My son got baptized this past Sunday.  I'm so proud of him!  I watched him stand on his nine-year-old toes to try to reach the microphone and share his testimony with those gathered in the sanctuary.  We had to strain to hear his voice, but his heart was more than loud enough.

Devin first gave his life over to God when he was three.  A teacher in his Sunday School class showed him on a wipe-erase board that his heart was black, but God could come in and make it white and clean.  He wanted some of that and he hasn't looked back, and he's been begging to be baptized ever since.  But it took him another six years to understand in his head what his heart already knew.  Which is why we put him off for so long.

Up until recently, my son thought being baptized would make him more of a Christian.  He thought that God would love him more if he got baptized. It was up to his father and me to teach him the truth.  Imagine the long-term effects if we allowed him to continue in a works-based outlook on life.  He'd end up where I so often am, struggling and comparing and performing my circus act to earn points with God. I've felt the pain of living in that place. I want better than that for my boy.

How important, then, that I know what is true!  How can I teach my son that his relationship with God doesn't depend on works - not even getting dunked in front of the congregation - if I don't know it for myself?  I have to learn about God's grace and about being obedient out of love and not under duress. Only when I train my own brain can I train up my children in the way they should go.  But it doesn't just happen - it takes intentional effort.

Over and over in Scripture, God is clear that we control what goes into our heads, while He's got the job of molding and shaping hearts.  We take our thoughts captive (2 Corinthians 10:5), test our thinking (Philippians 4:8), and are transformed by what's in our heads (Romans 12:2).  At the same time, God gives us hearts of flesh and not of stone (Ezekiel 11:19), and He cleanses and purifies us (1 John 1:7).  As a mom, then, I'm learning that it's my job to feed my brain and my boy's brain with the truth of God, and God's job to use that to shape both of our hearts.  I can trust Him with that job, but I am called to do my part.

This is why being a "mom after God's own heart" starts with me.  This is why I have to immerse myself in everything that is Him so that I can teach my kids and point them in the right direction and not the wrong one.  Without having the truth for myself, my heart may be right, but my children and I can end up in exactly the wrong place.

So...what truths has God taught you that you can teach your children today?

I admit it.  I have a love-hate relationship with grace.  I've been wrestling with it for a while now.  I want to just love, love, love God's grace all of the time.  It's so much of who He is!  But I have to confess that my heart is divided.

Grace is one of those things I'm so very glad is available to me, and I'm so very disappointed in myself for needing.  I feel the same way about other things, like "corrective undergarments" for example.  Really glad I can get 'em....really wish I didn't need 'em.

I completely understand that without the grace of God I would be totally lost. Ephesians 2:8 makes it clear: "For it is by grace that you have been saved, through faith - and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God..."  But now that my salvation is secure, I find that I need God's grace all the more.  I need His gospel-centered, freely given, unconditional grace to make it through an hour without getting zapped into a charcoal briquette by His holiness.

I really wish I didn't.  I really wish that I were a better person, that my thoughts were pure, that my motives were pure, that my habits were pure. But they're not.

I wish that I was so progressing in my sanctification that I need God's grace less today than I did nineteen years ago when I first believed.  But I don't.  And I hate that.  My pride hates that I can't fix these things, and my finite humanity imagines that God tires of extending grace to me over and over again.  I certainly would have given up on me a long time ago.

But God LOVES extending grace!  When God reveals His glory to Moses in Exodus 34, He can say whatever He wants to say about Himself, and He chooses to proclaim, "The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God...."  Before His justice, before His holiness, before His wrath, God proclaims His grace.  And He continues to proclaim it in me.

O, stubborn pride of mine!  How I long for you to be swallowed up in the immense grace of God!  How I yearn to be free of your petty desires to "do it on my own" and be self-sufficient!

So while I struggle with this love-hate relationship with grace, I find that I need His grace to struggle on. I cry out with the Apostle Paul, "What a wretched person I am!  Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God - through Jesus Christ our Lord!"

Do you have a love-hate relationship with God's grace?

My husband loves random television.  I'm not sure if it's a guy thing or just my guy.  But he channel surfs and pauses on the most bizarre shows.  Here's a sampling of what has appeared on my TV recently:

• I, Caveman (reality show of people living like Neanderthals)
• River Monsters Goes Tribal
• Giant Squid Vs. MegaShark
• Lake Placid 4 (they made 4 of these movies?!?!)
• Dinocroc
  
• Renovation Realities
• Planet Earth - which wouldn't be so bad if there weren't so many super-closeups of insects and spiders

I'm not sure what I'm more appalled by - that these shows exist or that my husband is interested in them. Other than Planet Earth, which is actually pretty good stuff when they're not showing giant bugs eating each other.

Do you have random TV in your house?

Yup...the bug has caught again.

After cramming a TON of ministry into a very short period of time, I'm finally sitting still enough to get back to work on the writing.  "Love Letters" will be a twelve-week study of the letters of John.

I've been studying for a number of months on this, and even drafted a few questions.  But the pressing needs and excitement of the start of a new ministry season with the R.E.A.L. Women of FEFC has kept me from diving in to the writing process.  Now, one week removed from the craziness, and feeling somewhat recovered and caught up on my sleep, I can hardly think of anything else.

So pray for me as I write over these next few weeks.  Pray that I'll hear what God wants to say and accurately put that into the pages of the study.  Pray that I'll be disciplined to get done the other things that need to be done and not just hole up in my office for the next several weeks.  And pray that I'll have it done in time for the spring study season.

More to come....

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