Welcome to another Thursday UNFILTERED blog post, the only blog that appreciates “Déjà View” where watching the film “Groundhog Day” over and over and over again is a tradition.
Important Update: There are only 26 days left until my new book The Untold Story of the New Testament Church: Revised and Expanded releases.
Please mark your calendars for March 4. We are giving away 7 marvelous bonuses to all who order the book during – not before – launch week. So wait until March 4th to grab your copy.
This new book is far more than a “revised and expanded” edition; it’s a complete overhaul and total rewrite, five times the size of the old flawed edition. And it took me three years – virtually every day – to complete it.
We will also provide the best places to order the book including for those of you who live outside the USA.
Also: this is NOT a book about ecclesiology. So it doesn’t advocate any kind of church form, whether organic church or house church or institutional church or liturgical church.
Rather, it is a robust guide that unlocks the New Testament. Therefore, the target audience is any Christian who wants to understand what the New Testament really says. That would include pastors, teachers, Bible students, and everyone else who wants to deepen their understanding of Scripture.
The word “church” in the title is simply representative of all the Christians in the first century since they dominate the pages of Acts and the Epistles.
In one of the interviews I recently did (that I’ll be dropping on the Christ is All podcast soon), I discuss the differences between New Testament 1.0, New Testament 2.0, and New Testament 3.0.
My new book is a contribution to New Testament 3.0 – which represents a fresh way to approach the Bible.
I have an article planned for the near future that will explain this approach also.
Dreams in Dissolution and Time Lost
We serve a God who has the power to redeem and restore human foibles, mistakes, and worse. He also has the ability to restore lost time.
God is outside of space and matter, but He’s also within it. Therefore, there is nothing outside the reach of His power to restore.
All throughout Scripture, the Lord promises restoration.
What humans assume is irretrievable, God doesn’t.
Consider a vase that breaks in your dining room. The pieces are shattered throughout. If you try to retrieve each one and glue them back together, the vase will never be what it once was.
But in the hands of our infinite Lord, the situation is profoundly different.
The vase can be restored. Even more, it can be transformed.
When God reassembles the pieces, all the tiny cracks become channels for His light to break through. So the vase becomes more beautiful than before.
But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us.
~ 2 Corinthians 4:7
This is how divine restoration works. It doesn’t simply glue what’s broken back together. It produces something fresh, bearing God’s image brighter than before.
Take a trip through the New Testament and you will see this principle at work repeatedly. From Peter to Paul of Tarsus to Jesus Himself.
And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten, the cankerworm, and the caterpiller, and the palmerworm, my great army which I sent among you. And ye shall eat in plenty, and be satisfied, and praise the name of the Lord your God, that hath dealt wondrously with you: and my people shall never be ashamed. And ye shall know that I am in the midst of Israel, and that I am the Lord your God, and none else: and my people shall never be ashamed.
~ Joel 2:25
Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.
~ John 12:24
Restoration demands patience. It rarely happens in an instant.
Therefore, faith and hope are required. Faith in Jesus Christ and hope in God the Father.
This is why faith and hope are often coupled with patience in the New Testament:
Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer.
~ Romans 12:12
But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.
~ Romans 8:25
Within the surrender of believing and expecting, we can watch the broken vases of our lives transformed into something new and elegant.
Until next Thursday,
Your brother,
fv
Psalm 115:1
Stunning Wisdom in the Age of the Internet
Thank you Frank. It seems that restoration can be, at times, much slower than than the slowest slow motion. My comfort comes from the assurance that ” I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day.”