Reflection: Mercy and Grace

God's  Mercy and Grace

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God has mercy, he forgives us even when we don't deserve it. He has compassion he watches our hearts. God gives us grace things we don't deserve. And he asks us to hate the things that he hates and love the things he loves. We know that God has mercy, grace, compassion, and that he is slow to anger.

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Reflection(January 12, 2016)

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It is important when studying scripture to consider the differences between two very similar terms, mercy and grace. According to scripture, the wages of sin is death. Everyone has sinned and fallen short of  the Glory of God, the only reason we have a chance at heaven is because God is a merciful God. Mercy is when someone keeps us from a negative consequence of our own actions. Mirriam Webster describes it as : a blessing that is an act of divine favor or compassion. god showed mercy on David when he killed Uriah and took his wife. He showed mercy on Samson after he was blinded and enslaved because of his own disobedience. Grace on the other hand is the giving a a positive consequence when we don't deserve it. It was through God's grace that Jesus came down from heaven to die on the cross.

Journal(August 2, 2015)

What did the Flood Represent?

(August 2, 2010)

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The flood was made to kill all of the evil, it represents cleansing and starting over and thats exactly what God wanted to do so he took a righteous man and started a new generation of everything. And to show his promise not to destroy the earth by flood again he made the rainbow. So now every time we see a rainbow we should remember God. 

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Reflection(January 7, 2015)

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God is a just God. He always gives man a way of escape. When the descendents of Adam and Eve became corrupt, he found godliness in the form of Noah. Even though, only Noah and his family were the only ones on the Ark, there was more than ample time for all of the rest to repent and join Noah on the Ark. According to modern theologians, Noah was believed to have spent approximately 120 years building the Ark. This means that Noah was in a position to preach to his neighbors about the coming flood for a little over a century. Yet not one other person forsook his worldly pleasure for the opportunity to board the Ark with Noah. Noah became God's chosen because he was set apart from the world. God formed a covenant or promise with him that covered both himself and his household. Much like God's covenant with Abraham covered not only him but his whole people. God provided Noah with a long enough life to complete the Ark, living to the ripe old age of 950. When he had finished building the Ark, after 120 years of tedious carpentry and construction, it would have amounted to nothing had god not sent the animals into it. When the flood came and the waters were rising, it would all be over if God had not closed the entrance. After the 40 days of raining and the 150 days of waiting, Noah and everything on the Ark would have starved and died had not God's wind pushed back the waters on Mt. Ararat and provided a safe place to rest and live. When we make a covenant with God, we admit our inability to succeed without him and our willingness to follow him no matter the circumstances. The rainbow was a sign of God's promise to never again flood the whole world, but it was also a sign marking the beginning of an era of God covenants.

Reflection : Journal(November 11,2010)

Queen Esther(November 11,2010)

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A Jewish girl in Persia who was taken from her home to become a Queen. When she was taken to the palace she changed her name to Esther so no one would know she was a Jew. When she was taken to learn how to be a queen she found favor in the head eunuch, and in the king. The king found much favor in her beauty and married her. Then one day, the kings high assistant Haman decided she would kill all of the Jews in Persia. So when Haman decided that one Hew in particular should be hanged it just so happened that Jew had saved the kings life and the king had been reading the history and he told Haman to do great things for the Jew. Now the Queen had learned of the plot and revealed her true identity. The king was furious so he hanged Haman and Queen Esther saved the Jews.

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 Reflection(January 6,2016)

It is an adventure in itself to look back on my old journals. Sometimes I hardly believe I wrote them, my mindset was so completely different back then you could almost say I was a completely different person. I think back to a time when I looked at the prospect of 2016 with mystery. "What would I look like?""How tall will I be?""What if I get acne?""How many more siblings will I have?" Its almost magical to have the answer to those questions. As if I'm back to when I was 10 years old, looking in the mirror, trying to imagine how my face will change, how a mustache would look on me. These journals are time machines for me. I rediscover myself in them. I see things about myself I never would have noticed in the moment. Like the way my handwriting curved to the left instead of the right, or the way I made my writing small in order to save space on the page. I find myself shuddering at the numerous and blatant grammatical errors. But I also find pride in my 10 year old self for the purity of his words and the simplicity of his writing. I am found envying his carefree attitude from a life before the stress of adolescence, the pressure of puberty, or the weighted knowledge of the world. On these pages I meet myself again where pen meets paper.

 

Reflection Galatians 5