Today, I shaved my 8-month beard. And as I think I look ridiculous with long hair and no beard, I kept my razor's pedal slammed to the floor! As the last time I've seen my face I was 30+ lbs heavier, I was surprised to see myself again. Hello me!

Thus, I restart the beard clock—what, did you think I've decided to go clean-shaven? May it never be!

No, this action is more than just superficial. It's a fresh start, one that parallels my renewed passion in advancing and sharing my love for Christ. It's a reminder of why I choose God over that which fails to fill my appetite. My action is a symbol of how He has made me anew—don't think it so much like baptism, rather it's more akin to a memorial stone from the Old Testament, evidence for something I can look back and say, "Woo hoo! That happened THERE!"

It just felt like the right thing to do as we celebrate His coming in that manger and by extension, His next coming. Look, that's what all of this Christmas celebration is about, for if we did not believe in his resurrection, we would have little interest in what happened in that little town of Bethlehem over 2000 years ago.

I'm in a place these days where I care little about Christmas gift-giving; I'm by far more interested that this holiday celebrates the One who became the fulfillment of the Old Testament. He is the greatest man who has ever lived and not only does He know me, He LOVES me—He even has a special name JUST for me—check out this from Revelation 2:17: "...and I will give him a white stone, with a new name written on the stone that no one knows except the one who receives it."

Incredible. Who am I to deserve this? CLEARLY, it's grace.

I violated God's law; I was dead in my sin. I was set to pay eternally in Hell. And yet, God opened my eyes; He replaced my heart of stone with a heart of flesh (Ezekiel 36:26). Jesus took my punishment on his shoulders. And not only was I spared, I was adopted; I can call God, Dad. This is marvelous and is a fuller picture of the Christmas story:

But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, "Abba! Father!" So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God.

Galatians 4:4-7

And I just realized everything I wrote can be found in Ephesians 2:1-10—it's NOT EVEN the text I've been studying lately:

And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience— among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.

Ephesians 2:1-10, ESV

At roughly an hour a piece, I've finished sermon 43 of 46 that John MacArthur has preached on 1 John. For 11 weekdays in a row, I've read 1 John; am I any further from the starting line? Nope! Ahh, so characteristic of God's Word!

This ties into what I want to accomplish as part of my New Year's Resolutions.

As part of my 30-month, weekday reps run through the New Testament, I've chosen to listen to every sermon MacArthur has on each scheduled passage. Since his ministry began in 1969 and he has principally applied a verse-by-verse approach, there is a LOT of content. It definitely charges me up! <insert a Rick Flair "woo!">

Speaking of MacArthur, I like these answers by him and Sproul regarding, "who seeks whom in the process of salvation, and how does American contemporary evangelicalism get it right or wrong?"

YouTube Link

This morning, I found delight in the reading of this summary as it reminds me why God has chosen me and what this means for my life:

But God is glorifying his name through the redemption of sinners. He has purposed to "make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory" (Romans 9:23). Christ, "raised from the dead by the glory of the Father," has "welcomed" us in the gospel of grace "for the glory of God" (Romans 6:4; 15:7). In Christ, we bring glory to God now by trusting in his promises (Romans 4:20). What's more, we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God (Romans 5:2), a glory that will be given to us with the redemption of the body, and a glory that is nothing less than cosmic in scope (Romans 8:18, 21; cf. 8:23)

Waters, Guy Prentiss. "Romans." A Biblical-Theological Introduction to the New Testament: The Gospel Realized. Ed. Michael J. Kruger. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2016. 193. Print.

For the future that awaits the believer, I was stoked as I listened to this sermon today: How to Recognize an Overcomer, Part 2. This really blows my mind. And again, I cannot comprehend why specifically I'm invited to be a part of it all...when I dwell on this, I lose my appetite for sin; worry falls off of me. It is an INCREDIBLE gift, one of those awkward ones where I don't have ANYTHING to give in return!

It is a wonderful thing, something in which I want to strive daily to keep my destination ahead of me. My salvific focus is not about what has happened in the past; rather, my life is out there on the horizon.

What is 22 years from now—or, if I live beyond my parents and become like my Lithuanian grandfather, I've got 50 left in the tank—what is this in comparison to an eternity? I look at this body of mine with the stories imprinted on my hands: this body will be glorified and be with me forever—I'll just have an upgrade with these Rice Krispies knees! In fact, if I'm gonna be caught up with Jesus in the air, it sounds like I'm gonna be an X-Men! I SO DO NOT deserve this! May we never again let the world and all strife therein be the totality of our existence. May we refuse to chase after what the world values, the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh and the pride of life (1 John 2:16-17). That mindset would give people's personal "brands" and Instagram usage a serious hit!

I don't say this out of need, for I have learned to be content in whatever circumstances I am. I know both how to have a little, and I know how to have a lot. In any and all circumstances I have learned the secret of being content—whether well fed or hungry, whether in abundance or in need.

Philippians 4:11-12, HCSB

When you walk around with the realization that you are an immortal being in the context of Romans 8:28, well, in the words of The Bourne Supremacy, "It changes things, that knowledge. Doesn't it?"

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For the past several years, my site featured a retrowave theme as a nod to the genre that entwines the pattern of the past with the shape of things to come. A central symbol of retrowave involves an illustration of setting sun out on the horizon. Starting in 2019, I began using it as the favicon for this website while my background always had mimicked the look.

When I first ran Logos in 2017, I thought its Verse of the Day feature was always artfully done. That said, I turned it off (I do like to streamline things). It's not something I've seen in years.

And you can imagine my being taken aback yesterday when I flipped it back on and saw that its verse of the day featured something that was something very familiar. It really does feel like one of those moments where I feel God encouraging me.

I'm on the precipice of rejoining Facebook. I am wary of returning to social media platforms; I don't want to be like...

I don't want to be that person who rolls out of bed and immediately grabs his phone to check out Facebook. I don't want to go backward: the past couple of mornings, the first thing I do is to get into my Bible. It has been transformative. Worries of the world tend to shed off. The world is a wreck and I'm at peace. Following Jesus is a good deal.

I happened to run across a prophecy in the Old Testament pairs ever so delightfully with something I've been running across in my daily study in 1 John:

And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.

And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.

1 John 2:17 and Daniel 12:2

John MacArthur makes the following observations in his message, Why Christians Don't Love the World:

The world is in the process of disintegrating. We're not just talking about the second law of thermodynamics, the law of entropy, that all matter is breaking down, although that certainly is an element of it...all the human beings who have followed the world's system, all the people in false religion from all of human history, all of the anti-Christ, anti-God people, all those who live their lives within the framework of the world, under the power of Satan. They are all in a death spiral and they are catapulting at a rapid rate into eternal hell...

Are you surprised that things are as bad as they are? You say, "Things have never been this bad in my life." Well, that's right, they've never been this bad in anybody's life because they're getting worse and worse and worse. We can assume they're going to be worse in the next generation and worse in the generation after that and the generation after that until Jesus comes. Sin is destroying the system it thrives on. It's like cancer, it's eating itself.

John MacArthur preached that in a sermon on Oct 27, 2002.

How I long for the future when all of the corruption will pass away! As for me, I'll keep dancing in the meantime:

YouTube Link