here & there

"...the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many."

Matt 20:28

This Christmas season, I pray that each of you will experience the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ who came to reveal His amazing love and salvation for mankind.

^"1 Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. ²Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. ³More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, ⁴and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, ⁵and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us."
-Rom 5:1-5

As Christians, these are part of our lives now.
Peace doesn't just mean the absence of conflict like how the world would usually define it when they use the word as in "we want world peace" or just a nice feeling of serenity inside. "We have peace" is an "indicative sense of the presence of actual peaceful, harmonious concord", quoting my Romans class notes. :)
Same with joy/rejoicing, it's not just a happy warm feeling, but the confidence and joy that comes from knowing that as Christians, we are God's children and no matter what we go through now, the presence of God is still real and unchanging, and the hope we have in Him is unchanging either--which is why we can rejoice in suffering (cf Philippians 4:4; Rom 8:17).
The hope that we have is a "know-so" hope, not a "hope-so" hope. We don't hope that God will be true to His promises like how we use the word usually, but we hope because we know that He will but we are just not there yet (heaven is still to come for us in a sense).

"at the name of Jesus every knee should bow"-Phil 2:10.

This is what the LORD says: 'Cursed is the one who trusts in man, who draws strength from mere flesh and whose heart turns away from the LORD.  That person will be like a bush in the wastelands; they will not see prosperity when it comes. They will dwell in the parched places of the desert, in a salt land where no one lives.  'But blessed is the one who trusts in the LORD, whose confidence is in him.  They will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit.

Jeremiah 17:5-8

for this blog. Hence, this picture which I took with a small point and shoot camera.