Isaiah 2:1-11 ~ Exalted in that day

All we need is a Tall Ship

and the Morning Star

to sail With

Isaiah 2:1-11

It shall come to pass in the latter days

    that the mountain of the house of the Lord

shall be established as the highest of the mountains,

    and shall be lifted up above the hills;

and all the nations shall flow to it

And many peoples shall come, and say:

“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,

    to the house of the God of Jacob,

that He may teach us His Ways

    and that we may walk 

in His Paths.”

For out of Zion shall go forth the law,

    and the Word of the Lord 

from Jerusalem.

 He shall judge

between the nations,

    and shall decide disputes for many peoples

And they shall beat their swords into plowshares,

    and their spears into pruning hooks;

nation shall not lift up sword against nation,

    neither shall they learn 

war anymore.

5 O house of Jacob,

    come, let us walk

    in the Light of the Lord.

The Day of the Lord

6 For You have rejected Your people,

    the house of Jacob,

because they are full of things from the east

    and of fortune-tellers like the Philistines,

    and they strike hands with the children of foreigners.

7 Their land is filled with silver and gold,

    and there is no end to their treasures;

their land is filled with horses,

    and there is no end to their chariots.

8 Their land is filled with idols;

    they bow down to the work of their hands,

    to what their own fingers have made.

9 So man is humbled,

    and each one is brought low—

    do not forgive them!

10 Enter into the rock

    and hide in the dust

from before the terror of the Lord,

    and from the splendor of His Majesty.

The lofty looks of man shall be humbled, 

and the haughtiness of men shall be bowed down, 

and 

The Lord alone shall be exalted in that day.

The Lord loves parables about life on earth, the fullness of the earth, His Good Creation - is where He loves us to observe and remember the height of the sky is the Limitless Love of The Lord.

We have all loved a day on the water. And if you are dehydrated or simply tired, the light on the water can become a terrible headache. 

Isaiah is chosen for 2 millenniums for us to read in the Season of Advent, preparing for the arrival of Jesus Christ. The birth of a baby, usually, a time remembered with such joy.

And Isaiah, The Great and Loving Prophet of the Most High God. The Almighty's Messenger, seems to work like a set of Christmas Lights.

The On Light twinkles away. The incredible and amazing language we cannot forget. They are the unmistakable, heart-warming and thundering Word of God. Once in our souls, they will never diminish with Love and Encouragement.

And just as suddenly, The Road turns to become the "Days will Come" Jesus Christ wrote about in His Gospels.

Isn't the immediate reaction, to return to the Comfort. The Help.  And yet, we know in our inner being, our eternal fire and soul - This Is Our God.

And, being sincere, we all long to have the Liturgy just magically and comfortably, deliciously, keep us in the sunshine passages. Our minds do think a like here, because we are all the same. Fallen from the Glory of God and requiring a Savior in Jesus Christ.  We are the people of God.  And our minds fire up with Help, Helper, Comfort, Comforter. 

We could look at the layer of Isaiah forever. God does! And this complicated Prophet helps us see the layers of the Season of Christmas.  And in being seen, Isaiah was seen, we are in sincere comfort.

God believes, as our Father, we can handle the musical change ups. The Words of Frank Honesty.  He does not speak to us as children, but as souls reaching into the eternal reasoning the Holy Spirit gives us.

And in this Truth of Jesus Christ, we do find the real Comforter.

What Isaiah 2 brings to me, this 2024th Birthday of our Lord Jesus Christ, will not be identical to your reading.   The Living Word of God. 

And God knows. He says Nations and the world read His Word and Decisions.  The impact of all of these layers gives us Peace to say God's Good Will be done on earth as in Heaven.

I recently read a Sunni Muslim woman wrote Christmas is a form of witchcraft. And I could understand this viewpoint if you wanted the world to be followers of Muhammad. The Love that flows from the Celebration of Jesus Christ coming into the world, truly has redemption.  Explained by teaching us to keep The God of Love, God of Encouragement in our heart. Our manner of life. Keeping Christmas in our Hearts daily.  Even when the day has clouds of joy and serious duty requiring our more serious nature.

I loved reading about Sunday in Russia in the time of the Czars. Saturday was a double duty chore day, early morning, past late at Night. The result, Sunday could have all the areas of the country in age, money and customs put on their best festival clothing, resting in a clean house and land, eating the best cooking of the week, and resting like a Lord.  And all enjoyed Sunday, going to Church, feasting, resting and seeing the fruit of their labors - wishing for Heaven for this joy to be perpetual and unending. 

Today's reading of Isaiah helps us to understand the press to cover Christmas with all our attention and balance life to be without the Russian jolt of Monday morning. The tempers of pressed to work and pressed to do so many items on the list. Santa had it easy to have a list to only Check Twice. 

Isaiah even covers the longing for Christmas Joy is tempered with the Christmas to do list. 

Isaiah's complete honesty, like the Lights that bounce on a Christmas Tree. On the same strand, created for Joy and Beauty.  We are created for Joy and Beauty. And also for the making the path straight. Our lives bring together Nations in peace and harmony, not chaos.  The Lord Says. Wondrously and Unforgettably. 

Chose Joy

with

what we can do

today!

Abba, Father,

Help me,

Help us

to clean our houses

and our lives 

knowing who we are

asking for Your

Forgiveness

and Mercy.

Dwell in me,

Dwell in us,

Dwell in those we Love,

Help us to seek You first.

And we will finish well, 

in Jesus Christ. 

Let evil and practicing evil

depart 

far 

from us

and our children.

With Your Help

We will act justly

 and to love mercy

 and to walk humbly with You, our God.

Help us seek Heaven

What will you gift us today?

Help us see Your Hand and Love

each day.

Help us read the Scriptures daily.

Help us to Bring more Heaven

To do the Good Works You

give us Daily.

To pray for others

and our details of life.

Help us to become a part of Heaven

to Give

Shelter

Love

Mercy

Encouragement.

AND

In this work You Bring Us

We 

WILL

FIND MORE HEAVEN ON EARTH.

And Good

Christmas

Practices and Choosing Joy

AGAIN Today.

Help us not to be 

something

we wouldn't want to see

on our dinner plate.

And Choose

Joy

Again.

And in Jesus - this Hope, 

Faith and Love - we will rise up believing Jesus. 

Amen.

♔ Lord Jesus Saves †

Yes The Lord Fulfills His Purpose

Thank You Jesus

John 3:8 ~ Born of the Spirit

When have you ever wanted to say,

"Thank You!" to a commercial?

Thanks for so many Memories

Santa Travolta!!!

Merry Christmas Joy!

Speaking of Saint Nick, we were, yesterday...

Nicholas of Myra, 

aka, Nicholas of Bari,

4th Century AD, Christian Bishop of Greek descent 

From the modern-day Antalya Province, Turkey. 

With many miracles attributed to his intercession, he is also known 

as Nicholas the Wonder worker.

Saint Nicholas.

One of the real and poignant aspects of Saint Nicholas' life 

was the troubled times he lived in, 

and his desire to make more of Jesus 

giving us more Heaven on earth with God's Good Will. 

St Nicholas had 'je ne sais quoi'. Certainly.

John 3:8

The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit 

Ancient Rome knew Diocletian had reworked the Power of Rome. And Constantine the Great had been his protégé, winning the Emperor throne through Civil War Victory. Not a man to trifle with Constantine the Great.

Diocletian's first order of business was to establish what became known as the Tetrarchy, the division of the empire between two Augusti (emperors) and two Caesars (sub-emperors). Ultimately, he envisioned easier management of the Roman Empire to grow and remain at the top of worldwide trade. 

Diocletian chose Maximiam as his fellow Augustus and assigned him the western half of the empire. Maximiam reigned in Milan, while Diocletian ruled the eastern half from his capital in Nicomedia. In 293 Constantius I Chlorus, Constantine's father, became Caesar under Maximian, while Galerius served under Diocletian.

Constantine The soon-to-Be Great remained with Diocletian, and life in the palace had a strong influence on his thinking and development. Furthermore, young man Constantine received education and traveled frequently with Augustus. The future emperor, as described by contemporary sources, wore his hair to the shoulder and wore jeweled robes and a high-crested helmet, later replaced with a pearl-decked diadem. However, this helmet was the prototype of the future Byzantine crown.  An outstanding general, Constantine also excelled as an organizer, leader, and administrator, possessing a wealth of energy. Imperatively, Constantine loved to chat with his troops, inspiring loyalty in return. Throughout his life, he worked hard to learn as much as possible. Constantine the Great was ambitious, religious to the point of being superstitious, and very emotional, always striving for personal success at all costs. Although, because he suffered from fits of anger brought about by a highly suspicious and jealous mind, occasionally resorting to murder.

And Constantine sent a letter to Nicholas, the Bishop of Turkey, in prison, where Emperor Diocletian had sent the Christian Nicholas for the kill you dead crime of having faith in Jesus Christ.

And the Letter arrived in the prison.

No photos available for St Nick's prison, so we substitute Mamertine Prison, Rome, where Peter and Paul are recorded specifically and in detail as inmates and cell numbers.

This letter, an invitation, could be a very superlative form of entrapment leading to death. Welcome to leaving prison and the delights of Mediterranean Ocean travel and highway robbery.

This, in effect, is the invitation of Constantine the Great:

St Nick's earliest icon

from St. Catherine's Monastery

at Mount Sinai

where Moses received the 10 Commandments

2 Corinthians 11:23-28

23 Are they servants of Christ? I am a better one—I am talking like a madman—with far greater labors, far more imprisonments, with countless beatings, and often near death. 24 Five times I received at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes less one. 

25 Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I was stoned.

 Three times I was shipwrecked; a night and a day I was adrift 

at sea; 

26 on frequent journeys, 

in danger from rivers, 

danger from robbers, 

danger from my own people, 

danger from Gentiles, 

danger in the city, 

danger in the wilderness, 

danger at sea, 

danger from false brothers; 

27 in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure. 

28 And, apart from other things, there is the daily pressure on me 

of my anxiety for all the churches.

1800 Bishops, not 1(800) Bishops, Eighteen hundred Bishops were invited and 

318 decided to risk the whooooole set up.

God is God Himself. The Almighty. The Mighty. Ancient of Days. I Am. 

And if God sets up the universe and holds all of this up, by His Word....

Hebrews 1:1-3

In these last days He has spoken to us by His Son, 

Whom He appointed Heir of all things, 

and through whom He

 made the universe. 

The Son is the radiance of God’s glory 

and the exact representation of His nature, 

upholding 

all things 

by His powerful Word.

So, God upholds the Universe, by His Powerful Word.  And if God deigns to remarkably set up December 25, by faith and not works, who are we to quibble Christmas is the actual Birth of our Lord Jesus Christ?!!

And if then, 

Saint Nicholas becomes Father, Patron Saint of Christmas,

Père Noel, 

then who are we to do other than find out why 

the Fullness of The Lord's Good Creation 

has Given His St. Nick a Place. 

St. Nicholas the Miracle Worker. Remember, with me, this is in the general time frame of The Acts of The Disciples. Not a light set of phrases!

In fact, if you wanted to be close

to the man, the saint, 

called St. Nicholas the Miracle Worker - what would you do?

Joshua 3

3 Then Joshua rose early in the morning and they set out from Shittim. And they came to the Jordan, he and all the people of Israel, and lodged there before they passed over. 2 At the end of three days the officers went through the camp 3 and commanded the people, “As soon as you see the ark of the covenant of the Lord your God being carried by the Levitical priests, then you shall set out from your place and follow it. 4 Yet there shall be a distance between you and it, about 2,000 cubits in length. Do not come near it, in order that you may know the way you shall go, for you have not passed this way before.” 5 Then Joshua said to the people, “Consecrate yourselves, for tomorrow the Lord will do wonders among you.” 6 And Joshua said to the priests, “Take up the ark of the covenant and pass on before the people.” So they took up the ark of the covenant and went before the people.

7 The Lord said to Joshua, “Today I will begin to exalt you in the sight of all Israel, that they may know that, as I was with Moses, so I will be with you. 8 And as for you, command the priests who bear the ark of the covenant, ‘When you come to the brink of the waters of the Jordan, you shall stand still in the Jordan.’” 9 And Joshua said to the people of Israel, “Come here and listen to the words of the Lord your God.” 10 And Joshua said, “Here is how you shall know that the living God is among you and that he will without fail drive out from before you the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Hivites, the Perizzites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, and the Jebusites. 11 Behold, the ark of the covenant of the Lord of all the earth is passing over before you into the Jordan. 12 Now therefore take twelve men from the tribes of Israel, from each tribe a man. 13 And when the soles of the feet of the priests bearing the Ark of the Lord, the Lord of all the earth, shall rest in the waters of the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan shall be cut off from flowing, and the waters coming down from above shall stand in one heap.”

14 So when the people set out from their tents to pass over the Jordan with the priests bearing the ark of the covenant before the people, 15 and as soon as those bearing the Ark had come as far as the Jordan, and the feet of the priests bearing the Ark were dipped in the brink of the water (now the Jordan overflows all its banks throughout the time of harvest), 16 the waters coming down from above stood and rose up in a heap very far away, at Adam, the city that is beside Zarethan, and those flowing down toward the Sea of the Arabah, the Salt Sea, were completely cut off. And the people passed over opposite Jericho. 

17 Now the priests bearing the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord stood firmly on dry ground in the midst of the Jordan, and all Israel was passing over on dry ground until all the nation finished passing over the Jordan.

Jericho Today

Sycamore tree site, (new tree)

attributed as Zachaeus climbed to see and meet Jesus Christ  

In Archaeology, Jericho Walls collapsed 

without earthquake

or flood

Joshua 6

 2 And the Lord said to Joshua, “See, I have given Jericho into your hand, with its king and mighty men of valor. 3 You shall march around the city, all the men of war going around the city once. Thus shall you do for six days. 4 Seven priests shall bear seven trumpets of rams' horns before the ark. On the seventh day you shall march around the city seven times, and the priests shall blow the trumpets. 5 And when they make a long blast with the ram's horn, when you hear the sound of the trumpet, then all the people shall shout with a great shout, and the wall of the city will fall down flat, and the people shall go up, everyone straight before him.” 6 So Joshua the son of Nun called the priests and said to them, 

“Take up the Ark of the Covenant and let seven priests bear seven trumpets of rams' horns before the Ark of the Lord.”

 7 And he said to the people, 

“Go forward. 

March around the city 

and let the armed men pass 

on before the Ark of the Lord.”

Asking again...

St. Nicholas the Miracle Worker.

Remember, with me,

This is in the general time frame of The Acts of The Disciples. Not a light set of phrases!

And therefore, if you wanted to be close

to the man, the saint, 

called St. Nicholas the Miracle Worker - what would you do?

t. Nicholas was buried in his church at Myra, and by the 6th century his shrine there had become well known. 

In 1087 Italian sailors or merchants stole his alleged remains from Myra and took them to Bari, Italy.  This availability greatly increased the saint’s popularity in Europe, and Bari became one of the most crowded of all pilgrimage centers.

 Nicholas’s relics remain enshrined in the 11th-century basilica of San Nicola at Bari, though fragments have been acquired by churches around the world.

In 2017 researchers dated one such relic fragment, a piece of hip bone, from a church in the United States 

and 

confirmed it to be from the 4th century.

NICE!

Original Icon

The Icon

and the reconstuction

are

GREAT TOGETHER

Nicholas shaped our Scriptures

And then in 380 AD, the 381 Bishops did gather The Council of Nicaea was the first council in the history of the Christian church that was intended to address the entire body of believers. It was convened by the Emperor Constantine.

Then Jerome spent almost three years (379–382) continuing his pursuit of scriptural studies. An enthusiastic disciple of St. Gregory of Nazianzus, Jerome also came to know St. Gregory of Nyssa and the theologian Amphilochius of Iconium at the Council of Constantinople (381). Under such influences, he improved his knowledge of Greek and developed an admiration for Origen’s exegesis. He translated 14 of Origen’s homilies (sermons) on Old Testament books into Latin. Here too he translated the church historian Eusebius’s Chronicon (Chronicles) and continued it to the year 378.

But the most decisive influence on Jerome’s later life was his return to Rome (382–385) as secretary to Pope Damasus I. There he pursued his scholarly work on the Bible and propagated the ascetic life.

In Christianity, in the 1600s, the name "the Apocrypha" is applied to a particular set of books which, when they appear in a Bible, are sometimes placed between the Old and New Testaments in a section called "Apocrypha." The canonicity of such books took longer to determine. Various of these books are accepted by the Catholic Church, Orthodox Churches and the Church of the East, as deuterocanonical. 

Saint Nicholas

When we read the Scriptures daily

Acts 17:11 

Now these Jews were more noble than those in Thessalonica;

 they received 

the word with all eagerness, 

examining the Scriptures daily 

to see if these things were so.

Abba, Father!

Happy Thanksgiving!

WE PRAY 

BLESSINGS 

ON THE DILIGENT
AND BLESSED FAMILY
OF SEDONIA AND DIESEL

The safety 

of Your people.

And their DOGS.

The safety 

of those

helping the earth 

to heal.

The Lord Bless you 

and keep you;

The Lord make His Face to shine upon you 

and 

be gracious to you;

The Lord lift up His Countenance upon you 

and 

give you peace.

“So shall they put 

My Name 

upon the people of Israel, 

and I will bless them.”

✝

NORTH CAROLINA

The people of North Carolina

today 

received running, clean water.

Fra

Christmas is coming.

Parents are looking for toys.

Winter is here

and they talk about how

How to be warm.

Or to be warm in an RV. 

Or a tent.

Hotel vouchers, how to find them.

Some areas were not covered

in the Blitz of Help Recovery.

They ALL SAY

THE GRAHAM MINISTRY

SAMARITAN'S PURSE

IS 

DOING INCREDIBLE
SHAKE NORTH CAROLINA
SHAPE NORTH CAROLINA

Love and Mercy and Work.

GIVE TO

 SAMARITAN'S PURSE

and 

PUT IT ON YOUR CHRISTMAS LIST

ALL, 

Please.

https://www.samaritanspurse.org/

GOD BLESS THEM

Let evil and practicing evil

depart 

far 

from us

and our children.

With Your Help

We will act justly

 and to love mercy

 and to walk humbly with You, our God.

Dwell in me,

Dwell in us,

Dwell in those we Love,

Help us to seek You first.

And we will finish well, 

in Jesus Christ. 

Help us seek and find 

and bring,

to become,

 more Heaven

to this earth.

And in Jesus - this Hope, 

Faith and Love - we will rise up believing Jesus. 

Amen.

♔ Lord Jesus Saves †

Yes, The Lord Fulfills His Purpose

Thank You, Jesus