.
Second, if the snow is not removed down to the bare ground (or blacktop or sidewalk), it gets compacted and freezes and hardens, and then continues to worsen, hardening treacherously more with each subsequent snowfall.  (I’ll let you think about the spiritual applications of those two lessons).
Anyway, in my own personal reading in Numbers 28 & 29, God showed me a direct connection between the snow lessons and our daily walk with Him.  Briefly, here are some of the highlights to encourage you to dig a little deeper on your own or with your family:

*in these two chapters God describes the daily, weekly, and monthly offerings, as well as the offerings He expects on each of the seven Feasts He has appointed for the Jewish people to keep, honor, and celebrate.
*daily, two lamb offerings are to be made every day—morning and evening (this is just to maintain acknowledgement of God and fellowship with Him).
*weekly, two lamb offerings are to be made for the Sabbath.
*monthly, ten animal sacrifices are to be made for the new month, and one goat as a sin offering
*all the sacrifices are to be without blemish, made by fire, as a sweet (pleasant) aroma to the LORD, and made with a grain offering and a drink offering, the grain offering to be made with fine flour mixed with pressed oil (a beautiful picture of Jesus, as the sacrifices themselves are).
*weekly sacrifices total 16; monthly sacrifices total 75.
*specific multiple sacrifices are required for each of the seven Feasts.
*the word “besides” appears 15 times and a goat offering for sin appears 14 times in chapters 28 & 29.

Again, I’ll let you dig in a little deeper on your own with these picture facts, but what came rising to the surface this time around for me was that even though special offerings were required for the Sabbath, the new moon, and the seven Feasts, the daily offerings were NOT to be neglected (“…you shall be careful to offer to Me at their appointed time”).  Fifteen times God says, “…besides the regular burnt offering.”  He takes our daily walk with Him seriously and expects us and wants us to engage Him personally the first thing every morning and the last thing every night, as well as throughout the day.  We cannot use any excuses, no matter how right they seem, sacrificial we think they might be, or justified we might believe we are in our disobedience, to fail to maintain our daily relationship with God.
Also, 14 times God mentions the required sin offering.  He wants us to be aware of the danger of our sinful nature, not to dwell on our past failures (Philippians 3:13-14), but to be mindful of what our sin cost God.

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January 18 is Sanctity of Human Life Sunday, and Thursday, January 22, will mark 36 years since the U.S. Supreme Court’s arguably worst decision—the “right” to abortion. Never before has anyone’s “right” caused so much bloodshed as Roe v. Wade, tallying more than 50 million dead at a present rate of 1.4 million a year, or the death of one baby every 24 seconds.

On January 20, the 44th U.S. President will be inaugurated under the theme, “A New Birth of Freedom,” invoking a line from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address: “…this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.” This historical event, however, will be a study in irony, given the fact that the incoming president is proudly and radically pro-abortion and promised Planned Parenthood that his first act as president will be to sign the Freedom of Choice Act, which federalizes abortion on demand as a “fundamental right” and annihilates every state law limiting, regulating, or prohibiting abortion, including the ban on partial birth abortion.

The audacity of using themes such as “birth,” “freedom,” and “rights of the powerless” is a mockery of those ideals and should send an Orwellian chill down the spine of every Christian American, because by the end of the day, more than 4,000 innocent fellow citizens will have been slaughtered.

In John 17, Jesus prayed to the Father for His disciples, and, by extension, for all believers in all generations, “Set them apart by Your truth. Your word is truth.” That truth moved America’s Founding Fathers to craft one of the most powerfully moral, religious, and political statements ever penned: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

From beginning to end, God’s Word declares and defends the personhood and sanctity of all human life from conception to the grave, unalienable rights that apply to every U.S. citizen, including the unborn.

While many argue that the social/moral issues are not important, or not as important as the economic and national security issues, the Bible states just the opposite: the morality of a nation is what determines its social, economic, and national success or failure. In that sobering light, then, in a manner similar to the sad state of ancient Israel when they rejected the true and living God for a man who only looked like a king (1 Samuel 8), the election of a man who espouses compassion and concern for the rights of the powerless while blatantly disregarding the most powerless of all—the unborn—may actually be the judgment of God on a divinely blessed nation that has turned its back on Him.

We must persevere, though, with the heart of God on behalf of the unborn as we shout to be heard above the wind—God is the Giver of life, and abortion is murder.

“For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved” (John 3:17).

All of the world’s religions, even some sects of Christianity, are based on a man-centered premise. Simplified, the assumption is that man is intrinsically good and only need discover his goodness through some sort of self-realization; or that man somehow lost his goodness and must regain it by appeasing God through ritual and self-atoning works; or that man is morally neutral and will eventually become one with the universe.

But true, biblical Christianity begins and ends with God. True Christianity rightly understands and recognizes that man, the highest being in God’s creation, fell from a state of spiritual, physical, and moral perfection when he freely and willfully chose to disobey God. Consequently, with the exception of Jesus, the Son of God, every human who has ever been conceived since that initial fall from grace, including the present generation and continuing through the end of time, is a sinner. That is why we, as humans, sin—because we are sinners. The sins we commit don’t make us sinners; they simply demonstrate that, indeed, we are sinners. And as such, we have absolutely no hope to save ourselves in this life or in the life to come, no matter what religious view we hold (and we all hold one).

Jesus, Himself, tells us that God the Father did not send Him to condemn the world because the world is already self-condemned by man’s act of disobedience (John 3:17-19). God sent Jesus to save the world—that whoever would exercise trusting faith in His life, death, and resurrection would not be lost eternally but would have eternal life in and with Him. The scenario can be likened to condemned humanity floating helplessly, and in many cases, ignorantly, downstream towards a Niagara Falls of eternal punishment. While many promising flotation devices are continually being tossed into the moving current, only one preserver is able to securely rescue someone out of that deadly flow. The choice, though, is up to each individual to reach out and grasp that life preserver. Refusal to do so is to surely perish. No one else can be blamed.

In every other religion, man finds himself trying to do something for God, or the gods, in order to save himself. Only in true Christianity has God Himself done all to save man. Nineteenth century British minister J.C. Ryle put it this way, “Although man’s salvation is entirely of God, his ruin, if he is lost, will be entirely from himself.”

Sadly, too many refuse God’s offer of life. “And this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil” (John 3:19). The roar of the falls is getting louder with each passing day. Reach out today for the only life preserver that can save—Jesus Christ (John 3:16).

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…God saw everything He had made, and indeed it was very good…(Genesis 1:1, 31).

God made man in His own image on the sixth day of Creation. With tender precision and biological perfection, He sculpted man from dirt, breathed physical, emotional, and spiritual life into him, and gave him the intelligence and ability to communicate. God also gifted him with something apart from every other created being—a free will—the capacity to choose right from wrong, good from evil. What a magnificent specimen of a living soul in an untainted personal relationship with his Creator.

But what wrong or evil was there in the idyllic garden setting in which God placed him? All creation in some way had been fashioned for man’s benefit and pleasure. God even created a helper for man who possessed the same attributes, abilities, and capacities, yet who was satisfyingly different in complementary ways. Man was given free reign in the garden with only one prohibition: Don’t eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, “for in the day that you eat of it you will surely die.”

Since God had proclaimed all His creation to be good, this tree and its fruit were not evil. The tree was simply the test of man’s free will. It was man’s own self-determination that would be evil and which would bring death. So, given a perfect state in a perfect environment, man willfully committed an act so simple, yet so eternally profound, that it instantly and irreversibly infected the entire universe, separating man from his Creator for all future generations. The warning had become prophecy with the choice to disobey, which was, in essence, the first realization or knowledge of evil. It resulted in the severed personal God-man relationship that no fig leaves, towers of Babel, or animal sacrifices could ever restore. That it was impossible for sinful man to approach a sinless God became humanity’s ultimate dilemma.

God would require a blood sacrifice for the punishment of that sin, but man could never meet the requirement, because the blood of all earthly sacrifices was tainted by the very same sin. With God, though, all things are possible. His personal intervention on man’s behalf in the original garden by providing animal skins for man’s shame was a clue to His divine solution: He Himself, untainted by sin, would graciously step out of eternity and onto the cross to become the acceptable sacrifice for the sins of the world. This incomparable demonstration of God’s unfathomable love (John 3:16) is the only satisfaction to the deep yearning in man’s soul to get back to the garden. No other way will work.

“For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved” (John 3:17).  That, indeed, is good news.  And every generation has had the same choice–still simple and still eternally profound.

“Holy Father, keep through Your name those whom You have give Me, that they may be one as We are…I do not pray for these alone, but also for those who will believe in Me through their word; that they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me…And the glory which You gave Me I have given them, that they may be one just as We are one: I in them, and You in Me; that they may be perfect in one, and that the world may know that You have sent Me, and have loved them as You have loved Me” (John 17:11, 20-23).

The more I seek the Lord Jesus Christ, the more I hear His voice.

The more I hear His voice, the more opportunities I have to obey Him.

The more I obey Him, the more I learn, grow, and mature in His Spirit, in His Word, and in His knowledge.

The more I learn, grow, and mature in Him, the more I am transformed into the image of Christ.

The more I am transformed into His image, the more I understand and see people and the world from God’s eternal perspective.

The more I understand and see people and the world from God’s eternal perspective, the more I am a conduit of His great love, grace, and mercy.

The more I am a conduit of God’s love, grace, and mercy, the more I am one with Him.

The more I am one with Him, the less I am of myself.

His sight becomes my sight.

His thoughts become my thoughts.

His actions become my actions.

His will becomes my will.

What He speaks to me, He speaks to His Spirit in me.

He increases; I decrease.

The Father and I become one as Jesus and the Father are one.

“See, I have set before you today life and good, death and evil…therefore choose life, that both you and your descendants may live…” (Deuteronomy 30:15-19).In context, these are the words of Moses to the children of Israel in the hard labor of their miraculous birth as a nation. God, the Creator, Giver, and Sustainer of life, presented Israel with the most basic choice a person can ever make: life or death. To most sensible people, the right choice may be obvious, but to far too many others, it isn’t. Proof? More than 50 million fellow humans, by conservative estimates, have been killed by abortion in the U.S. alone since the January 22, 1973, Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that “legalized” abortion as a de facto law of the land.

Our nation shamefully stands accountable before God and before the world for the sanctioned murder of 4,000 citizens every day for the last 35 years, a mind-numbing thought given the total number of U.S. military deaths in all our wars from the Revolutionary War to the present is 668,622 and the combined number of battle dead in all the wars of the 20th Century worldwide is 38 million. Aside from the staggering numbers, Roe v. Wade initiated a rapid and dramatic devaluation of human life and unleashed an unprecedented culture of death in the U.S., fostering a widespread increase of domestic violence, child abuse, and child pornography, as well as a frightening push for physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia, embryonic stem-cell research, and human cloning.

The Supreme Court’s majority opinion, written by Justice Harry Blackmun, candidly admitted that if the “personhood [of the fetus] is established, the appellant’s [Roe] case, of course, collapses, for the fetus’ right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the [14th] Amendment…[T]he appellee [Wade] conceded on reargument that no case could be cited that holds that a fetus is a person within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

Perhaps the reason why no case could be cited was because up until that time it never would have entered any sane person’s mind to think that the fetus was anything else but a person. Even today, ask any child what is inside the “belly” of a pregnant woman and the answer will undoubtedly be, “A baby!” And modern medical and media technology, along with federal laws like the Unborn Victims of Violence Act of 2004, have clearly and unarguably addressed Blackmun’s required establishment of the “personhood of the fetus.”

More than three bloodstained decades of hard facts, research, and testimony are readily available and easily accessible online, not to mention thousands-of-years-old biblical mandates. Inescapably, then, Americans, in general, and Christians, specifically, are without excuse for remaining silent about the tragedy of abortion that has long ripped the moral fabric of our society in more ways than the obvious. Are we so dull of heart or arrogant of mind to think that God will spare us judgment for nationally choosing death? Speak up. Speak out. Choose life.

For those facing a crisis pregnancy, or for more info, visit:

• Care Pregnancy Center of the Eastern Panhandle
• National Right to Life
• Pregnancy.Org