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As Jesus faced the epic battle of the ages in the Garden of Gethsemane the night before He would be crucified thoughts that our poor minds cannot begin to conceive 
pounded into His head. And while everything in His body and mind told Him to run away from tomorrow, something deep in His spirit witnessed that He must submit to this death—that He must trust when He couldn’t see. And ultimately, though deserted by those closest to Him in this darkest hour of need, He chose what He had always chosen: To do the will of God. He chose to not just submit to, but embrace the will of His Father. And when He did, strength came. A special messenger from the Father appeared and touched Him, releasing strength into His weakened body and embattled mind. Now, though He had sweat blood due to the emotional pressure, His body felt much better. His mind was now at peace, as always comes with a surrender to the will of God. Joy—small, but strong—began to course through His being. He was now ready. And the time had come.
Judas had walked with Jesus the last three years. He had even been the treasurer of the group. But there was something about him that was different from the rest. Whereas they had each been touched with the way Jesus lived and taught, Judas seemed to keep himself beyond the reach of Jesus’ friendship. He never opened his heart to Jesus as the others had done. His mind had never actually Continue reading
cross, His disciples weren’t thinking about His long-range mission: They were too busy enjoying the recognition they were receiving from the crowds from being associated with Jesus. They were “flying high”! But Jesus had not come to cater to our selfish desires. He would not play the world’s game of trying to build our own self-image by gaining the acceptance of others—neither will He allow His followers to do it. He must bring these disciples to the awakening of who they really were, of why they were here on this earth. All this “acceptance” would shortly meet an abrupt end.
By miracles in the Revolutionary War, a basically Biblical government was re-established in America. And, over the next eleven years, they would work with that government to make it better. The end product, our national Constitution (written in 1787 and approved by the states by 1789), was no less of a miracle. Many of our Founders would speak of the miracle that brought our national Constitution into being. George Washington would acknowledge God’s hand in that Constitutional Convention in a letter to his good friend, Jonathan Trumbull, then Governor of Connecticut. He wrote,
I have hope for our land because I am seeing more and more people beginning to pray. Some are praying for revival. Some of them are beginning to see the necessity of repentance if our prayers are to be heard. Some don’t yet know enough of God’s truth to know to pray for revival, they are just praying that God will help us in America and do something to change the direction in which our nation is headed. Some know the Lord so well that they are crying out to Him in very specific prayers, the particular revelations of which would amaze most of us if we knew just how specifically God is leading them in prayer. I am so grateful for all who are praying for us, be they a citizen here or a citizen elsewhere. I recently heard a group of South Koreans praying for us with such appreciation for America and such intensity in their cry for Revival and Transformation for us that I was brought to tears. I knew God was listening intently to their praying.
just like all other men. He laughed and wept just as all humans have since the dawn of creation. He had to manage money and relate to relatives. Yet the peace and confidence with which He did it all was amazing. It was as if He wasn’t weighted down as others were. He talked about His Father and His Spirit in such a familiar way that They seemed close, not far off in an unreachable heaven. His followers would later come to recognize this uniqueness as the very fulfillment of what God intended man to be all along. In short, they would come to know they had seen God’s presence living in a human body (2 Corinthians 5:19).
The unveiling of this centerpiece of “His Story” begins in an obscure village in Palestine called Nazareth. An unknown young maiden is startled one day by a visit from an angel who identifies himself as being no less than Gabriel himself. He tells Mary (for that was her name) that she will have a child and that this child will be called “the Son of the Most High” (Luke 1:32). It was further revealed to her perplexed fiancé, Joseph, that, “She shall bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, because He will save His people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21). Mary is shocked! She? Bear the long-awaited “Anointed One”? She was to give birth to the One Who would pay man’s debt to God? She was to bring into this world the One Who would fix what we had messed up in the Garden of Eden? This seemed incredible! Yet, the credibility of this mighty angel standing before her is hardly debatable.
Besides the Tree of Life, there was another Tree in that Paradise: The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. This tree represented the opposite way of life. This way of living would be motivated by what happened outside of man. Instead of being inspired by the moving of the Life of God deep within him, if he chose to eat of this tree man would be rejecting God’s offer to come inside him and be his life. He would be choosing a way in which he would make his own decisions, instead of allowing the flowing will of God to come through him.
This was the reason for the two trees. As the Scripture declares,
The clause “It is finished”, in the Greek language in which Jesus spoke it, means to reach a goal. It also means to pay a debt in full, so that the books balance. Jesus had reached His goal of paying our debt. But to understand the “debt” Jesus was paying, we must revisit the scene in the Garden of Eden: When God begins to work with a pile of dust. He carefully shapes it into the form of a man. Once this human body is finished to perfection, God “blows” His own breath into the nostrils of this pile of clay. All of a sudden, the form moves! Light comes to its eyes! It gets up and stands erect like God. I can see Father God turning to the rest of His creation and saying,