The Kingdom, The Kids, & The Cowboys

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One More Week!

June 30, 2025 / / 0 Comments

The latest measurements from Friday show Elliott Walker at 6 lbs 3 oz and Samuel Heath at 5 lbs 3 oz and Valerie Nicole is ready to deliver. If not physically, certainly mentally and emotionally.

The doctors keep telling Val she’s having a textbook twins pregnancy: the boys are in great shape, she’s doing really well, all the numbers look good, and there’s nothing to worry about. That’s wonderful, but Valerie is ready for this part of the journey to be over. She’s miserable. She’s carrying nearly twelve pounds of baby inside her! She calls them her two watermelons. It makes my back hurt just to look at her pictures.

Carrie-Anne left for Tulsa early this morning to be with Valerie and David during this last week. The C-section is scheduled for July 8, one week from tomorrow. If her water holds, Whitney and I will drive up Monday for the births Tuesday morning. If something breaks before then, Whit and I will head up there as quickly as possible, but we’ll probably miss the births–it’s an eight-hour drive and a C-section won’t take that long.

I’m pulling for her to make it to the 8th, and I believe she will. There are no signs that anything is imminent. In fact, she’s worried she’ll still be pregnant in August. Or September. Like these boys are going to be born with facial hair.

I’ve landed on “Granddad.” I say “I’ve landed…” because Valerie and Carrie-Anne are not thrilled with the choice. It’s not cute enough. “Granddad” is traditional, conservative, historically Texan, and decidedly un-cute. For me, it couldn’t be more perfect.

As the countdown has reached single-digit days until our middle daughter delivers our first grandchildren, here’s a couple of favorite baby pictures of Val.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Having grandkids is a lot different from having your own children. When you’re pregnant with your own kids, you fret and worry and you pray a lot. But you really don’t know anything. You’re mostly clueless. You worry about things that don’t really matter and you fret over stuff that never happens. But when you’re having grandchildren, that’s a whole different deal. Now I’ve experienced some things. We’ve been through some stuff. Now, I know a lot. I worry differently. I fret differently. I pray even more than I did then. And for very different things.

Peace,

Allan

Blessing

June 26, 2025 / / 0 Comments

I’ve been away from my phone this morning.
Nico Harrison hasn’t traded Cooper Flagg yet, has he?

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Think about the very first words our God said to the very first human beings. In the creation account in Genesis 1, the text says “God blessed them.” His very first words to his created humans were words of blessing. He created them and he immediately spoke blessings to them.

I wonder what he said.

We don’t know. The text doesn’t tell us. Maybe it was something like this.

You are very good. I made you in my image. You are mine. You belong to me and I belong to you. You are important to me. You are valuable to me. You matter to me. You are deeply loved by me. 

Then almost immediately, these people take what God says is important–people–and make them not important. They take what God blesses as valuable–people–and make them not valuable. There’s murder and revenge, lying and rape, pride and jealousy, violence and drunkenness–all kinds of evil in our hearts and minds and in our actions against each other.

And in Genesis 12, God says, “No! This is not how it’s going to be! What I think is important is going to be important! What I have blessed as valuable is going to be valuable! I am going to bless Abraham and, through him, I am going to bless all the people of the whole world!”

And Jesus takes all that wickedness, rebellion, and sin, he bears it in himself, all the way to the cross, and he leaves it there. And on that third day, when our Lord is raised to life by the Holy Spirit, he doesn’t speak one word of vengeance or punishment or anger or retribution. The very first word Christ Jesus says to his disciples on that resurrection day is, “Peace. Peace be with you.”

You are very good. You are made in God’s image. You are his. You belong to God and he belongs to you. You are important to God. You are valuable to him. You matter to God. You are deeply loved by God.

And his blessing for you and his promise to you is bigger than all your sin.

I think about David, the king of Israel, the man after God’s own heart. What did God see when he looked at David that day and chose him and blessed him? David was just a kid, kind of an afterthought, just a kid hanging out with the sheep. What did God see in him that day?

Did he see David’s fierce violence or his fierce loyalty?

Did he see David as the great psalmist or the notorious outlaw?

Did he see David’s humility and prayers or his rape and murder and lying and sin?

God saw all of it. Every bit of it. And God still picked David. He chose David and blessed him.

And our God chose you in Jesus Christ before the foundations of the earth.

His blessing for you and his promise to you is bigger than all your sin.

Peace,

Allan

Who God Is

June 25, 2025 / / 0 Comments

We are beginning a shepherd selection process here at the GCR Church to choose a few additional elders to join our leadership group. If you belong to GCR, it is especially important that you visit our shepherding page on the church website for information and resources. If you’re not a GCR member, I would still encourage you to check out this page. You’ll find four sermons we preached back in 2023 about elders–qualifications, processes, term limits and sabbaticals, the “lists” in 1 Timothy and Titus, and what to look for in potential shepherds. You’ll also find several excellent resources that include breakdowns of the “qualities” in those two New Testament “lists,” other Scriptures that are just as important in helping discern the right men for the job, and theological answers to the questions of divorce and remarriage, and an elder’s children. I believe you’ll find it very helpful.

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“God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us… When we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son.” ~Romans 5:8, 10

God insists on doing whatever it takes to have a righteous relationship with us so he tells us exactly who he is. He wants us to know him, so he gives us his full name: compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion, and sin (Exodus 34:6-7). And then he comes here to show us. He goes to the cross to show us that there are no limits to his love and no end to his faithfulness.

The cross is where God receives the worst sin and evil we can muster. All of our sin, all of our evil, everything that’s wrong and broken in us–our God absorbs all of that at the cross and he turns the other cheek and he forgives. In Christ, God reconciled us back to himself. God is not reconnecting himself back to us. It wasn’t God who was alienated from us! It was we who were alienated from God!

Jesus doesn’t die on the cross to change God’s mind about us. Jesus died on the cross to change your mind about God.

When we look at the cross, we don’t see what God does, we see who God is.

God did not require the death of Jesus. It’s that God came to us in person and we said, “Crucify him.” And when we said, “Crucify him,” God said, “Forgive them.”

When Jesus prayed, “Forgive them” for his murderers, he was not acting contrary to the nature of God. This wasn’t something new. He was revealing the eternal nature of God as faithful and forgiving love. We see at the cross that our God would rather die for his enemies than do them harm. That’s who God is.

Peace,

Allan

We’ve Seen It

June 24, 2025 / / 0 Comments

“No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only Begotten, who is at the Father’s side, has made him known.” ~John 1:18

I would love to have this conversation with the writer of John. No one has ever seen God? Come on, man! The Bible tells us all kinds of people have seen God. Abraham had a picnic with God under the oak trees at Mamre. Jacob saw God at the top of that stairway to heaven at Bethel. Moses met God face to face. The 70 elders saw God in Exodus 24–it says it twice!–they saw God and they ate and drank. Isaiah saw God in the temple. Ezekiel saw God at the river in Babylon. Come on, John, lots of people have seen God.

I think John would say, “Look, man, I know all those stories better than you do. But all those visions and dreams, all those epiphanies and theophanies–all of that pales in comparison to this full revelation of God that we have in Jesus! Jesus is the ultimate revelation and full disclosure of who our God is and what he’s all about!”

Jesus himself says it over and over: “I and the Father are one” and “If you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father.”

Paul makes the same claim: “God gave us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6).

Our God wants so badly to have a righteous relationship with us, so he tells us exactly who he is. He gives us his full name: compassionate, gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion, and sin. And then he comes here to show us who he is. Jesus Christ is compassionate, gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness! Faithful to the death, is he not? And forgiving! Jesus reveals an undeniable flesh and blood, on this earth with us, reflection of exactly what God describes as his “glory” on Mt. Sinai in Exodus 34.

And John says, yeah, we’ve seen it.

“We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” ~John 1:14

Peace,

Allan

A Juneteenth Prayer

June 19, 2025 / / 0 Comments

On this Juneteenth holiday, I invite you to join me in prayer to our God for three things:

~ lament to our Lord the atrocities of slavery and acknowledge to him this country’s sins of racism and segregation

~ thank God for the progress we’ve made  and that we are not where we once were, as individuals and in this country

~ personally resolve before God to continue fighting racism and segregation in all its forms in our communities, our families, and our churches

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Juneteenth used to be an exclusively Texas thing. For Texas Monthly’s wonderful profile of Opal Lee, the Fort Worth grandmother who almost single-handedly turned our Lone Star tradition into an official national holiday, click here.

You might also check out the work Jerry Taylor and others are doing at the Carl Spain Center on Race Studies and Spiritual Action on the campus of Abilene Christian University. Their website is here.

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Finally, this Juneteenth prayer I have borrowed from the Archdiocese of Baltimore:

We pray, O Lord, for change. 
Jesus, you revealed God through your wise words and loving deeds, 
and we encounter you still today in the faces of those whom society has pushed to the margins. 
Guide us, through the love you revealed, 
to establish the justice you proclaimed, 
that all peoples might dwell in harmony and peace, 
united by that one love that binds us to each other and to you. 
And most of all, Lord, change our routine worship and work
into genuine encounter with you and our better selves
so that our lives will be changed for the good of all. 
May it be so in Christ Jesus. Amen. 

Peace,

Allan

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