In my weekly Works & Wonders column, I combine a brief devotional with other interesting and uplifting bits and pieces I gleaned throughout the week. I hope you enjoy this week’s collection! It includes:
- Our Being and God’s
- John MacArthur’s Influence
- Where There Are No Rats
- Hand of You
- The Story of SermonAudio
- Hear Now Our Hearts
1.
Our Being and God’s
Each human is a being. God is a being. But there is a crucial distinction between our being and God’s: God’s is self-existent, but ours is created. God is the one and only whose being exists before, beyond, and outside of what has been created. He is the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end, the One who is without creation or creator, the One who exists by his own will alone, the One who has always been and will always be. And while we, too, have being, ours is finite, limited, dependent, created, and mortal. Our existence is derived from God’s, since “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). Our being, compared to God’s, is like molehills are to mountains, as puddles are to oceans, as fireflies are to stars in the night sky. Or as Thomas Goodwin says, as a shadow is to the object that casts it—no less real, but only a pale, imperfect imitation.1 True Being belongs only to the One who has always been and will always be.
2.
John MacArthur’s Influence
I thoroughly enjoyed this video of well-known Christians simply explaining how John MacArthur influenced them. You’ll see lots of familiar faces like H. B. Charles, Al Mohler, Paul Washer, and many more.
3.
Where There Are No Rats
I couldn’t quite decide if this was a better fit for Saturday or Sunday, but opted for Sunday: How Alberta Eradicated Rats. The article explains how almost every jurisdiction in the world has been overcome by rats at one time or another, yet the Canadian province of Alberta has managed to keep them at bay. “Alberta, a Canadian province, is rat free, and has been for more than seventy years. On a map of global rat distribution, Alberta is a blank spot in an otherwise unbroken sea of rodents.” Alberta has a few geographic advantages that help them in this battle, but they also expend a great deal of effort to keep the rats away.
Other places have eliminated rats too: South Georgia and a handful of New Zealand islands have done so to protect endangered birds. But these are tiny, uninhabited landmasses surrounded by ocean, with no permanent human population to speak of. Alberta, by contrast, has almost five million people and two cities of over a million each. It shares land borders on all sides with provinces and states that rats colonized in the 1950s, and its farmland and trade links make it an obvious target. Yet it stopped them. After Antarctica, Alberta is the largest rat-free area on Earth.
4.
Hand of You
Someone told me about Hand of You, a neat site that allows you to create a font of your own handwriting. You simply draw on the screen, and it will make a font for you. Why? So you can add a personal touch to typewritten letters, I suppose. I think it’s a neat idea.
5.
The Story of SermonAudio
I expect most of us have listened to a sermon from SermonAudio in the past. If we haven’t done so recently, we almost certainly did back in the days before every church and ministry hosted its own sermons. Either way, SermonAudio is a great ministry with a long history. This short documentary explains where it originated, how it has remained effective, and how it is future-proofing itself against potential future censorship.
6.
Hear Now Our Hearts
I have linked to a couple of songs by Celtic Worship, and don’t intend to stop now! They recently released “Hear Now Our Hearts,” and I think you’ll enjoy it as much as I did.
- “The true name of Being is proper to God only; the creatures are in themselves but shadows and appearances of beings. God alone is.” ↩︎
