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Spiritual Exercise
Before reading the Wisdom Story, read over the Today's Scripture a few times. Engage it through prayerful meditation or Lectio Divina. Let the Holy Spirit speak to you, applying the scripture to you personally.
Today's Scripture
I tell you for certain that everyone who hears my message and has faith in the one who sent me has eternal life and will never be condemned. They have already gone from death to life.
*St. John 5.24, CEV
Wisdom Story
A Phoenix, Arizona, newspaper had the following in January 1999:
Early yesterday, January 6th, 1999, Bill Bennett was told his wife had been killed in a robbery. But five hours later, authorities said she was really alive. Michelle Bennett was kidnapped during an apparent robbery at a Castle Boutique adult bookstore. The kidnappers shot her several times and left her for dead on a trail near the Lost Dutchman State Park. She is listed in critical condition this morning after surgery.
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The family of the woman had identified the body through a picture and had accepted her death.
Comments
The French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) remarked: "Everything has been figured out, except how to live." Jesus clarifies that the principle question, however, is not how to live but do we have life. Of course, by this life he means a Personal Sacredness, often felt more as an intrusion than a visitation.
This life, or Life, swallows our life up into Itself, transmuting our natural powers into a quality of being that leads, gradually, into a character of inward being and outward living that living can never accomplish, regardless of how respectable the living is.
Jesus does not first call us to respectability. Jesus invites us to a death that opens to a vista of sacred discovery only attributable to Amazing Grace.
The first question for us is not "How shall I live?" The first question for us is "Do I have life?"
Are you still discovering the life Jesus points out as of first priority? If so, what are you discovering about that life?
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Story from Phoenix newspaper is at www.sermons.com ; the quote from Sartre is at www.wisdomquotes.org .
For Brian's on-line audio sermons, go to www.wherethelightshines.org and select Pastor's Corner; on the following page is his weekly sermons given at Christ United Methodist Church, Punta Gorda, FL.
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For replies and biographical information, and submission to "The Light Shines" daily devotionals ~ a ministry of Christ Community United Methodist Church, Punta Gorda, FL, see next page:
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