Jeremiah 17:5-10 (NRSVCE) Thus says the Lord: Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals and make mere flesh their strength, whose hearts turn away from the Lord. They shall be like a shrub in the desert, and shall not see when relief comes. They shall live in the parched places of the wilderness, in an uninhabited salt land. Blessed are those who trust in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord. They shall be like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream. It shall not fear when heat comes, and its leaves shall stay green; in the year of drought it is not anxious, and it does not cease to bear fruit. The heart is devious above all else; it is perverse-- who can understand it? I the Lord test the mind and search the heart, to give to all according to their ways, according to the fruit of their doings. It’s very easy, I think, to read passages like this and get the wrong impression. Trust in the Lord, and He will provide. That’s one takeaway from this, but it’s only part of it. And even that part can be misunderstood.
When we talk about trusting in the Lord and receiving His blessings, we certainly don’t mean “do nothing, and the Lord will provide.” We don’t mean avoid going to the doctor, because the Lord will provide. We don’t mean skip the vaccinations, because the Lord will provide. We don’t mean quit your job, because the Lord will provide. Rather, it means doing things purposefully and prayerfully. A tree does not grow aimlessly. It spreads its roots to where the nutrients are, and it stretches its limbs up toward the warmth of the sun. It moves with the purpose of being strengthened and nourished. So too we should be. Our nourishment comes from above, and our strength comes from our roots being firmly established in our faith. It is a faith of action, and a faith that bears fruit. A faith that drives us to reach for the warmth of the heavens, and to use the blessing of warmth we receive to spread seeds of faith around us. All because we have trust that the Lord’s blessings will always be there, to nourish us. The alternative is to live in fear. Fear that we may collapse at any moment. Fear that the Lord may not provide. That fear drives us to turn to the world for strength. The world is immediately present to us, which makes it much easier to choose the world over God. But the world cannot provide the nourishment we need, and so to turn to the world instead of to God is to be like a shrub thirsting in the desert, eventually to have its roots give way and be blown away like a tumbleweed. One who is fearful shrinks and shrivels, desperately clinging to whatever power he has left within himself. Whereas one who has faith uses what power he has left to produce what fruit he can, trusting that the Lord will provide. Now, that’s a lot of flowery language and imagery to say something which is quite simple. God will bless those who trust in Him, and that trust drives us to action. It drives us to work to provide for our families. It drives us to give to charitable causes. It drives us to maintain our health and the health of those under our care to the best of our ability. And it drives us to reach out to our neighbor in love. The first command God gave to the first man was to do work—to take what God had given him and use it to care for what was around him (Genesis 2:15). God created man to be faithful to Him, and being faithful meant doing what is good to do. A faith which does not prompt action is no faith at all. Jeremiah 18:18-20 (NRSVCE) Then they said, “Come, let us make plots against Jeremiah—for instruction shall not perish from the priest, nor counsel from the wise, nor the word from the prophet. Come, let us bring charges against him, and let us not heed any of his words.” Give heed to me, O Lord, and listen to what my adversaries say! Is evil a recompense for good? Yet they have dug a pit for my life. Remember how I stood before you to speak good for them, to turn away your wrath from them. Jeremiah was a prophet. He proclaimed the goodness of God, he called out the wickedness of the world, and he prayed for mercy and salvation for the people of God. And the people hated him for it. He did what prophets are there to do—he disrupted the ordinary ways of the world, for the sake of the ways of God. But nobody likes change. The world hated the mere thought of giving up its wicked ways. So instead of heeding Jeremiah’s pleas, instead of changing their behavior, they instead chose to demonize Jeremiah. Jeremiah is a prophet, and thus ought to be listened to. But if we make him an enemy, if we find a reason (or can make up a reason) to condemn him, we get to keep going about our lives as we always have, in sin.
Is evil a recompense for good? It was precisely because he was good that the people sought to get rid of Jeremiah. The goodness of his words and the goodness of his deeds highlighted the wickedness of their own. I can’t help but think of how we respond now to those who call on us to be better than we are. Do we listen, accept, and learn from what they have to say? Rarely. Do we get defensive, looking for any way to justify the way we are now? That’s certainly more common. But the sad state of affairs is that the most common response is that of the people to Jeremiah. Instead of accepting that we may need to learn or change, and instead of even defending ourselves, we attack. We conspire. We plot. If you don’t think that’s true, go to your local news station’s social media page and read through the comments on any article about a new public policy, or a new project proposal. That will eliminate any doubts about who we still are. We seek to tear down anyone who would even suggest that we ought to be any different than we are, or that the natural order of things can be improved. We are comfortable in our situation and in our behaviors, and we will bring charges against any who would dare to suggest it is not the way things ought to be. Those who challenge us are not allowed to be our teachers, or our advocates. They are only our enemies, just as the people perceived Jeremiah to be. The takeaway from this is obviously the most difficult bit. We need to work on ourselves. We need to learn how to learn again, how to be like children, how to accept that the way we are right now is not the best we can do or the best we can be. Until the return of our Savior, there is always improvement to be done. We need to open ourselves to the possibility that God is still calling to us with prophetic voices to be better. And we need to help those closest to us to do the same. Romans 4:13, 16-18, 22 (NRSVCE) For the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith. For this reason it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham (for he is the father of all of us, as it is written, “I have made you the father of many nations”)—in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. Hoping against hope, he believed that he would become “the father of many nations,” according to what was said, “So numerous shall your descendants be.” Therefore his faith “was reckoned to him as righteousness.” We read the other day about the agreement that God entered into with man. God agreed to make man holy and to be our God, and man agreed to obey and uphold His commandments. But we are not made holy by our own power, or our own merit. It is God who is the agent of our sanctification, the one who actually sanctifies, and we who are sanctified by Him. That’s what Deuteronomy says. And this is what Paul is getting at here in Romans.
God’s promise to Abraham that he would be a father of many nations was not grounded in his and his descendants’ adherence to the law. They were called to adhere to the law, certainly. But the grounding for the promise was not the law itself, but rather it was in their faith. They had faith that God would provide, that God would supply for their needs, that God would fulfill His promises, and so they did as He commanded. They couldn’t simply do what the Law said and expect reward, absent faith. The Pharisees were rebuked by Christ for just such a thing, as was Job when he questioned God for allowing tragedy to strike him when he had done everything which was asked of him. The agreement between God and man is not grounded in man’s obedience. And why? God is unchanging, and thus His word and His promises are unchanging. This agreement requires more sure footing than the whims of fallen men. “For this reason it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace.” Our faith does not arise independent God. Faith itself is a gift of grace. We love because He first loved us. It is God’s grace which moves the heart of fallen man such that it is even capable of loving Him. The agreement is grounded in faith precisely because that places its ultimate grounding in the grace given to man by God, and that grace is as unchanging as God Himself. That puts the agreement on unshakeable ground. Abraham’s faith was reckoned to him as righteousness, not Abraham’s adherence to commands and fiats. Abraham did obey God’s commands, but precisely because he had faith. Paul doesn’t emphasize this point to the Romans arbitrarily. He knows his audience. The promise God made to Abraham does not apply only to the descendants of Abraham (that is, the Jews, of which the Romans are not), but to all who share the faith of Abraham. He is speaking to a Gentile audience, assuring them that these promises of God apply just as much to them as they do to the Jews, so long as they have faith. And in that way, Abraham not only is the father of the Jews, but also the father of all nations, united together in faith. Daniel 9:4b-10 (NRSVCE) “Ah, Lord, great and awesome God, keeping covenant and steadfast love with those who love you and keep your commandments, we have sinned and done wrong, acted wickedly and rebelled, turning aside from your commandments and ordinances. We have not listened to your servants the prophets, who spoke in your name to our kings, our princes, and our ancestors, and to all the people of the land. “Righteousness is on your side, O Lord, but open shame, as at this day, falls on us, the people of Judah, the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and all Israel, those who are near and those who are far away, in all the lands to which you have driven them, because of the treachery that they have committed against you. Open shame, O Lord, falls on us, our kings, our officials, and our ancestors, because we have sinned against you. To the Lord our God belong mercy and forgiveness, for we have rebelled against him, and have not obeyed the voice of the Lord our God by following his laws, which he set before us by his servants the prophets. It doesn’t get much more fitting for a penitential season than this. Lent is a time for us to fast and pray, so that we might acknowledge our sins and take our faith more seriously not only now, but always. It’s a time for us to ask for God’s mercy, for it is not long before we will remember the day we committed the most heinous of sins. The day that we murdered Christ.
Here we have Daniel acting as an example for us. He pleads with God to have mercy on the people of Jerusalem and all of Israel for the sins they have committed. God gave them commandments, and they broke them. God sent them prophets, and they ignored them. God asked one simple thing of them: “Follow me.” And they turned away. Daniel may as well be speaking here and now, as his confession applies equally to us. Shame covered Israel then, just as it covers us now. Remember yesterday what we read from St. Paul about shame and humiliation? The ones who are on the path of destruction are too covered in shame, but they fool themselves into thinking it is glory. It’s only those who recognize their shame and come to God in humility that will be saved. Daniel sees Israel’s shame, and his own, for what it is. He sees how unworthy they are of God’s blessings, and he knows the only thing he can do is come to God in earnest repentance and ask for grace and mercy. But this seems to be where we diverge from Daniel. We are covered in shame, certainly, because of our sins. But we appear to revel in it. We no longer feel our shame. Instead, we simply whisk it away, filling our minds and hearts with more and more things to distract us from the truth of our sin. Instead of turning to God, as Daniel did, we turn to the world. We are on the path to destruction. This is why confession and penance are so important, why Lent is so important. Until we look past the things we use to distract ourselves and actually look upon our own sin, we will never recognize our shame, and thus we will never be able to turn toward the path that leads to God. There are three parts to the sacrament of reconciliation (what most people simply call “confession”). There is the examination of conscience, in which we reflect on our sin, seeing it for what it is and how it harms our lives and the lives of those around us, so that we might ask God for forgiveness and mercy. There is the confession itself, in which we confess our sins, ask for forgiveness, and receive absolution. And there is the penance, in which we work to reorient ourselves—turn away from the path of destruction and toward the path of life. This is what Lent is about. Reorienting ourselves to more closely follow the narrow path of life. But we can only begin to do that if we are able to ask God for forgiveness. And we can only make an honest prayer for forgiveness if we first see our sin for what it is, as Daniel did. Philippians 3:17-4:1 (NRSVCE) Brothers and sisters, join in imitating me, and observe those who live according to the example you have in us. For many live as enemies of the cross of Christ; I have often told you of them, and now I tell you even with tears. Their end is destruction; their god is the belly; and their glory is in their shame; their minds are set on earthly things. But our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. He will transform the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory, by the power that also enables him to make all things subject to himself. Therefore, my brothers and sisters, whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, stand firm in the Lord in this way, my beloved. This passage is a bit misleading outside its context in the rest of the epistle. Paul urges the people to imitate him, which makes Paul come off as incredibly vain and self-important. And that makes his warnings about those whose “god is the belly” ring a bit hollow, as it seems Paul is just another one of those people. But a few verses before this passage begins, Paul talks about everything he possessed and everything he had done, and how all of that was worthless without Christ:
"Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ.” (Phil. 3:7-8) So Paul’s call for imitation is a call to cast aside those vain concerns. He warns of people who will hold themselves up as righteous and worthy of admiration and imitation, but set themselves in stark opposition to the cross. We see religious leaders all the time, particularly on television, who create a big show about how perfect and holy they are, and how you could become holy too if only you will admire them (and usually, more sinisterly, give them money). They surround themselves with their own shame, fooling themselves and others into thinking it is glory, and their desires center only on earthly things. They use language we as Christians are familiar with in attempts to persuade us into idolizing them, but make no mistake about it, their citizenship is firmly in this world. Our citizenship, as Paul makes clear, is in heaven. Our Savior does not come from the megachurch down the road, or from the prime time slot on TBN. Our Savior comes from heaven. Paul was humiliated. He lost everything for the sake of Christ. That is what he calls us to imitate. Only by recognizing the poverty of our condition, only by realizing the humiliation of the state of our lives, can we truly turn to Christ with an earnest desire. It is only then that we begin to understand what Christ offers, and what salvation entails, and thus only then that we can make an honest response to Christ’s call of “Follow me.” That is the problem with the false teachers that Paul warns about. They have no humility. They feel no shame. And because of that, they are unable to turn to Christ. They have closed themselves off from Christ’s glory, having instead chosen to revel in their own infirmity. They follow no one but their own greed and vanity, and thus they have set themselves on the path of destruction. Do not imitate these false teachers. Pray for them. Mourn for them. And join your feet to the likes of St. Paul, who have been conformed to the body of Christ, and acknowledge your condition. Realize that we are sinners, and no matter how many honors and riches we lay upon ourselves to cover that up, we will never be more than that, without Christ. Deuteronomy 26:16-19 (NRSVCE) This very day the Lord your God is commanding you to observe these statutes and ordinances; so observe them diligently with all your heart and with all your soul. Today you have obtained the Lord’s agreement: to be your God; and for you to walk in his ways, to keep his statutes, his commandments, and his ordinances, and to obey him. Today the Lord has obtained your agreement: to be his treasured people, as he promised you, and to keep his commandments; for him to set you high above all nations that he has made, in praise and in fame and in honor; and for you to be a people holy to the Lord your God, as he promised. “This very day”
The word of the Lord is not something which was given to us at some point in the past. The commands of the Lord are not merely passed on to us by our ancestors who actually received them. Certainly, we can trace the history of Christianity (and ultimately Judaism), look into archaeological evidence, and dig through historical texts to get a pretty good idea of who actually wrote the words we see on the page, and the commands we hear in church on Sundays. Indeed, there are entire academies dedicated solely to these projects. But the commands of the Lord are not for some past people. They are for today, for you and me right now. God does not speak His commands only to Moses, or only to the prophets. He speaks eternally, and thus at all times. But notice that this is not merely a one-way relationship. God does not merely speak His commands and that’s that. Follow them, or else. The following verses highlight the mutuality of this arrangement. The Lord has agreed to be our God, and in turn we have agreed to follow in His ways—to obey, and give Him the due honor of being our God. And we have agreed to be God’s faithful people, because He has promised to make us holy. He has promised to set us apart from the world, to raise us up into something more. He has promised to sanctify us and make us holy. There are commands here, most definitely, but the commands are not arbitrary. They are for a purpose, and that purpose is what was promised to us in this mutual agreement. By obeying God’s commands, we are made holy. We enter into this agreement this very day. This is a two way street. We are made holy this very day, so long as we observe His commands with all our hearts and with all our souls. But we need to be careful here, because it can sound like we are the cause of our sanctification, and that is absolutely not the case. Only God can sanctify us. Only God can make us holy. We do not have that power. We are sanctified by God because we do what He commands. But that we are even capable of doing what He commands to begin with is a work of His grace. “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). He agreed to be our God first, before anything else, and that entails bestowing upon us the grace to receive His commands and the grace which empowers us to follow them. Grace which enables us to enter into this agreement. We have a role to play in our sanctification, but that our role exists at all is the result of His grace. And the agent of our sanctification is God. All He asks is that we abide by the agreement. This very day. Ezekiel 18:21-28
“The way of the Lord is unfair.”
How often have we thought this? The demands of a righteous life are difficult, and often can make us feel completely overburdened. We may know what the “good” thing to do in any given moment is, but it just feels almost impossible to actually do. Or perhaps we can’t even distinguish the good choice from the bad—they seem to both be shades of gray. So if choosing the wicked thing is what causes us to die, surely this must be unfair! We don’t even know what good is! How could we possibly choose the good? This passage repeatedly uses the phrase “turn away.” We must “turn away” from our sins, we must not “turn away” from our righteousness and commit iniquity. This turning implies that we are to undergo some manner of transformation. We are transformed into that which is capable of being righteous, and so long as we do not turn away, we will have life. But that’s not to say we will never sin. This turning is a transformation of the heart, a change in our disposition toward what is good and what is evil. We are turned, passively speaking, by the grace of God, and that enables us to recognize the good for what it is. But we also turn ourselves, actively speaking, by cooperating with that grace and actually choosing the good. We may fail from time to time, but because we have allowed God to work in our lives (passively), we are able to see that failure for the evil that it is, and we are able to repent of it (actively). One who has not turned away from sin, one who has not allowed God to transform his heart, will not see that. He will be lost in shades of gray, or perhaps even be so fallen as to see the good as evil, and the evil as good. And because of that, because he has turned himself away from God’s grace, he will die. So is it truly unfair? God extends His grace freely. He makes that offer to transform our lives. He makes us capable of responding in the affirmative. All we need to do is cooperate, to accept that transformation of the heart and turn away from sin. This is not an unfair dynamic. Indeed, the unfairness is on our end, not His! “Is it not your ways that are unfair?” We don’t deserve His grace. We don’t deserve His offer of salvation. It is far from fair that we should have this chance. But He extends the offer anyway, and welcomes us with open arms. Matthew 7:7-12 (NRSVCE) “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for bread, will give a stone? Or if the child asks for a fish, will give a snake? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him! “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets. “Ask, and it will be given you”
Jesus tells us that, should we have desire in our hearts, we ought to take that desire to God. For if we take our wants and our needs to God, He will provide. There’s an obvious caveat here, that gets implied by Jesus’ example of the child. God will provide your desire, if your desire is good. When a child asks for something good, we don’t give her something wicked, because we know better. So far more, when we ask the Father for what we desire, if that desire be good the Father will provide (because the Father knows what is good better than anyone), and if that desire be wicked, God will instead provide what is good. “Search, and you will find.” Searching implies earnestness and sincerity. You don’t search for something unless you truly desire to find it. If you didn’t have desire, you wouldn’t bother searching. And so Jesus tells us here that the things we ought to be taking to God ought to be those things that we find we have an earnest desire for. Those wants that you just can’t seem to get out of your mind—that nag you for days on end. Take them to God. But it also means that when we ask, ask with the sincere intent to find an answer, even if that answer is one we may not expect or enjoy. One who seeks earnestly does not determine beforehand what the nature of his finding will be, but rather he opens himself up to the many possibilities of what might be found. If a scientist were to do all his experiments with his conclusion already decided, and instead was just looking to prove the conclusion he already had, that is bad science. That is not earnestly seeking the truth. When we pray, we are not to be like a bad scientist. We are to open ourselves up to whatever we might find, because the Father knows what is good, and His response will always be good for us. “Knock, and the door will be opened for you.” Here we get the implication of persistence. Once who knocks doesn’t knock only once. She keeps knocking, with the hope that someone will answer her on the other side of the door. She persists, perhaps through several rounds of knocking, before giving up. The difference here is that we ought to not give up. We are to keep knocking, to keep asking, and to keep searching. Jesus is telling us here to not be discouraged when it seems our prayers are going unheard. Persist in our prayer. Maintain hope, because Jesus tells us there will always be someone there to answer the door. Desire, sincerity, and persistence. Those are the three things we must have in our prayer lives. Not all of those things will be there with the same intensity with every prayer. Sometimes we will feel discouraged, and thus won’t want to persist. Sometimes we already have such a strong idea of what God’s response ought to be, that we are far less able to be sincere seekers. And sometimes we may feel that we are only praying for something because we know it intellectually to be good, and not because we truly desire it. But as these three things waver and shift and grow in each of our many prayers, the one thing remains constant: God will always be there to answer. Jonah 3:1-10 (NRSVCE)
After having been swallowed by a fish for disobeying God, Jonah seems much more amenable this time around. Now when God tells him to go to Nineveh, he doesn’t hesitate. A massive city even by today’s standards, Nineveh was the largest city in the world in its prime—a testament to the power of man. And it fell to Jonah to bring the news to the city. Nineveh would fall, and it would fall at God’s hand.
We’re not told how the people responded, really, or how long it took. Only that, eventually, they believed Jonah. I imagine a man coming to a city proclaiming that “the end is nigh” garnered about as much reaction back in Jonah’s day as it does now. I imagine for a long time, Jonah was ignored, mocked, chastised, perhaps even assaulted. I imagine they tried to run him out of town just to shut him up, probably more than once. But I wonder, who was that first Ninevite who stopped? While everyone else was brushing on past Jonah, eyes probably glued to their iPhones for fear that if they make eye contact they will have to engage, one person stopped and listened. Someone else saw the first person stop, and so she stopped to listen too. And then another. And another. Until eventually, all the city was listening. Just moments before, it was clear to all that these were just the wild ravings of a madman, perhaps worthy of scorn but almost certainly not worthy of being taken seriously. But because just one person listened, because just one person stopped, what seemed like ravings was suddenly revealed to be truth. And because the truth was finally made known to the people, the city was converted, and it was saved. I wonder how many times God has sent a Jonah into my own life. How many times has he sent someone to try turn me from my wickedness? Someone to proclaim the truth, so that I might be saved? And how many times have I ignored that person? How many times have I met that person with scorn, with mockery, with disdain? The hero of this story is not Jonah, the one who proclaimed the truth to the people. The hero is the first Ninevite who listened. It is the first one who was willing to accept the truth which was being proclaimed. The truth that God gives to us acts like a seed. Once received, it grows, and it spreads. This Ninevite received the truth, and because of that others began to listen as well. God didn’t change his mind about destroying the city because Jonah proclaimed His message. God changed his mind because they listened. That is our task: to open our hearts and listen, so that we might receive the truth that is being proclaimed to us. Isaiah 55:10-11 (NRSVCE) For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it. A simple enough image. The rain and snow fall from above, wetting the earth and enabling it to bring forth plants, which in turn become food and further seed for planting. Rain brings life. It makes it possible and helps it to flourish. Rain never falls in vain—it is always either enriching the soil or feeding the plants or washing minerals away into the seas for the fish. It always succeeds. And eventually that rain returns to the skies, having accomplished what it was sent forth to do.
Similarly, God’s word has a purpose. God’s word brings life to us. You can take “God’s word” here to both mean “The Bible” or Jesus himself—it remains equally true. In Scripture, God communicates life-giving truths to us. In Scripture, we discover who God is, how God has been present and active all throughout history, the truth of our human condition, and how God has always had a plan for our salvation. And in Scripture we encounter the Christ, the Word that goes out to bring life to the world. St. John tells us that it was through the Word that all life came to be (John 1:3), and so too it is through the Word that our life shall be made anew. And that new life consists of one thing: returning us to our Father. The Word returns to the Father, but He does not return empty. He joins us to Himself, in the one Body of Christ, so that we all may return together. Without the Word sent out, we would be like dry earth. We would have no means to grow, no means to bear fruit, and everything around us would wither, die, and be scattered by the winds, for there would be no roots to provide stability. Without the word, we would be lost and hopeless. But because the word goes out from the mouth of the Father, we have the nourishment we need. Our roots make us strong, and we are capable of bearing good fruit. Because God’s word gives us life, we are thus able to nurture and bring forth life around us. The old song “This little light of mine, I’m going to let it shine” is about shining the light that God gives you into the darkness—about spreading the blessings you were given. That’s what this passage is talking about. God’s word “waters” us, like the rains, not only so that we might sprout and prosper ourselves, but so that we might provide seed to the sower, and bread to the eater. So that we might spread the life we have been given. The challenge, of course, is actually allowing ourselves to be “watered”. The power that sin has over us is such that instead of a dry earth, we might be more akin to water-repellent earth. God pours his blessings on us in massive overabundance, and yet we are too often able to go through life without ever getting wet. Indeed, our sin even causes us to try push Him away. But no matter how powerful of a hold sin has over us, it is never powerful enough to withstand the torrential onslaught of God’s blessings. Even in the darkest of moments, a shimmer of light will always make it through. All we need to do is receive it, and that light will begin to grow. |
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