nawinter.com

It is hard to believe that we are over halfway through 2022. There has been a lot to rejoice over in the first half of 2022 and a lot to mourn and weep over as well. I pray that as you seek to serve God for the rest of this year that you will be encouraged and strengthened by His Word and that you will have wisdom and grace to do all that He calls you to do.

• Jesus Changed Everything for Women – “If we could read the Gospels through first-century eyes, Jesus’s treatment of women would knock us to our knees. His longest recorded conversation with any individual was with a Samaritan woman of ill repute (John 4:7–30), and this wasn’t an isolated incident. Jesus repeatedly welcomed women his contemporaries despised.”

• Seven principles for cultivating a Christian posture toward the world – “What should the Christian’s posture be to a hostile world? Not surprisingly, the question does not allow for a simple answer. The message and model of the New Testament cannot be reduced to a single attitude or strategy. But there are important lessons to learn. Here then are seven principles for cultivating a Christian posture toward our “negative” world.”

• State of the Bible: Trauma survivors flourish by Scripture engagement – “Scripture-engaged respondents scored 19 percent higher than Bible-disengaged respondents on the six-domain human flourishing index measuring happiness and life satisfaction, mental and physical health, meaning and purpose, character and virtue, close social relationships, and financial and material stability.”

• Caregivers Suffer from Dementia Too – “One way to serve God is by caring for others who bear his image. Every human receives worth and value from the Creator (Gen. 1:26), who weaves together each of us in the womb (Ps. 139:13). Your service through caregiving is often done in secret—but God sees and rewards you (Matt. 10:42). He refines and realigns your motivations toward him and away from appreciation from men.”

• Conceited Motherhood: Three Temptations Moms Face – “Jesus Christ is the most humble human who has ever lived. So, to be a humble mom — a mom who fights against “selfish ambition or conceit,” and therefore a mom in the truest, God-given sense of the word — is to look increasingly like Jesus as we look increasingly to Jesus. Only as we realize that he lives to serve his people (us!) will we fight the temptation toward selfishness and long for a heart that looks like his.”