Lessons from Judas

Have you ever had one of those days when you feel like God is speaking to you and revealing things to you all day long? Well, I had one of those on Sunday, and it wasn't just me. My husband did too. He was out of town so he texted me and asked me to call him as soon as I could. He shared his revelations and then the rest of the day, I had one after another.

It started when I watched The Last Supper Superbook movie. I was afraid I'd barely have time to get in the word with three kids, three goats and 20 chickens needing my attention so I just asked God to show me something in the Superbook movie I put on for the kids while I was feeding my newborn. And, as promised, God showed up. He always shows up when He's invited.

He started by showing me that He knew that Judas would be a thief. I had just never given it too much thought, but Jesus, when he put Judas in the position of keeper of the purse, knew that Judas would steal it and be dishonest... and He still gave him that responsibility! Why? Well, I don't presume to know Jesus' mind on this one, but here are the reasons I was able to come up with.

1. Money doesn't matter to Him. God is our provider and while money can sometimes be used to do the job of purchasing food, shelter and giving to the poor, ultimately, to God, money is really not important. Therefore, it ought not be very important to us either. We should never live in fear of being robbed or having things or money stolen from us. God will provide. While we shouldn't be irresponsible with money and our things because God has made us stewards of these things, we also should not live in fear, and in fear push people away because we're afraid they might steal from us. God can protect us and provide for us. We just need to trust Him.
2. He wanted to give Judas a chance. Granted Jesus knew the outcome all along, but even when He knows we'll be dishonest and unfaithful, He will still give us a chance. It's always us walking away from His seeking us out, from the countless chances He gives us. He always gives us chances - and lots of them!
3. This point was harder for me to get at, but having been raised in the church, I just knew I could come up with a third point to this "sermon." Jesus could have caught him earlier on. He could have called attention to Judas' crime earlier, although certainly it would have changed the most important story in history in one way or another, but he could have removed this responsibility from him, even discreetly. Yet, he didn't. Instead, he allowed sin to run its course and God to remove him from the disciples in another way. What we can learned from this is that sometimes we should intervene and take matters into our own hands to stop sin, and other times, we ought to let God take over and handle it in the way He sees fit.

The Wedding Anniversary

Our Wedding Day, September 19, 2009

Every year my husband and I forget our anniversary. I am not a big fan of showing love on scheduled days, and prefer random acts of love and generosity throughout the year to these scheduled days. If my husband only thinks to get me a card and say I love you because it's an anniversary, we have a problem, ya know?

(Oooh, as I write this, there's another lesson I can hear. Can you also?)

So, the other day I was thinking of why we always forget our anniversary. We married on September 19, 2009, so easily I could list back-to-school craziness as one such reason. Also, my husband inevitably goes off to Man Camp that time of year, and surely, there are a thousand other less obvious reasons.

Now that we celebrate the Feasts, I am aware of three big feasts in the fall, starting in September, so I decided to consider whether these days interfere with me remembering our anniversary or if they possibly could help me remember. I know Feast of Trumpets or Rosh Hashanah comes first in September, followed by Yom Kippur and Feast of Tabernacles, I decided to start with Trumpets and looked up the date it came the year we married.

I typed in "Feast of Trumpets 2009" in my iPhone and was completely stunned when I saw our anniversary date appear. We married on Feast of Trumpets that year. Now at quick glance, who cares!? Except that when I first became interested in the feasts I learned that Feast of Trumpets is absolutely filled with wedding symbolism! In light of that, how exciting that we celebrated our wedding on Feast of Trumpets! If only, we'd had a trumpet at our ceremony! I digress.


First, I should say that I think it is very very likely that the rapture will occur on the Feast of Trumpets or Rosh Hashanah. For one thing, a "nickname" for this feast is "No Man Knows the Day or the Hour." For another thing, it is known as Coronation Day, when the King would be crowned. Also, Jesus often referred to His church as His bride and uses traditional Jewish language when he says "No man knows the day or the hour, Only the Father in Heaven." In Jewish tradition, only the Father of the groom would know when the wedding would occur because he'd be preparing the bridal chamber, and only he knew when it would be finished. "He goes and prepares a place for us..." Just as the groom will come to take his bride, Jesus will come for His bride, "like a thief in the night." Yes, there are many verses that could lead us to believe that this Feast will be the time of the rapture. It helps that the spring feasts were all fulfilled with their prophetic significance on the exact day of the feast. Jesus the Lamb was slain for us on Passover; we were sealed and had the law written on our hearts on Pentecost, and so forth.

But back to the wedding. Jewish weddings are beautiful. I attended one as a teenager, back when I didn't really even much care about any of this and certainly did not pay attention to the significance of things, but I recall the Chuppah and it was beautiful. So, when I married, I wanted one too. I asked my (then) fiance to build me one of birch trees, drape it with sheer fabric and decorate it with roses and sunflowers. It was beautiful! We stood under this Chuppah and said our vows, joined our lives together in covenant love.

Jesus came and already wrote the Ketubah, the marriage contract, on our hearts and in His own blood. We are betrothed to Him. Now, we await His return for His bride, the church. He will come as a thief in the night, when the Father tells Him all the preparations are complete. He will take us to the Chuppah in the sky, give us robes of white and we'll be His.

I am so honored that we accidentally married on the Feast of Trumpets and that even without knowing it we included some components of the Feast for our guests. Our anniversary is September 19th on the Julian calendar, but even if we forget September 19th every year as it comes around, I know we can celebrate our anniversary on Feast of Trumpets, a day of blowing trumpets in remembrance of something that is yet to come... our wedding day with Jesus.

Passover 2013

Ah the irony of this title. To talk about Passover with a Julian Calendar year following it seems so ironic in some ways. Yet, even this irony cannot surpass the irony most would find with our little family Passover celebration this year.

For one thing, I had just given birth to my son, Micah, and was told by my midwives that I was to rest for two weeks and not do anything or go anywhere. Of course, I couldn't let Passover pass by without some celebration of it, no matter how meager.

Secondly, we knew my husband's children were going to their mother's house where they'd be drowned in Easter eggs and candy for a week, so we really wanted to celebrate Passover before they left. This meant we had to pull it all together a day before Passover was to actually begin.We decided that celebrating it in Spirit was more important than getting the day right.

Thirdly, the company we had ordered our baby chicks from called us that morning to ask us to pick them up. You see when you order baby chicks for a certain week, you don't really know what day they'll show up, but the call came and so my husband loaded up the kids and off they went for the 2 hour drive.

On the way, I had asked my husband to pick up some lamb, Matzohs and parsley - the three items we didn't have. Only he returned with dried parsley in a shaker bottle, because he didn't know what I needed it for.

In addition, we had just begun attending a new church about two weeks earlier. A family from the church, who my husband had previously known, had been very friendly to us, so we decided that morning to invite them for dinner. They came with their four children who are still at home, joining our family which consisted of my husband, my mother and me and our five children ages 4 days to 14 years.

Just before dinner, I discovered that the parsley was dried and not fresh, that the lamb was chops and that we didn't have enough chairs. I swapped some baby spinach for the parsley, pulled a bench up for some of the kids to share, stuck the chicks in a box in the basement, did an internet search for cooking lamb chops, found our old Hagaddah on the computer, strapped the baby onto my chest with a wrap and sat down with my computer for my husband and I to lead Passover. There were missing words in the computer document and we didn't have any printed out. It was thrown together, it was rushed in a way that it shouldn't have been, but all in all, we tried. It was a special meal with special new friends, our children heard the same lesson for the second Passover in a row and hopefully some of it is making its way down deep into their hearts.

It was not at all how I wanted it to be, but it was Passover. God was there with us. And, well, he'll accept as an offering even the most disastrous, meager attempts at honoring his Word.

Incomplete Church

I recently read The Incomplete Church by Sid Roth. When I began reading this book, I made it about 30 pages before I had to put it away. To the bookshelf it went, and then to the moving boxes, only to be rediscovered about 10 months later. Having forgotten why I put it away, I picked it up again.

Sid Roth himself can be hard to take. His focus on the supernatural can wear on you. I am a believer in the supernatural myself, but I also am cautious to not demand signs and wonders from God. Throughout the Bible, God cautions about looking for, asking for, demanding, or refusing to believe without a sign. I believe He calls them a "wicked and adulterous generation" (Mt. 12:39, Mt. 16:4).

That said, after 10 months, I grabbed this book and started reading again and found it to be filled with scripturally sound beliefs. That's not to say I agree with everything wholeheartedly, but I do find value in the book, and truths that I had not earlier considered have now deeply embedded themselves in my heart.

However, one area I struggle with personally is the way he interprets the concept of "to the Jew first." While I agree that we must evangelize the Jewish people, I also hesitate to devalue God's works of the past. Roth claims revival can only come when we have first evangelized the Jew successfully. Yet, what does that mean for the revivals of the past? Were they not genuine?

We must love the Jewish people. We must be grafted into the vine alongside them. We cannot escape this fact. We must evangelize them, loving them in this way. We must pray for them to return as the once prodigal son did, and we must be cautious to avoid any false doctrines, like Replacement Theology.

Overall, The Incomplete Church is a good work. I feel it has some flaws, but I also feel it is worth reading with caution, testing everything against the Word of God.

http://www.amazon.com/Incomplete-Church-Unifying-Gods-Children/dp/0768424372/ref=la_B000APK9OW_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1366737803&sr=1-4