Purity Seminar

Our church had a Purity Seminar.
Debe was one of the speakers; speaking on "Purity in Marriage."

Here is a highlight:

From the beginning God establishes the union of marriage as something special. Two people are joined together to become one. They are to share a love and intimacy that no other relationship has. God uses the illustration of marriage to also describe the union between Jesus and the church.

Ephesians 5:30-32 says,

“For we are members of His body, of His flesh and of His bones. “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the church”.

Our relationship with Jesus needs to have the same intimacy and love that an ideal husband and wife share. The way we achieve and maintain this kind of intimacy is by keeping our relationship with God pure. When we think about purity, we usually think about physical purity. However, there are several kinds of purity.

Three types of purity that we will look at today are:

1) Spiritual purity, 2) Physical purity, & 3) Emotional purity.

By keeping ourselves spiritually, physically, and emotionally pure, we can keep our marriage pure. Or to look at it another way, we can keep our marriages free from anything that weakens or pollutes.

With a 1 and 3 year old, Debe is really busy, but she was glad to have this opportunity to teach.

Resting in the Lord

Psalm 37:1-7

1 Do not fret because of evildoers, nor be envious of the workers of iniquity.

2 For they shall soon be cut down like the grass, and wither as the green herb.

3 Trust in the LORD, and do good; dwell in the land, and feed on His faithfulness.

4 Delight yourself also in the LORD; and he shall give you the desires of your heart

5 Commit your way to the LORD; trust also in him; and He shall bring it to pass.

6 He shall bring forth your righteousness as the light, and your justice as the noonday.

7 Rest in the LORD and wait patiently for Him; do not fret because of him who prospers in his way, because of the man who brings wicked schemes to pass.

"Do not fret" David writes. Yet how many of worry about, or even get "angry" when we see the "evil-doers" seemingly getting away with it.

In a day where we can choose to worry about terrorism, shootings at schools, war, illness, etc. David tells us to "not worry"? That's not easy to do!

Ah, but he also tells us how to get there -- to the place where we can "rest in the Lord" (vs 7). Notice the progression of verbs:

• we start by "not fretting" (vs 1);
  
• we move to "trust" (vs 3);
  
• then we have "delight" (vs 4);
  
• and "commit" (vs 6);
  
• finally we get to "rest" (vs 7)

Notice also that "delight" is in the middle of this list; we too can find "joy" in the middle of worrisome times -- but only if we trust and commit!

Chinese New Year

As you might know, not everyone follows the Gregorian calendar.




In China and Taiwan they follow the Lunar calendar (it's actually Lunisolar).

So New Year's is not until February 7th, for some. In celebration, Ping came over and cooked us some delicious Taiwanese food.

As you can see, it tasted pretty good.



Hey! save some for us, girls!














Sorry, Mika. Maybe next year you can have some food...




By the way, Happy Year of the Rat!