Stevemidkiff's Blog

Before I formed you in the womb I knew you

before you came forth out of the womb

I set you apart

I ordained you a prophet to the nations.

But he complained, Lord GOD! Look, I can’t speak: for I am a child.

But the LORD said to me, Say not, I am a child:

for you will go to all that I will send you to

and whatever I command you, you will speak.

Don’t be afraid of their faces: for I am with you to deliver you

Then the LORD reached out his hand & touched my mouth.

And the LORD said to me, Behold, I have put my words in your mouth.

I have set you over the nations

I have set you over the kingdoms,

I have set you over the politicians

to root out,

to pull down,

to destroy,

to throw down,

to build,

to plant.

Jeremiah 1:5-19

God calls us in all our assumed deficiencies

Jeremiah means “exalted of the Lord” or “established by the Lord.”

God is omniscience (all knowing), before we were ever conceived.

He knew us because He had determined our conception.

Every conception is God’s amazing doing

This is the greatness of our all powerful God

We’re compensated for each personal weakness by Gods enabling grace

Jeremiah complained he had an articulation problem.

“I cannot speak”

He knew the message would be a difficult one,

and since he didn’t want to speak it so claimed an inability to speak.

Moses & Jonah didn’t want their message from God.

They came up with the same excuse

Jeremiah complained he had an age problem.

“I am a child”

He bemoaned his Immaturity or inexperience

These are perceived inadequacies

These are feelings of our lack of personal qualities

Our 2 cats Fiona & Maisie had their 1st birthday yesterday

They are terrified of going outdoors

But they love to stare through the window & fantasize

If I take them outside they can’t stand up to anything

They run back inside in terror

God says whatever I command you say

Our message is not our ideas

It’s what God wants us to say

Failure to speak is rebellion & defiance against God

That never goes well but results in bondage to monstrous consequences

Are our Churches cowering in fear of consequences from our enemies

Or do we respect & have awe in our God

So we hear:

If you don’t wear a mask

If you breath on someone

We’ll kill each other

The shrieking weirdos are calling us murderers if we don’t do as we’re told.

What if God wants us to call Inslee?

What if God wants us to call Bill Gates?

What if God wants us to declare this all as a manufactured crisis?

What if God wants us to call this a planned-demic not a pandemic?

What if this whole scheme is youth-in-Asia (euthanasia)?

What if we’re acting like a bunch of babies?

What if we’re cowards in hiding with our location services turned off of our phones?

What if we’re called to say “let my people go”?

When God calls us He enables us in all our assumed deficiencies!!!

When God calls us in all our assumed deficiencies

We’re compensated for each personal weakness by Gods enabling grace!!!

Our 2 cats Fiona & Maisie has their 1st birthday yesterday

They are terrified of going outdoors

But they love to stare through the window & fantasize

If I take them outside they can’t stand up to anything

They run back inside in terror

God says whatever I command you say

Our message is not our ideas

It’s what God wants us to say

Failure to speak is degrading ourselves

Are our Churches cowering in fear of consequences?

What if we’re acting like a bunch of babies?

What does God want us to

to root out,

to pull down,

to destroy,

to throw down,

to build,

to plant.

Be not afraid of their faces … be not dismayed at their faces”

Faces say a lot, often they speak much louder than words.

They can approve & disapprove.

We find many faces we have to ignored

We want approving faces.

We have to concentrate not on face but on delivering God’s message

“Be not dismayed at their faces, lest I confound you before them”

“dismayed” is the same word translated “confound”

It involves shame

If let faces upset us, we’ll be shamed by God.

We have to concentrate on God’s face

His face gives courage, the other faces destroy us in destructive cowardliness.

Don’t toady up to our enemies proclaiming a puny message they want to hear.

To root out & to pull down, to destroy to throw down

describe symbolically a condemning message

These four verbs simply emphasize a work of criticism & condemnation.

Preaching against oppressive nonsense is echoing out their negatives

most people want to cling to their bondage to sins tenaciously.

“To build, and to plant”

describe symbolically a positive constructive communication

We only want to be constructive not ever condemning or adverse

The negatives come before the positives

Christ spoke of a heart cleaned of evil spirits
but not filled with any other spirits
so when the evil spirit returned,
the heart became worse then previous.

We tear down to build up, we prepare the field to plant,

The negative is necessary & vital but without the positive,
there is a lack of purpose. We separate from evil that we
might give ourselves to the good.

Separation is not a work in itself,
it is simply to make room for better association.

We need both the positive and the negative.

We need to scrub the nasty spirits out
but then we have to be immediately filled & immersed

Filled with God’s Spirit by staying immersed in His Word

As peculiar as it appears, I went over today, as I’m loath to do to check on our real estate.

We owned 18 grave plots here although after we
filled 2 more we are down to 16.

I’ll actually have to die to really live it up here.

I broke up the moss over growth on about 10 headstone of precious dear ones whose bodies are at rest here

I also cleaned moss out of the graven etching that communicate their names out of a desire to respect
their memory

I’m always reminded of the phrase in the Psalms

“I am like a dead man, out of mind”

We can’t allow our loved ones to drift out of our
memories as we celebrate Memorial Day weekend

It was fun to find this website of my Grandfather who was a lightweight pro boxer. He boxed initially at 140 lbs.
then later boxed at welter weight 165 lbs

I have a bunch of old newspaper clips of his 109 bouts.

It’s fun to read the press releases of the fights & how they went down.

https://boxrec.com/en/proboxer/157483

He told me he trained & made extra money by cutting firewood & selling it to neighbors.

He said used a crosscut saw to build his arm strength up

In the 1930s he had a little mini farm on the sammamish slough. He trapped muskrat & mink for furs to sell & help haul garbage regularly for Bothell residence to feed his wife & 7 kids
He had one son (my dad) and 6 daughters.

His health was poor.

He had two cauliflower ears,
his nose had been busted 13 times &
he was punch drunk.

When I remember the times I visited with him it felt like his eyes had no foundation and rolled around in there sockets.

Later in life my dad bought him a newspaper stand on 3rd & pike.
It was kind of a smaller version of
The news stand at the farmers market in Seattle. I have some Seattle post intelligencer articles with a pic of him
at his wood shack newsstand.

He was will liked & died young at 63
His gravestone has a set of boxing gloves etched into the stone.

I am just a poor boy
though my story’s seldom told

I have squandered my resistance
for a pocketful of mumbles,

Such are promises, all lies & jest,

Still a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest, hmmm

When I left my home & my family,
I’s no more than a boy

In the company of strangers
In the quiet of the railway station, runnin’ scared, laying low,

Seeking out the poorer quarters,
where the ragged people go,

Looking for the places only
they would know.
Li la li

Asking only workman’s wages,
I come lookin’ for a job,

But I get no offers,
Just a come-on from
the whores on 7th Avenue.

I do declare, there were times
when I was so lonesome
I took some comfort there.
La la la
Li la li

And I’m laying out my winter clothes and wishing I was gone,
Goin’ home

Where the New York City
winters aren’t bleedin’ me,
leadin’ me, Goin’ home.

In the clearing stands a boxer,
and a fighter by his trade

And he carries the reminders
of every glove that laid him
down or cut him

‘Til he cried out in his anger & his shame

I am leaving,
I am leaving,

but the fighter still remains.
Li la li

Babies are God’s blessing.

God’s first words to His newly created man & woman were a blessing but also a command,

“Be fruitful and multiply” Genesis 1:28

Children are a reward from God.

“Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward”

Psalm 127:3

The blessings God promised His chosen people in the Old Testament
when they entered the land always included the fruit of the womb: babies

Deuteronomy 7:12-14

Babies are part of God’s good design.

The only thing that was not good at creation was man being alone

Genesis 2:18

We were designed for community, fellowship & family.
Sex and babies were part of the created order & the procreative process
was in place before sin entered the world.

Having babies is part of the normal order of creation. Why?

God wants the earth to be full of people.

Isaiah 45:18 says, “For thus says the Lord, who created the heavens

God, who formed the earth & made it (he established it; he did not create it empty,
(He formed it to be inhabited!):

Bill Gates is dead wrong about abortion

I am the Lord, and there is no other.’

And how will all these babies come to know God and worship Him?

Married couples are called to make babies — disciples of Jesus Christ.

John Piper wrote, with even more punch,

All believers are called to make disciples (Matthew 28:19), that is, spiritual children.

Believers, who are married have the added calling — God enables them —
to make physical offspring

Malachi 2:15

Couples are called to be fruitful & faithful to raise children in the fear & instruction of the Lord

Ephesians 6:4

to the praise of His great glory.

And where will that glory be fully realized?

Heaven will be full of worshipers.

Only people are made in God’s image. Every baby born is an eternal being made in God’s image,
with the potential to praise Jesus.

We know that one day the earth will be filled with the
knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea

Isaiah 11:9

Babies born & given hope through Christ are those people who will one day enter heaven.
Where there will be “a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation,
from all tribes & peoples & languages, standing before the throne & before the Lamb,
clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands & crying out with a loud voice,

Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!’”

Revelation 7:9-10

The Bible is full of glorious motivation for having babies

God shapes us to conform with His will, to resist the pressure around us to conform
to the pattern of the world.

He’ll change us in the process, making us more like Him.

Through His good gift of children: as babies are Jesus way of pointing us to our Father.

Adapted from Candice Watters

Kindness has converted more sinners than zeal, eloquence, or learning.

Frederick W. Faber

My soul followeth hard after thee: thy right hand upholdeth me.

Psa. 63:8

“No man can come to me,” said our Lord,

except the Father which has sent me draw him,”

and it is by this very drawing that God takes from us

every vestige of credit for the act of coming.

The impulse to pursue God originates with God,

but the outworking of that impulse is our following hard after Him;

and all the time we are pursuing Him we are already in His hand:

“Thy right hand upholdeth me.”

The LORD hears us in the day of trouble;

the name of the God of Jacob defends us;

Psalms 20:1

God answers us when we crash & fall all apart,

The name “God-of-Jacob” will rescue us from,

through or by our tragedy.

The title, God of Jacob, conjures up an image of

God getting down on His knees as an affectionate Father, to wrestle with us.

But in these playful, close expressions,

He allows nothing in that will hurt us.

The cry of man’s anguish went up to God,

Lord, take away pain:

The shadow that darkens the world You have made,

The close, choking chain

That strangles the heart, the burden that weighs

On the wings that would soar,

Lord, take away pain from the world You have made,

That it love You the more."

Then answered the Lord to the cry of His world "p

Shall I take away pain,

And with it the power of the soul to endure,

Made strong by the strain?

Shall I take away pity, that knits heart to heart

Will you lose all your heroes that lift from the fireWisdom toward the sky?

And sacrifice high?

Shall I take away love that redeems with a price

And smiles at the loss?

Can you spare from your lives that would climb unto Me

The Christ on His cross?"

Shall I not drink the cup the Father has given me? John 18:11

“God is a thousand times more meticulous with us than a perfectionist artist is with his paintings.

Using many brush strokes of sorrow & circumstances of various colors,

He paints us into the highest & best image He visualizes,

if we will only receive His bitter gifts of myrrh in the right spirit.

If our cup of sorrows is taken away & the lessons in it are suppressed or go unheeded,

we do more damage to our soul than could ever be repaired.

No human heart can imagine the incomparable love God expresses in His gift of myrrh.

However, this great gift that our soul should receive is allowed to pass by us because of

our sleepy indifference & ultimately nothing comes of it.

In our barrenness we come & complain, saying,

“O LORD, I feel so dry & there is so much darkness within me!”

The solution is to open our heart to the pain & suffering & it will accomplish its good.”

Tauler

I was glad when they said to me, “Let us go to the house of the Lord.”

Beloved, while I was making every effort to write you about our common salvation,
I felt the necessity to write to you appealing that you contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all handed down to the saints.

Jude 3

The Old Story.

Come and hear the grand old story,
Story of the ages past;
All earth’s annals far surpassing,
Story that shall ever last.
Noblest, truest,
Oldest, newest,
Fairest, rarest,
Saddest, gladdest,
That this earth has ever known.

Christ, the Father’s Son eternal,
Once was born, a Son of man;
He, who never knew beginning,
Here on earth a life began.

Here in David’s lowly city,
Tenant of the manger-bed,
Child of everlasting ages,
Mary’s infant, lays his head.

There he lies, in mighty weakness,
David’s Lord and David’s Son;
Creature and Creator meeting,
Heaven and earth conjoined in one.

Here at Nazareth he dwelleth,
’Mid the sin of sinful men;
Sorrowful, forlorn, and hated,
And yet hating none again.

Here in Galilee he wanders,
Through its teeming cities moves,
Climbs its mountains, walks its waters,
Blesses, comforts, saves, and loves.

Words of truth and deeds of kindness,
Miracles of grace and might,
Scatter fragrance all around him,
Shine with heaven’s most glorious light.

In Gethsemane behold him
In the agony of prayer;
Kneeling, pleading, groaning, bleeding,
Soul and body prostrate there.

All alone lie wrestles yonder,
Close beside him stands the cup,
Bitterest cup that man e’er tasted;
Yet for us he drinks it up.

In the Roman hall behold him
Stand at Pilate’s judgment-seat,
Mocked and beaten, crowned and wounded;
Jew and Gentile join in hate.

On to Golgotha he hastens;
Yonder stands his cross of woe;
From his hands, and feet, and forehead,
See the precious life-blood flow.

Sinless, he our sin is bearing,
All our sorrows on him lie,
And his stripes our wounds are healing,
God, for man, consents to die.

It is finished! See his body
Laid alone in Joseph’s tomb;
’Tis for us he lieth yonder,
Prince of Light enwrapt in gloom.

But in vain the grave has bound him,
Death has barred its gate in vain;
See, for us the Saviour rises,
See, for us he bursts the chain.

Hear we then the grand old story,
True as God’s all-faithful word,
Best of tidings to the guilty,
Of a dead and risen Lord.

’Tis eternal life to know it,
Light and love are shining there,
While we look, and gaze, and listen,
All its joy and peace we share.

Hear we then the grand old story,
And in listening learn the love,
Flowing through it to the guilty,
From our pardoning God above.

Glory be to God the Father,
Glory be to God the Son,
Glory be to God the Spirit,
Great Jehovah, Three in One.

Horatius Bonar