Elliott's Muses

Paul opens his book to the Ephesians with a remarkable set of words...and get this, it’s all one sentence in the Greek.  Ephesians 1:3-8 3  Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, 4  even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love 5  he predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, 6  to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved. 7  In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace, 8  which he lavished upon us, in all wisdom and insight Blessed...that’s the word he uses to describe what Christ has done for us.   Blessed...it has nothing to do with good health, material things, money, great job, even great k...

Four years ago I sat in a bus as it wound it's way around the river that separates France from Germany.  I left France and entered into the land of my ancestors.  My Great-Grandfather had brought his family from Germany in the late 1860's to eventually settle in Wisconsin.  I looked around, took in the landscape, looked at the farms, and most of all looked at the people.  Everything looked familiar. I wasn't there on an ancestry trip.  I was visiting the lands of the Reformation - and in this case, the land of Martin Luther.  The name places were familiar in my mind... Eisleben, Eisenach, Erfurt, Worms, Wittenberg, Leipzig, Heidelberg, Coburg and more. This land of beer, sauerkraut, cuckoo clocks, the Rhine river, castles, also is the land of Bach, Mendelsshon, Beethoven and Wagner - all uniquely German, became the birth place of a fierce defender of the Gospel in Martin Luther. Raised in a normal German family, he originally was studying to be a lawye...

I thought originally of entitling this "Monday MOURNING"...a play on words, yes, and sometimes an apt description of crawling out of bed, knowing that the week ahead seems large and long, and while the weekend was great, it's over and now its back to the grind. That word "Grind" is the way in which we often look at work...It's gotta be done...I've done it 100's, 1000's of times, but it has to be done again.  The Grind is that feeling that sometimes the Bible conveys as "weight"...the burden...the work...the mess.  It's true, life is sometimes a grind. For the Christian though other things enter in.  For example, faithfulness and grace.  Faithfulness is a feature of people of faith.  We have faith in God - it is a gift of God to us, Paul reminds us in Ephesians 2. Faithfulness is a character trait of God.  We are reminded over and over again that when we wake up, God's grace and faithfulness are right there to meet us. 1 ...

I hear the question in my head, from people of faith, from doubters and skeptics... "What is God doing?  Nothing more occupies that question than when tragedy strikes...natural disasters such as Hurricane Harvey in Houston...or, evil actions as when a terrorist commandeers a truck and drives it through a crowd of people...evil such as was the Holocaust, or the terror of Stalin...or, when someone near and dear to us suddenly becomes the victim of cancer, or some other life-changing disease, and eventually it takes their life - for us it often seems way before it should have. "What is God doing?" I could launch into theological reflection - the nature of God's sovereignty, His wisdom, His ways and thoughts not being our ways and thoughts, etc... and it would be all true.  It is not that we don't need theology; in fact, we need it more than ever in times of questions and doubt. I could tell you about some wonderful books that have been written on this subject. ...