Father, purge the church

of the health/wealth/prosperity gospel...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTc_FoELt8s&feature=youtube_gdata_player

show Yourself glorious, & full of strength & joy, & sufficient, through our "deepest possible pain." thank you, awesome Father!

we need these reminders, right? that He is enough. that He will get us through. and not just in a barely making it kind of way. in a way that says, this sucks but i praise Him & run to Him because i have no where else to go & because He's absolutely worthy & capable. a friend recently pointed me to peter's words (in 2nd peter 1) about teaching the scriptures, his defense of repeating to his audience what they already knew about prophecies of Christ revealed, etc etc.

essentially, he wrote that they needed to be told often, even though they already knew, believed & walked in the truth. and he saw the repeated telling as his purpose until his time was done: "so i will always remind you of these things, even though you know them and are firmly established in the truth you now have. i think it is right to refresh your memory as long as i live in the tent of this body."

i thought you might also benefit by hearing the above lines as paraphrased by eugene peterson: "because the stakes are so high, even though you're up-to-date on all this truth and practice it inside and out, i'm not going to let up for a minute in calling your attention to it. this is the post to which i've been assigned—keeping you alert with frequent reminders—and i'm sticking to it as long as i live. i know that i'm to die soon; the Master has made that quite clear to me. and so i am especially eager that you have all this down in black and white so that after i die, you'll have it for ready reference."

so there it is. a couple things i'm feeling especially passionate about lately- an American church purged of the crap that is the prosperity gospel. and the church being the church by reminding each other of His grace & power to shape our character & make us whole.