The beginning of Luke’s Gospel is taken up with the announcement of two significant births, John the Baptist and Jesus. These births are first proclaimed by the angel Gabriel. Such supernatural signs had not been seen since the days of the prophets. And so with this angelic pronouncement, Luke lays in place the foundations of the new Messianic age about to dawn.
Guest blog — Duane T. Harder
“And now, Lord, for what do I wait? My hope is in you” (Ps 39:7).
Our hope might be fixed on the gift of our dreams. That hope is called wishful thinking. But hope in Christ is not one of wishful thinking. We might also have hope that is rooted in the expectation of our investment. The farmer prepares the soil, plants the seed, natures the land and lives in hope of a good crop. We invest time and resource and live in expectation of a return. Any number of unexpected intrusions can shatter that hope.
International travel is never without stress, but our experience this week took discomfort to a new level.
We were sitting in an airport hotel in London trying vainly to sleep, as the overnight hours ticked by for our early morning check-in. There was only one problem. The Canadian government requires travelers to produce results of a COVID test taken within 72 hours of arrival in Canada. But labs are not necessarily equipped to come up with the results that quickly. In the end, I spent half the night sending emails and making desperate calls, and a very kind supervisor expedited the results.
I am pretty well finished writing another book. The topic this time is the meaning of freedom from a Biblical perspective.
One of the things I’ve been wrestling with is the fact my freedom is restricted by the people around me. You could say “Welcome to the pandemic!” But it’s more the case that the pandemic has provided an opportunity to find out something the Bible teaches but we often ignore because we don’t like it.
