Nathaniel from Timfam: Recent Episodes
Nathaniel Timmermann
Have you found pleasure and delight? Can you sustain delight through all of life? Stare at God’s pleasure and delight within himself. It is a wonderful sight.
As life goes on, it is easy for dreams to be shattered on the rocks of reality. At the same time, many consider dreams their own responsibility to fulfill, something like the pressure we put on our children as we try to live through them. The gospel shows us a middle way. Simeon and Anna’s dreams were fulfilled - more than their wildest dreams were fulfilled. But this wasn’t their own doing. The Lord made their dreams greater, stronger, and then fulfilled them.
The amazing thing about the Lord Jesus is that he lets us know God personally. We don’t know an abstract, impersonal God, we get a personal God. And yet he still speaks truth into our lives. Most people know us so personally that the can’t speak truth into our lives or they don’t know us well enough to speak truth to us. The Lord Jesus is both for us.
Is God real? Can we relate to him? Definitely. God is far more than we imagine and far more intimate than we could ever hope. Christmas tells us how real he is and how much we can relate to him.
Love is a challenge, because it is more than either emotion or action, but it is not less than each. Jesus brings both action and emotion together, and that makes him the ultimate display of love from God.
You can’t experience joy unless you’ve experienced loss, but if you’ve experienced loss you can receive incredible grace and with grace comes joy.
Do you have hope? It is possible to have hope and you need it. But along with other things, it will only come from words that work and a Lord that is beyond this all. From the depths of hopelessness, you can see the one in the most hopeless situation of all and discover real hope.
Are you going where no one else is, dancing and fighting the whole way? That’s what we can do with generous feet. Generous feet come when we see how much God delights in us and how Jesus fights for us. He came dancing and fighting, now we go and do the same.
Generous hands don’t just appear out of nowhere, but are produced from a context of goodness to all, trustworthiness before all, and righteousness in all our ways. That’s the way the Lord deals with us, and when we see that, we’ll handle others in the same way.
Charity and generosity are two very different things. Generosity comes from a heart commited to God and defined by God. That makes it filled with and modeled after Jesus.
While 500 years ago the concern might have been that God only works through certain jobs - priests, nuns, and the like, today more people seem concerned if God works at all in the world. The Christian faith doesn’t think that God works through the great and fantastic events of live as much as he works through the mundane parts of life: taking the kids to soccer practice, going to work, or picking up groceries at Meijer’s. That should change everything about the way we look at life. God works through us. Could life get any better?
How do we gain access to God? How do we get to know him and be known by him? Is it when we bring our sacrifices and offerings? Yes, but those sacrifices don’t get us access. Too many stumble over Christ. Access comes not because of our service, but our status. As priests, we gain access to God in Christ.
How did God take such normal people as Martin Luther, Katie Luther, and Phillip Melancthon and make them into gigantic figures who changed the world? Specific ideas influenced them to produce significant life change. The most important was the gospel. Martin Luther was deeply and personally changed by it. Has it changed you?
Hell produces all sorts of questions and problems for people. That’s understandable. It is really hard to reconcile the ideas of judgment and love both founded in God. But in Christ, God lets understand our own hearts and love him more because of hell.
Christianity has a poor record regarding injustice. While we have righted some wrongs, we have also contributed to other wrongs. What can we say about this? Praise God he chooses the poor.
Suffering is a big deal and it bothers us. But abandoning belief in God is not the answer. That just overlooks the fact that it bothers us. Instead, we should look back, ahead, and into something.
Does the exclusivity of religion bother you? Has it affected your life? Take the gospel in the center of your life and it will change you. Find out how.
Outside of religious circles, the commonly held view of men and women is that each is vying for power in a constant battle of strength. Within religious circles, most people either seem to eliminate any real difference between the sexes or give one sex a better status out of the gate. The gospel is none of those, instead saying that the giving up of power and strength that takes place as each person puts them beneath the other opens doors for God to remake us. And that is just what he does as Christ takes his place beneath us.
Real revival doesn’t come from good work, but from the gospel of justification by faith.