As iron sharpens iron,
one person sharpens another. (Proverbs 27:17)
“So many people I love in Nashville today are without strength. The pastor’s wife at Covenant Presbyterian who once shared a weekly prayer group with my wife, now going home to face and empty room, a gaping hole in their family portrait.” - Daniel Darling
Related:
“Christmas — over any other season — tends to make life’s sweet things sweeter and hard things harder.” - Desiring God
“He told Martha, ‘Your brother will rise again’ (11:23) but He did not say to Martha, ‘Don’t grieve.’ He is the Resurrection and the Life, but He weeps with Martha and Mary over their loss.” - Colin Smith
“With church funerals and burials no longer the norm, pastors hope to restore occasions to gather and remember.” - C.Today
When we think of the story of Jesus’s birth in the little town of Bethlehem, we envision a beautiful and peaceful scene with shepherds and wise men gathered around a manger, worshipping the young Christ. But that’s not the whole picture! Matthew reminds us that the birth of Christ was not only associated with happiness and hope but also with feelings of profound sorrow and deep despair.
“The day we received the report was one of the hardest we’ve had since he died. Yet there was also some comfort in it. It was comforting in the sense that he did nothing wrong and we did nothing wrong. It was comforting in the sense that the people who tried to save him did all they could… And it was comforting in the sense that it was so clearly an act of providence in which the Lord just took him.
“How can we avoid the pitfall of being one of these well-meaning, but miserable comforters?” - TGC
“In recent months I have often mentioned the growing importance of poetry in my life. As we come to Good Friday and Easter, I have been enjoying some of the devotional poetry of days gone by, and was especially struck by Hannah Flagg Gould’s “To the Mourner.’” - Challies
“The birth of my Savior has everything to do with the death of my son, for it is only because of Christ’s birth that I can have hope in Nick’s death. Because Jesus lived and lives, I can have confidence that Nick lives and will live. Christmas does not take away all my pain, but it does give me hope…” - Challies
“If Nick’s death was not a lapse in God’s sovereignty, it was also not a lapse in his goodness. If there was no moment in which God stopped being sovereign there is no moment in which he stopped being good—good toward us, good toward Nick, good according to his perfect wisdom. God can’t not be good.” - Challies
Discussion