Category: Uncategorized

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The Gospel is about how Good God is, not how bad we are!!!

Michael J. Weiss, Sr.

The Lord Has No Equal

To whom will you compare me?
Who is my equal?” asks the Holy One.
Look up into the heavens.
Who created all the stars?
He brings them out like an army, one after another,
calling each by its name.
Because of his great power and incomparable strength,
not a single one is missing.
O Jacob, how can you say the Lord does not see your troubles?
O Israel, how can you say God ignores your rights?
Have you never heard?
Have you never understood?
The Lord is the everlasting God,
the Creator of all the earth.
He never grows weak or weary.
No one can measure the depths of his understanding.
He gives power to the weak
and strength to the powerless.
Even youths will become weak and tired,
and young men will fall in exhaustion.
But those who trust in the Lord will find new strength.
They will soar high on wings like eagles.
They will run and not grow weary.
They will walk and not faint.

Isaiah 40:25-31 (NLT)

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The Gospel is about how Good God is, not how bad we are!!!

Michael J. Weiss, Sr.

The Lord Has No Equal

Haven’t you heard? Don’t you understand?
Are you deaf to the words of God—
the words he gave before the world began?
Are you so ignorant?
God sits above the circle of the earth.
The people below seem like grasshoppers to him!
He spreads out the heavens like a curtain
and makes his tent from them.
He judges the great people of the world
and brings them all to nothing.
They hardly get started, barely taking root,
when he blows on them and they wither.
The wind carries them off like chaff.

Isaiah 40:21-24 (NLT)

Uncategorized

The Gospel is about how Good God is, not how bad we are!!!

Michael J. Weiss, Sr.

The Lord Has No Equal

Who else has held the oceans in his hand?
Who has measured off the heavens with his fingers?
Who else knows the weight of the earth
or has weighed the mountains and hills on a scale?
Who is able to advise the Spirit of the Lord?
Who knows enough to give him advice or teach him?
Has the Lord ever needed anyone’s advice?
Does he need instruction about what is good?
Did someone teach him what is right
or show him the path of justice?

Isaiah 40:12-14

Testimonies, Uncategorized

I’m So Stoked

Michael J. Weiss, Sr.

“I’m living the Dream,” Ben Gravy

Ben Gravy loves to explore and find one-of-a-kind waves to ride. In this short clip, Ben is sharing his excitement about catching one Bonzi Pipeline wave recently. The waves that day were bigger than they usually are.

https://youtube.com/clip/Ugkxa6WUsdzdHia6IljNpRwMjnhucUwGDrJv

I love Ben’s honesty about being so afraid in the morning he told himself he wasn’t going to surf that day.

Ben’s experience is universal. Having a dream that is so big were to afraid to even paddle out into the line-up with all the other dreamers. But, each time we try we experience something new, that we could not experience if we didn’t “Go For It.” I have

I have dreams that scare the crap out of me and I know, from experience, that going for it out weighs staying on the shore.

I want to be in the middle of the arena with the Teddy Rosevelt’s of the world, not an onlooker from the stands.

Let’s do it together!!!

Defination of Stoked: being in an enthusiastic or exhilarated state. (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/stoked)

God Loves Us, Guest Post, Recommended Reading, Uncategorized

A Way Forward by, Michael Metzger

Michael J. Weiss, Sr.

https://claphaminstitute.org/a-way-forward/ (copied Feb 14, 22)

I appreciate folks who can evolve in their thinking. So I find it fascinating that many who are evolving are recommending the same way forward.

In March of 2020 Chuck DeGroat wrote a confessional titled, It’s Always Been About Love. He felt he’d forgotten that. A great many evangelicals feel similarly, including James K. A. Smith, N. T. Wright and Dallas Willard. Here’s Wright’s evolution over the last 30 years.

In 1992 Wright wrote about a “spiral path” of knowing reality, where the only access we have to reality “lies along the spiraling path of appropriate dialogue or conversation between the knower and the thing known.”[1]Few Christians understood what he meant by that.

Maybe that’s why in 1999 Wright sounded rather pessimistic. “We live at a time of cultural crisis. At the moment I don’t hear anyone out there pointing a way forward.”[2] He felt some Christians “put up shutters” while others capitulate to the post-Christian world. “My brothers and sisters, we can do better than that.”

But Wright wondered aloud who in the faith community has a way forward?And, if believers aren’t pointing a way forward, who else might? By 2013, Wright had found a who else.

That year DeGroat joined a small group of believers meeting with Wright. They were exploring faith and formation. DeGroat asked Wright for his best recommendation for a resource that explores spiritual maturation at depth. Without hesitation, he recommended Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World as a way forward. Wright called it is a “magisterial” work.

I can imagine a few reasons why. McGilchrist says findings in neuroimaging reveal how knowing reality is a spiraling path, a reciprocating flow between the right and left hemisphere of the brain. It turns out Wright’s intuitions were right on.

McGilchrist says the right hemisphere is the intuitive mind. The left is the rational mind. Since 95 percent of the western world biases the left brain, and most of Wright’s readers are western Christians, most couldn’t intuit what he was saying. Small wonder Wright was pessimistic.

But there’s more. McGilchrist notes how only the right hemisphere has direct contact with the outside world, the cultures passing through our gills. The left doesn’t. Since 95 percent of the western world biases the left brain, and most of Wright’s readers are western Christians, most do not touch, feel, taste that we live at a time of cultural crisis.

But there’s more. According to McGilchrist, it is only in the right hemisphere that we make a paradigm shift. In most cultural crises, the way forward requires shifting some paradigms. I have a hunch Wright read that and thought, That’s why there’s so little spiritual maturation at depth. The deepest part of our being is not beliefs but paradigms, unconscious assumptions shaping beliefs. Western Christians don’t go deep enough into anthropology, human nature.

James K. A. Smith, Professor of Philosophy at Calvin University, does. He notes how our anthropologies shape our theologies. He gets that from reading scripture as well as Iain McGilchrist. He cites McGilchrist’s work as a way forward for the church.

It’s no coincidence that DeGroat, Smith, and Wright are all now saying they missed the wider picture. Love. All three come from Reformed traditions formed by the Enlightenment, biasing word over image, language over metaphor. Language is the domain of the left hemisphere, which is narrowly focused. Most Reformed traditions embrace a narrow view of the cross, substitutionary atonement. Jesus died on the cross to satisfy God’s demands for justice. Law. DeGroat, Smith, and Wright are saying they missed love.

The good news has always been about love… and law. In other words, Jesus did die for our sins. But he did this for the joy set before him of “marrying” us, love, enduring the cross, despising the shame. On the cross, we were betrothed to Jesus as his bride. [Yes Love. Father so loved us he sent Jesus. Jesus so loved Father and us he came. Holy Spirit so loved Father, Jesus and us he helps us know them. Jesus is the true way to life (more than Zoe, Shalom); Becoming children of God the Father, betrothed to King Jesus and indweldt by Holy Spirit. This comment added by Michael J. Weiss]

It seems that Dallas Willard was moving in this direction in the last months of his life. Like Wright and Smith, he was despairing. Do people really change—even with all the available resources and practices and disciplines? With his good friend and neuro-theologian Jim Wilder, Willard was exploring how neuroscience is a way forward, developing a psychology of love.

I had a similar experience when I first read The Master and His Emissary. That was in 2010. It helped me see why so few Christians recognize our post-Christian age. McGilchrist helped me see why we don’t seem to have a way forward, and why so few ever make the necessary paradigm shifts. I didn’t feel quite so alone.

That same year I read Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010by Charles Murray, a religious skeptic. Yet he’s hoping for a fourth awakening in America. The first three were led by religion. But Murray rightly notes that religion no longer has cultural capital in America. It can’t lead the way. Neuroscience can, so Murray writes…

“The more we learn about how human beings work at the deepest genetic and neural levels, the more that many age-old ways of thinking about human nature will be vindicated. The institutions surrounding marriage, vocation, community, and faith will be found to be the critical resources through which human beings lead satisfying lives.”[3]

Wow. Neuroscience is a way forward. It can validate, corroborate, older Christian traditions and their understanding of human nature. They can be a resource for shalom, satisfying lives, seeking the well-being of all.

So… if you’re looking for a Valentine’s Day gift for a loved one who wants to evolve in their thinking, and seek a way forward… I highly recommend Iain McGilchrist’s work.

There’s The Master and His Emissary.

There’s a shorter rendition: Ways of Attending: How our Divided Brain Constructs the World.

And there’s McGilchrist’s new book: The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World. I bought the Kindle version and am currently making my way through it. I’ll report on it later, but I feel it’s reinforcing what a heckuva of lot of evangelicals smarter than me see as our way forward.

[1] N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, (Fortress Press, 1992), 35.

[2] N. T. Wright, The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was and Is(InterVarsity, 1999), 195.

[3] Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010(Crown Publishing Group, 2012), 300.

I highly recommend you start receiving Michael’s blog and listen to his podcast!!!!

“The Gospel (Good News) is about how good God is and not how bad we are.” Michael Weiss

Uncategorized

The Hidden Name of God Bible Study: Part 1-A

Michael J. Weiss, Sr.

I cannot encourage you enough to prayerfully read this post by Lisa Urbani and Gina Cash from their site called “On Scripture,” https://onscripture.blog/2021/12/01/the-hidden-name-of-god-bible-study-part-1-a/

I believe our Father wants us to call him by his actual Name.

Introduction

If I told you that God’s name appears more than any other name in the entire Bible, would you believe me? If I said that it appears in the Hebrew Tanakh, the Old Testament, 6828 times, and if you include the poetic form, 6877 times, would that surprise you? If I asked, could you tell me His name? If it appears in the Bible that many times, surely it must be very recognizable, right? In fact, it would have to appear multiple times on almost every page, wouldn’t it? When I assure you that it does, could you point it out to me? 

I am not trying to trick you, but those questions are tricky, aren’t they? I can tell you that if you read any of the popular English translations, from the King James Version, to the New International Version, to the New Living Translation, to the Message Bible, and on and on, you will not see God’s name more than a handful of times, if at all. 

I think I hear a cry of “Fake News!”

If you are curious to find out the answer to the questions I have posed and even if you know the answers, I invite you on a journey of discovering the hidden name of our Father in Heaven. Hallowed be His name!

Are you ready? Let’s get started!

God Is NOT His Name

On March 3, 2018, my sister, Lisa, sent me a link to a blog post entitled, “What does the Bible say about OMG?” It was a brief post, opining on the dangers of taking God’s name in vain and pointing out that our common usage of OMG is doing just that.  The article got my sister and I thinking. I had often been grieved when hearing fellow Christians use terms like that casually and often when angry or frustrated.  “Good Lord!” is another one I often heard from a young woman in ministry at a church I once attended. She always seemed to say it in a tone that showed frustration or irritation with someone/something. I, too, always thought that it was bordering on taking God’s name in vain if not outright doing so.  However, I knew then that God is not His name; neither is Lord, or Christ. Those are titles, not names. BIG DIFFERENCE, right? 

Reading through the comments of social media posts can be “fun” and informative. You can get a real sense of where people’s attitudes and beliefs are from these. This article was no different, except that it was a civil discussion that did not devolve into viciousness and name calling that is so rampant on many sites.  I noticed that most people were agreeing with the writer of the post, but there were several that pointed out that God is not the Creator’s name. (Neither is Creator, BTW!) It is a title and there are a number of titles for Him in the Bible.  A few took extra pains to really lay out their argument for this. At one point, the blog writer made a comment which was designed to shut down all further arguments. She said, “Can we agree that God is the name that English-speaking people know and use? Can we agree on that? You can get technical on me, but the bottom line is that when we say ‘God’ we are referring to the Creator of the Universe.” (The answer is NO, by the way!)

That statement was one of the main reasons why I set out to study more about God’s real name, and why many, if not most, Christians believe, as Leslie A. does, that God is His name. Where this study led me was deeper than I had expected and took me down paths of discovery I could never have imagined! 

What’s in a (Nick)Name?

Does consistently referring to someone in the same way for a long period of time with a specific term cause that term to become his proper name? For instance, I have always called my father “Daddy” (I’m a Southern girl). Does that make his name Daddy?  Obviously not. But sadly, this is not at all obvious when it comes to the name of the God of the universe. Another example could be a nickname. Sometimes, a nickname is just a shortened form or a slight variation of the given name: Michael becomes Mike, David becomes Dave, etc. Or, it could be something totally different. My husband was a tall skinny boy who was all arms and legs and he earned the nickname Spider! Some people still call him that to this day. But do his friends think that is his real name? Of course not! Unfortunately, many of us (me included) have been tricked into believing that Lord or God is our heavenly Father’s name, because we read it so often in His Word. But His REAL name has been hidden in plain sight behind the most common title in the English translations of the Bible.  It was also silenced in another way in the Hebrew Bible.

Purpose of This Study

We will seek to discover the who, what, where, when, why and how behind the intentional hiding of God’s name, as we uncover His true name. Why is knowing His personal name important? How can it affect our relationship to our Father, the one true God of the universe? If you want to find the answers to these questions, come with me on this journey!

“Who hath ascended up into heaven, or descended? who hath gathered the wind in his fists? who hath bound the waters in a garment? who hath established all the ends of the earth? what is his name, and what is his son’s name, if thou canst tell?”
Proverbs 30:4

Your Turn

Before you head to Part 1-B, consider the questions below. Answer honestly, from the knowledge you currently have. This will give you a benchmark to measure any changes in perception as you progress through this study.

  • Does the difference between a title and a proper name have any real significance in understanding or relating to a person? To God?
  • Does consistently referring to someone with a specific term for a long period of time cause that term to become their proper or legal name?
  • Why do you think it might be important to know God’s personal name?
  • How might knowing God’s personal name affect our relationship to our Father, the one true God of the universe?
  • What are the answers to the questions posed in Proverbs 30:4?

I hope you will join me for the rest of this study on the Hidden Name of God. See you in Part 1-B. A new section will post each Wednesday.

Guest Post, The Daily Blessing, Uncategorized

The National and International Day of Repentance and Solemn Assemblies Regarding Abortion on December 1, 2021

Michael J. Weiss, Sr.

https://www.nationaldayofrepentance.org

We believe America is at a crossroads and that our time is short. God hates the shedding of innocent blood and the Mississippi abortion case presents us the best opportunity since 1992, to see the reversal of Roe v. Wade. But we need to pray desperately.

The Supreme Court has announced the day of Oral Argument in the Mississippi Ban on Late Term Abortion Case (Dobbs) for Wednesday, December 1, 2021.

Will you partner with us in helping to organize and call for a National Day of Repentance and Solemn Assemblies where we humble ourselves, pray, seek His face and turn from our wicked ways on the day of Oral Argument for this case?

We must have physical assemblies, perhaps in front of the Supreme Court, on the National Mall, in front of abortion clinics, and in churches across the nation. As well, we will be having a national 24-hour zoom call on the day of Oral Argument. We also believe we should be praying the day before, the day of, and the day after Oral Argument. Organizing this call will help generate millions of Americans and others to pray for the Supreme Court all the way through June 2022, when the decision will probably be announced.

America has committed the 4 great sins that can bring national destruction:

1. We have forsaken God (1962 Supreme Court Prayer case)

2. Shedding innocent blood (1973 Roe and Doe )

3. Sexual immorality on a vast scale (repeatedly)

4. The love of money and greed

We must repent of all these things.

There must be actual concrete ways to demonstrate turning from our sin on that day. Our suggestions would include praying in front of abortion clinics, signing The Moral Outcry Petition, helping the poor, the homeless, donating to pregnancy resource centers – either with time or donations, committing to pray more, and committing to be more publicly vocal that abortion is a crime against humanity and offering help to those considering abortion, etc. We value your suggestions also.

We encourage everyone, everywhere in America to pray as the Holy Spirit leads in accordance with your understanding of prayer and your sphere of influence. We need each denomination in America that still believes the Bible and that God hates the shedding innocent blood to stand up and cry out to the Lord.

We need to reach the fourth step of II Chronicles 7:13-14. We have prayed, we have humbled ourselves somewhat, but we have not yet turned from our wicked ways. We need to continue to confess that and see that this is the only remedy. The alternative is national or existential destruction, but if we turn, God will heal our land. Could you please share this short video call for a National Day of Repentance on the Day of Oral Argument in the case that could reverse Roe, December 1, 2021? Over 40 ministries are joining in this call. Will you join us? I believe this could be the last opportunity for the Nation and the Body of Christ to repent and TURN from the wicked ways of abortion.

God bless you

Lilian Schmid

Prayer Strategist and Coordinator 

lilianschmid@prayerstrategy.org

Prayer Strategy for the Spheres of Influence – Prayers and Forums for the Spheres of Influence in our Families, in the Church and in the Marketplace

Featured Writers, God Loves Us, J3Khai Ambassadors, Jehovah, Jesus, Messiah, Personal Reflections, The Daily Blessing, Uncategorized, Yehovah

Jehovah Bless you and the Glory of God is seen in the face of Jesus

Michael J. Weiss, Sr.
Jehovah bless you and keep you,
Jehovah make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you,
Jehovah lift up his countenance upon you and give you shalom.
Numbers 6:24-26

“God, who said, ‘Let brilliant light shine out of darkness,’ is the one who has cascaded his light into us—the brilliant dawning light of the glorious knowledge of God as we gaze into the face of Jesus Christ.” 2 Cor 4:6 (TPT)

Learn about Akiane, this painting of Jesus and her other works by clicking here!

Reduce stress while driving Part II

Can driving the speed limit reduce stress?

Note: In this video I say, “when a police officer points his gun at you.” I meant to say, when a police officer points his speed monitoring gun at you,” not his weapon.

Featured Writers, J3Khai Ambassadors, Jesus, Messiah, Personal Reflections, The Daily Blessing, Uncategorized

Yehovah Bless You and The Gospel is about how good God is, not how bad we are.

Michael J. Weiss, Sr.
Jehovah bless you and keep you,
Jehovah make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you,
Jehovah lift up his countenance upon you and give you shalom.
Numbers 6:24-26

Jesus the Messiah is Wonderful, Full of Wonder!!!

“Not a single title advanced by Christ concerning Himself in the Word of God, nor any other name by which He is addressed overestimates His transcendent majesty or overstrains His tremendous merit. He is never called by any one of His distinctive designations of honor, without richly deserving the same; and by virtue of His celestial comeliness engraces each with a heavier weight of dignity and a greater degree of excellence in every instance. His suitability as a Governor and His stability as a Guardian are both underived. His durability as a Shepherd and His desirability as a Saviour are not qualifications conferred by any human administration. He is the Lord, ‘which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty.’”

Rolls, Charles J.. The Indescribable Christ: The Name & Titles of Jesus Christ A to G . Believer’s Bookshelf Canada Inc.. Kindle Edition.

Take a Break While Driving

Take a momentary break while driving by completely stopping behind the white line at each red light and stop sign.

God Loves Us, J3Khai Ambassadors, Jehovah, Jesus, Legacy Dream Team Overseer, Messiah, Personal Reflections, Recovery Updates, Uncategorized, Yehovah

Yehovah Bless You and Thank You for the Birthday Greetings and Blessings

Michael J. Weiss, Sr.
Jehovah bless you and keep you,
Jehovah make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you,
Jehovah lift up his countenance upon you and give you shalom.
Numbers 6:24-26

Because God loved me first, I love him and you,

Shalom,

Michael Jay Weiss, Sr., The Khai Guy

“The Gospel (Good News) is about how good God is not how bad we are.” MJW