nawinter.com

Greetings! I hope that you are encouraged and strengthened in the Lord this weekend as you gather with the saints in your local body of believers to worship Him. May we increasingly more like Jesus as we follow closely after Him.

• Don’t Run from Tension. Embrace It. – “But tension isn’t always a warning light to indicate something’s malfunctioning一it can be useful, even beautiful. Power lines utilize tension to stay safely hoisted above pedestrians. Cello strings appropriately tuned produce breathtaking music. Similarly, the more we’re stretched by God, the more he can use us. Here are four reasons Christians should embrace tension…”

• A Conversation with God for the Doubter in All of Us – “There is a tension here. Humility helps my heart to rest in what I don’t understand, and love for God will move my heart to desire to understand more. In the meantime, there are many things in the Word of God that are crystal clear; these we can be living in humble surrender to the One we long to know more intimately.”

• For Our Endurance and Faith – “God, I pray for the faith of the saints that they would trust in you in the middle of whatever they’re walking through, that they would know, even right now that they would be reminded that they are not alone.”

• Letter to a Young Man Desiring to Follow Jesus – “Who you become will be the result of the daily choices you make. The key to spirituality is the development of little habits—Bible reading and memorization and prayer—which will develop into life disciplines. Through God’s Word, the Holy Spirit transforms our hearts and minds.”

• Is Jael a Modern Woman?: Feminine Fight in a Feminist Age – “What some fail to notice is the distinctly feminine way Jael conquers her enemy. She does not approach him on the field of open combat so that she can jujitsu her way to a victory. She deceives him, making him believe she’s a place of safety and refuge as she bides her time, tent peg within reach.”

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.”