Dear Lord; Happy Meditations Monday Father!<\/p>\n
To start off our week together Lord, I want to thank You for the many Blessings You graced my family and I with this past weekend.\u00a0 As I still wasn\u2019t feeling very well, we spent much of Saturday at home, save for a much-needed grocery shopping trip, and finished the evening off by curling up on the couch together and watching the final chapter in the Harry Potter movie series.\u00a0 Sunday we started our day with an inspiring worship service at Ewell\u2019s St. Paul, and then joined some close friends for a brunch to celebrate the birthday of one of their children.\u00a0 The afternoon was filled with a marathon of housework, homework, bill-paying and laundry, but at the end of the day we were all able to relax a bit before bed, and enjoy some quiet time together.\u00a0 You know Father, as my Walk with You progresses, I find myself appreciating those times of unity with my family more and more.\u00a0 I\u2019ve always enjoyed \u201cfamily time\u201d<\/em>, but the more connected I become with You, the more connected I feel to them as well.\u00a0 \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n In her message this weekend, Pastor Kris made a statement that\u2019s been churning around in my head ever since.\u00a0 She told us that one of her seminary professors had once said that if you look at the Bible as a whole; the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Gospels, the one underlying concept that\u2019s consistent throughout and that ties it all together, is love.\u00a0 Now Father, while initially this may seem like an awfully simplistic and obvious statement, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it was a fundamental point that quite often we miss.<\/p>\n Throughout the Scriptures as well as in our lives today, we see many examples of the wide range of ways You show Your love for us.\u00a0 Some are obvious, and come in the form of Blessings that clearly enrich our mortal lives and bring us immediate joy. \u00a0Others however, may be perceived as negative events that seem to complicate our lives and cause us difficulty.\u00a0 The point that we need to remember however is this; just because things don\u2019t always go as we expect or desire them to, it doesn\u2019t mean that it wasn\u2019t an act of love on Your part nonetheless.\u00a0 I liken it to when I have to discipline my children.\u00a0 I certainly don\u2019t enjoy reprimanding or punishing them, but in my desire to be a loving, caring and responsible parent, sometimes it\u2019s necessary for me to correct and guide them by providing a response that makes the point apparent and relevant to them.<\/p>\n In one of the most beautiful, and I believe powerful passages of the Bible, the Apostle Paul describes this love that You\u2019ve given us, and the importance of it in our lives:<\/p>\n \u201c<\/strong>If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.\u00a0And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.\u00a0If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.<\/strong><\/p>\n Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant\u00a0or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;\u00a0it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.\u00a0Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.<\/strong><\/p>\n Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away.\u00a0For we know in part and we prophesy in part,\u00a0but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away.\u00a0When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.\u00a0For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.<\/strong><\/p>\n So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.\u201d \u2013 1 Corinthians 13:1-13 (ESV)<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n I view love as the \u201cglue\u201d<\/em> You use to bind our hearts to Yours Father.\u00a0 You bestow it on us freely, and through Christ\u2019s example, You lead us to share it with others in a similar fashion.\u00a0 Such an overwhelming gift Lord, and one that grows more and more prominent as our walk to You progresses.<\/p>\n Heavenly Father,<\/p>\n We thank You Lord, for the love and Blessings You give to us freely and abundantly each day.\u00a0 Please open our hearts and our minds, that we may more fully come to recognize Your acts of love in our lives; both those that fill our hearts with overwhelming joy, and those guiding actions which while sometimes painful, are done as the caring, loving, responsible Father that You are.<\/p>\n In Jesus\u2019 Name we pray,<\/p>\n Amen.<\/p>\n ~Phather Phil<\/p>\nPin It<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
![Pin It<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dear Lord; Happy Meditations Monday Father! To start off our week together Lord, I want to thank You for the many Blessings You graced my family and I with this past weekend.\u00a0 As I still wasn\u2019t feeling very well, we spent much of Saturday at home, save for a much-needed grocery shopping trip, and finished […]<\/p>\nPin It<\/a>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1593,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[1835,724,505,185,1123,851,359,207,168,419,12,770,129,286,132,321,91,899,915,546,1972,541,15,4,1995,173,619,228,24,661,2122,208,2119,2121,59,805,457,686,847,444,731,140,593,916,464,224,976,1055,900,271,269,222,757,60,133,1127,96,206,1325,355,141,274,385,576,582,2120,65,753,392,1206,448,19,2041,887,1726,1833,587,572,217,1032,69,1080,683,699,609,575,252,629,1358,461,117,493,736,631,114,1744,1324,785,697,481,49,504,138,604],"class_list":["post-1592","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-daily-emails-to-god","tag-1-corinthians","tag-actions","tag-afternoon","tag-angels","tag-apostle-paul","tag-beautiful","tag-bible","tag-birthday","tag-bless","tag-blessing","tag-blessings","tag-caring","tag-celebrate","tag-child","tag-children","tag-christ","tag-connected","tag-correct","tag-dear-lord","tag-difficult","tag-esv","tag-example","tag-faith","tag-family","tag-family-time","tag-father","tag-feeling","tag-friend","tag-friends","tag-fundamental","tag-fundamental-point","tag-gift","tag-glue-that-binds-our-hearts","tag-gospels","tag-grace","tag-graced","tag-grow","tag-guide","tag-guiding","tag-happy","tag-head","tag-heart","tag-heavenly","tag-heavenly-father","tag-hope","tag-hopes","tag-house","tag-housework","tag-importance","tag-inspiring","tag-jesus","tag-joy","tag-kind","tag-knowledge","tag-love","tag-love-is-patient","tag-loving","tag-meditation","tag-meditations-monday","tag-message","tag-mind","tag-minds","tag-movie","tag-necessary","tag-negative","tag-new-testament","tag-noisy","tag-nothing","tag-obvious","tag-old-testament","tag-overwhelming","tag-pain","tag-painful","tag-passage","tag-pastor-kris","tag-pauls-first-epistle-to-the-corinthians","tag-power","tag-powerful","tag-pray","tag-prophet","tag-quiet","tag-quiet-time","tag-realize","tag-recognize","tag-remember","tag-resentful","tag-rich","tag-saturday","tag-scripture","tag-shopping","tag-son","tag-speak","tag-statement","tag-sunday","tag-thank-you","tag-the-bible","tag-tongues","tag-truth","tag-understand","tag-week","tag-weekend","tag-will","tag-work","tag-worship"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/11\/Glue-Sticks-1-Cropped.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p18mMc-pG","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1592","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1592"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1592\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1595,"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1592\/revisions\/1595"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1593"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}](\"http:\/\/pinterest.com\/pin\/create\/button\/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.phatherphil.org%2F%3Fp%3D1592&media=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.phatherphil.org%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2011%2F11%2FGlue-Sticks-1-Cropped.jpg&description=Inspirations+from+Phather+Phil+-+Meditations+Monday%3A+The+Glue+That+Binds+Our+Hearts\"){kind=link}