Giving and Receiving Thanks and Moving Forward – Purity 1206

Giving and Receiving Thanks and Moving Forward –
Purity 1206

Purity 1206 11/24/2023 Purity 1206 Podcast

Purity 1206 on YouTube:

Good morning,

Today’s photo of the sun setting on the horizon,
obscured by a stand of trees alongside the asphalt pathway of Waite Rd comes to
us from your truly as I captured this scene during an extended stroll near my
countryside home in Easton NY.    I love
how the trees obstruct the sun but also seem to create a pathway of their own,
inviting us to take a different but more direct path to the sun in the
distance.

I can imagine this picture challenging us. “You can
take the roadway which has been well-traveled and clear, but it may not lead to
where you want to go. Or you can go between the trees where the direction is
sure, and the path is clear for a time, but  seems to be blocked the closer you get to your
goal, assuming you are pursuing the brilliance of the sun. Or you can just
stand here to enjoy it from a distance, but be warned, it will only be here a
short time before it fades away and its light and its heat is gone, possibly
leaving you cold, lost, and in the dark.”  

It reminds me of the dilemma posed by the Clash…”Should
I stay or should I go now… If I go there will be trouble,  And if I stay it will be double.” 

Anyway, It’s Friday – Black Friday – and thanks to
my union, I am in the midst of an extended holiday weekend and whether or not
your Thanksgiving celebration yesterday was joyous or not, I pray that you were
able to accomplish what really mattered about yesterday’s holiday – that you
were able to give (and possibly receive) thanks.  

I for one was very thankful for my family. I was
thankful for their presence in my life in general and was especially thankful
for:

My brother and sister-in-law, Donald and Megan
Seguin, for hosting Thanksgiving dinner.

My wife, TammyLyn, for her love and her service in
preparing a bunch of food for everyone to enjoy.

And my mother, Kathy, and brother Mike, who provided
and delivered a Thanksgiving meal to my twenty-something children, Haley and
Brennan, who were quarantined at my place down by the River, having tested
positive for Covid the evening before Thanksgiving. 

Although I like to consider myself a pretty
independent person, I have to acknowledge that having the love and support of your
family sure makes life a lot better and I have been blessed by my family’s love
all my life. 

One of the lies that Satan loves to tell us is that “Nobody
cares” or “You are all alone” but if we rejected that lie and decided to be
vulnerable and asked our family, friends, or even strangers in support organizations
for help, we would discover that what the enemy says, that would keep us
depressed and cause us to isolate from others, is a complete and utter
lie.  We are not alone. People do care.
But there is a condition to meet to know this, we have to let go of our pride and
seek the company and help of others, knowing that we may be rejected. 

And we may be, let’s be real. We may have burned
bridges we can go back over. We may have exhausted the goodwill of everyone we
know. And so we may find out that “I am all alone” or “No one will help me” not
only feels true but we can back it up with evidence!

But God….

Hopefully we haven’t burned all our bridges in life,
but even if you have, even if you have destroyed or have been destroyed in
every relationship of your life, there is One person who will never leave you
or forsake you – and that’s God.

Of course the Lord has one condition to be fully
receive His unconditional love – faith in Jesus Christ.  While God unconditionally loves all his
created beings, entrance into His kingdom family comes through faith in Jesus Christ
alone. He didn’t send Jesus to live a sinless life and die on a cross for
nothing. He sent Christ to save us.  And
being in a covenant relationship with God is only a matter of putting our faith
in Jesus.   When we make Jesus our Lord
and Savior, the Holy Spirit comes to dwell within us. Experiencing the joy and
power of our relationship with God comes from living in harmony with Him by
living according to God’s word and by abiding in His presence.

But that love and power that we receive from the
Lord isn’t supposed to be just experienced by us. Although the Lord’s love and
strength can empower us to take a lonely road out of the darkness, it isn’t
necessarily supposed to be used for individual use.  We are supposed to experience and share the
love, power, joy, and peace of God with others.  

I can encourage you that you are not alone when you have
the Lord in your life because I have had some lonely times in some dark periods
of my life where, even though I had family and friends who loved and supported
me, I was basically “on my own”.

Personal problems of addiction and broken
relationships are highly personal problems because they intimately involve you!
You either caused or played your part in the mess you are in and while you can
receive help from others to work out some of the kinks, a lot of the work of
transformation and change has to be done by Y-O-U.  

I can’t believe for you. I can’t stop believing lies
that drive patterned behaviors for you. I can’t repent for you. I can’t diet
for you. I can’t exercise for you.  I can’t
read the Bible for you. I can’t pray for you. I can’t commit to living a surrendered
life for God for you.  But if you choose
to do those things for yourself, with God, consistently, continually, you will
see the power of God change your life.

And if you experience the freedom that Christ has
for you, even though you did a whole lot of this work and walking and talking
with God, solo, you won’t stay that way. 
The joy of experiencing your salvation and freedom in Christ compels you
to share it. It compels you to worship the Lord in community – you join a
church. It compels you to tell others about the hope you have in Jesus. It
compels you to fellowship and serve alongside other Christians.   So as you walk on this path of Christian
Discipleship, you will be joined by a whole cast of characters from Gods’
kingdom to join you as you seek to share the love of God with the world. You
will encourage and counsel others in the ways of God and will rejoice when you
see the Lord move in their lives.

And if all this wasn’t enough – triumph, victory,
freedom, righteousness, peace, and joy – if that wasn’t enough you get blessed
when people thank you for being the person God created you to be. People thank
you for the encouragement you give. They thank you for giving what the Lord gave
you.

Yesterday, on the day to give thanks, I received several
Thanksgiving greetings and specific thanks for my help that only happened
because of what the Lord did in my life and continues to do in my life.  I received thanks from old comrades of the
faith that I’ve known for years, and I received thanks from people I didn’t even
know a year ago and was humbled because it wasn’t anything I necessarily did
that caused them to thank them, more than it was who God made me to be, that
lead to our relationship and their gratitude. 
And of course, thanked them for being faithful to follow the Lord and for
them letting me be a part of their journey through life.  

But today’s a new day, we made our thanks and if we
were lucky we received some but now we start again.  Just like today’s picture seems to invite us
to take a different path, I encourage you to consider Thanksgiving Day to be a crossroads
to a new beginning or as a way to make the most of the holiday season and the
rest of 2023.

Let’s endeavor to love the people that we were thankful
for yesterday and move forward to resolve issues that need to be taken care of
and to purposely align ourselves with God’s will for our lives.  We’ve had our feast yesterday so let’s remember
it fondly and move forward with the confidence that comes from knowing that we
are loved and that we have decided to follow the One who is love and that if we
just keep walking and talking with Him, and share His love along the way, there
will be much more to be thankful for further down the road.  

——————————————————————————————–

Today’s
Bible verse comes to us from “The Quick Scripture Reference for Counseling” By
John G. Kruis.

(
While Bible verses on various topics of Counseling can be found with a quick Google
search, we encourage you to purchase this resource to support the late author’s
work. (https://www.amazon.com/Quick-Scripture-Reference-Counseling-Kruis-ebook/dp/B00CIUJZT2?ref_=ast_author_dp )

This
morning’s meditation verses come from the section on Church, Communion of the
Saints.

Hebrews 10:25 (NLT2)
²⁵  And let us not neglect our
meeting together, as some people do, but encourage one another, especially now
that the day of his return is drawing near.

Today’s
verse falls under the ninth point of our counseling reference guide resource’s
section on Church,
Communion of the Saints.

 9. Attend worship services faithfully.

Today’s verse is the
quintessential “go to church” verse that tells us to join together with others
in the body of Christ for worship to encourage one another.  

We are not supposed to
walk out our Christian faith alone. So if you are not in a church, find a
church that believes in the Bible and where you can fellowship and serve with
other Christians to encourage one another as you seek to share and show the
love of God with others.  

——————————————————————–

As always, I invite all to go to mt4christ.org where I
always share insights from prominent Christian theologians and counselors to
assist my brothers and sisters in Christ with their walk.

Today we are sharing from “God
is in the Manger- Reflections on Advent and Christmas” – By Dietrich
Bonhoeffer.

As
always, I share this information for educational purposes and encourage you all
to purchase Bonhoeffer’s books for your own private study and to support his
work.  This resource is available online for less than $10 at many
sites.

God
is in the Manger – Dietrich Bonhoeffer

ADVENT
WEEK ONE –  WAITING

DAY
TWO

Waiting Is
an Art

Celebrating Advent means being able to wait. Waiting
is an art that our impatient age has forgotten. It wants to break open the ripe
fruit when it has hardly finished planting the shoot. But all too often the
greedy eyes are only deceived; the fruit that seemed so precious is still green
on the inside, and disrespectful hands ungratefully toss aside what has so
disappointed them. Whoever does not know the austere blessedness of
waiting—that is, of hopefully doing without—will never experience the full
blessing of fulfillment.

Those who do not know how it feels to struggle anxiously with the
deepest questions of life, of their life, and to patiently look forward with
anticipation until the truth is revealed, cannot even dream of the splendor of
the moment in which clarity is illuminated for them. And for those who do not
want to win the friendship and love of another person—who do not expectantly
open up their soul to the soul of the other person, until friendship and love
come, until they make their entrance—for such people the deepest blessing of the
one life of two intertwined souls will remain forever hidden.

For the greatest, most profound, tenderest things in the world, we
must wait. It happens not here in a storm but according to the divine laws of
sprouting, growing, and becoming.

Be brave for my sake, dearest Maria, even if this
letter is your only token of my love this Christmas-tide. We shall both
experience a few dark hours—why should we disguise that from each other? We
shall ponder the incomprehensibility of our lot and be assailed by the question
of why, over and above the darkness already enshrouding humanity, we should be
subjected to the bitter anguish of a separation whose purpose we fail to
understand.… And then, just when everything is bearing down on us to such an extent
that we can scarcely withstand it, the Christmas message comes to tell us that
all our ideas are wrong, and that what we take to be evil and dark is really
good and light because it comes from God. Our eyes are at fault, that is all.
God is in the manger, wealth in poverty, light in darkness, succor in
abandonment. No evil can befall us; whatever men may do to us, they cannot but
serve the God who is secretly revealed as love and rules the world and our
lives.

Letter to fiancée Maria von Wedemeyer

from prison, December 13, 1943

A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse,

and a branch shall grow out of his roots.

The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him,

the spirit of wisdom and understanding,

the spirit of counsel and might,

the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.

His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord.

He shall not judge by what his eyes see,

or decide by what his ears hear;

but with righteousness he shall judge the poor.

Isaiah 11:1–4a^[1]

—————————more
tomorrow————————

Join our “Victory over the Darkness”, “The Bondage
Breaker”, “Freedom in Christ” series of Discipleship Classes via the
mt4christ247 podcast!

at https://mt4christ247.podbean.com, You can also find it on Apple podcasts

(https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-mt4christ247s-podcast/id1551615154). The mt4christ247 podcast is also available
on Google Podcasts, Amazon Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartradio, and
Audible.com. 

These teachings are also available on the
MT4Christ247 YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@MT4Christ247

Email me at mt4christ247@gmail.com to receive the class materials, share your progress, and
to be encouraged.

My wife, TammyLyn, also offers Christian
encouragement via her Ask Seek Knock blog (https://tammylynask.blogspot.com/ ),  her
Facebook Group: Ask, Seek, Knock (https://www.facebook.com/groups/529047851449098 ) and her podcast Ask, Seek, and Knock on
Podbean (https://feed.podbean.com/tammalyn78/feed.xml)   

“The views, opinions, and commentary of this
publication are those of the author, M.T. Clark, only, and do not purport to
reflect the opinions or views of any of the photographers, artists, ministries,
or other authors of the other works that may be included in this publication,
and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any entities the
author may represent.”

Encouragement
for the Path of Christian Discipleship