Barbara Roberts

Every serious believer has prayed for God to kill their flesh. When we pray that prayer, we expect an anesthetic or a kill switch. We imagine a painless transaction where God quietly turns down the volume on our worst impulses, leaving our pride and self-image undisturbed. Instead, He answers with a mirror and a scalpel. We often approach God believing we already know where the flesh is weak. We identify it only by its loud, embarrassing symptoms: an unexpected temper, a secret spiral, or a compulsive habit. We point to the visible stain and assume we’ve diagnosed the disease. But those symptoms are often merely the tip of an iceberg. Beneath them lies a massive stronghold of entitlement, self-preservation, and an obsession with being sovereign over our own lives. Before the flesh can be put to death, its true perimeter has to be mapped. And mapping it means total, humiliating exposure. The mirror is the word of God, and James warns that the man who glances into it and walks away forgets what he saw (James 1:23-24). When this prayer is answered, He doesn't let us walk away. C.S. Lewis described this bargain in Mere Christianity. As a boy with a toothache, he knew that asking his mother for aspirin meant being taken to the dentist the next morning, he couldn't get the one without the other. We go to God begging for painkillers just to sleep through the night, and like the dentist, He refuses to stop at comfort. He goes straight for the root, refusing to leave the rot inside us. When that divine surgery begins, the flesh never lies down and dies with dignity. Starved of oxygen, it thrashes like a cornered animal, manufacturing sudden panic, defensiveness, and desperate cravings. When God sends the help you asked for, a spouse asking an honest question, a mentor seeing through your facade, an accountability partner refusing to flatter you; your dying ego perceives executioners where God sent allies. To protect itself from crucifixion, the flesh bites whatever hand is closest. Many friendships and marriages become collateral damage simply because an exposed ego is swinging wildly in the dark. So what must our posture be when the exposure hits, the ground gives way, and we begin to spiral? Our natural instinct is to negotiate our way off the table: "Lord, make it stop. Put the mask back on. Give me relief." But true mortification requires that you stop defending what God has marked for death. Paul says it is by the Spirit that we put to death the deeds of the body (Romans 8:13), which means the scalpel is in His hand and our only assignment is to stop wrestling Him for it. Heroic willpower has no part here; the posture is trembling, defenseless stillness. It is the agonizing willingness to agree with God’s verdict about who you actually are apart from Him. When exposure makes you dizzy with shame and the urge to lash out rises, you stop bargaining for an exit. The plea nust shift from relief to endurance: the grace to stay still while the rot is cut out, the restraint not to strike the people God sent to steady you, and the resolve not to crawl off the table until the work is finished. If you asked God to kill your flesh and you suddenly feel unmasked, disoriented, and weaker than you have ever been, do not mistake exposure for abandonment, or confrontation with your weakness for defeat. The prayer did not fail. God just took you at your word, and He loves you too much to patch up the very self you asked Him to crucify.

The resurrection absolutely must be scrutinised. If it is untrue Apostle Paul himself said Christians are the most miserable and doomed people on earth. We hinge our entire lives on it. It is the absolute foundation of Christianity so it must be heavily checked. But with that said it is incredibly hilarious to watch a Muslim scrutinise the resurrection using standards that instantly vaporise their own religion. The Islamic equivalent of the resurrection, in terms of foundational significance is Muhammad in the cave of Hira. Your own trusted sources explicitly state he fled that cave terrified and suicidal. He genuinely believed he had been attacked by a demon. He was entirely convinced he was possessed until he was talked out of it by his wife Khadija. She and her blind Christian cousin repackaged a demonic panic attack into a divine encounter. Now one might ask what was even Khadija's basis to know it was an angel and not a demon? According to credible Islamic traditions attributed to Ibn Ishaq, Khadija attempted to test the entity through an improvised veil experiment. Essentially she uncovered herself, and when Muhammad claimed the entity had disappeared, she concluded that it must have been an angel rather than a devil because angels do not look at unveiled women 😂😂😂. Think about that. The foundation of your faith rests, in part, on an experience nobody else witnessed, interpreted by a wife who was not present at the encounter, and reinforced through a test in which the only evidence was Muhammad’s own report of whether the unseen entity remained in the room. Your biggest physical sign from this founding incident is the splitting of the moon, an extraordinary astronomical event that conveniently no other civilisation on the entire planet witnessed. Not a single Chinese, Persian or Byzantine astronomer noticed the moon cleave in half yet you expect the world to believe it. As much as there is a temptation to meticulously defend the resurrection it is hard to take you seriously when you look at the moral fruits of your foundation. The disciples of Christ went out and performed highly attested public miracles. Paul raised a man from the dead in the middle of a crowded congregation. More importantly they lived the morally restrained lives you expect from men transformed by God. Paul went from a violent persecutor to enduring torture for peace taking no wives and amassing no wealth. Peter and the rest did the exact same. Muhammad changed for the worse with every ounce of power he amassed. He built a harem of wives including a nine year old child and his own adopted son’s wife who was also his cousin. He committed brutal acts of violence and consistently produced convenient revelations for his own sexual and political gain. Even Aisha famously mocked him in Sahih al Bukhari by stating she noticed his god did not hesitate to fulfill his desires. If you reject the resurrection for a want of evidence then you simply cannot be a Muslim. It makes zero logical sense. The foundational credibility of Islam is exponentially less reliable. Even if we were to assume the absolute worst of Christian historical attestation, the Islamic foundation remains a literal joke by comparison.

Agree, it’s a bit juvenile. Far too bizarre when living in Kansas City & dealing with very real corruption. Must we beat the Wizard of Oz metaphor to death? I personally love monkeys anyway. Enablers of violence, abuse & crime are complicit in committing harm, no sugar-coating it

In Luke 1, Mary asked one of the most consequential questions in Scripture: "How will this be?" It stands right beside Moses at the burning bush asking, "What shall I tell them your name is?" The two could hardly be more different. Moses wanted an identity; Mary wanted a mechanism. Yet God answered both the same way, in different words: He revealed Himself. Moses asked on behalf of an enslaved nation looking backward: Who is behind the promise? Mary asked on behalf of creaturely limitation looking forward: How does an untouched womb bear life? Mary's question carried no cynicism. As a daughter of the covenant, her reasoning was shaped by Scripture. Zechariah asked how he could be sure and was struck silent, while Mary asked how it would happen and was handed a sign she never sought. When God sets out to convince her, He proves Himself a master teacher who honours human dignity. An almighty force imposing its will could never do that. Gabriel begins with the mechanics: "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you." God could have stopped there. He owes no mortal an explanation. But ending at verse 35 would leave us with pure, unvarnished omnipotence, an "abracadabra." Pagan deities operated on raw force, which only compels terrified compliance. It takes character to win willing surrender, and omnipotence alone cannot produce trust. So He paired His power with His character. Throughout Israel's history, barren wombs were Yahweh's signature territory. Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, Hannah: major turning points in redemption emerged where biology had failed. Sarah was the first testimony. God could have said, "Remember Sarah?" For covenant memory, that was enough. Mary knew the scroll. Yet after four centuries of prophetic silence, ancient miracles can feel like dead history. A God who acted two thousand years ago has a résumé; a God who acts right now has a living character. And character does not rest on memory, character repeats itself seamlessly. And then God gave Mary a name: Elizabeth. A woman past childbearing age, already six months pregnant in the hill country of Judea. Mary hurried there and encountered an immediate, Spirit-filled confirmation, blessed by a woman who had never heard Gabriel speak. To Moses, God spoke the name: "I AM." To Mary, God demonstrated it. He showed her that the God who opened barren wombs in Genesis had not retired. He was still doing what He had always done, only a few days away. Elizabeth was the bridge. If God could revive an old, barren womb, Mary could trust Him to overshadow an untouched one. Moses received the same kind of answer. After the name came his objections. When he protested that he was slow of speech and asked God to send someone else, God answered with a man: Aaron the Levite, already on his way to meet him and glad to see him. Elizabeth was already six months along, and Aaron was already walking. God had set the help in motion before either of them knew to ask for it. When Gabriel closes in verse 37 with "For no word from God will ever fail," he deliberately echoes Genesis 18:14, God's question to Abraham about Sarah: "Is anything too hard for the Lord?" The Greek confirms it: Luke reuses adynateō and rhēma, straight from the Septuagint's Genesis 18:14. Gabriel tied Sarah to Elizabeth, and Elizabeth to Mary. Most of us bring God the same vertical request Moses and Mary brought. Yet when He answers, He places the answer inside people. Moses got a brother already on the road. Mary got a priest's household, staying three months with a woman who confirmed everything Gabriel declared. God does not only work miracles from above. He settles us among His people, shows His character in their company, and works around us at the exact moment He works within us. When we ask Him how, part of the answer may already be walking towards us.

A God too great to suffer cannot be the God of suffering people. Let Him be the God of angels and of bliss. A God of suffering people must suffer. Any god that lays claim to creation but has never braved incarnation is a coward. And any righteousness that has never been tested in the flesh is merely theoretical. The Creator set the parameters of human consciousness: he gave us fragile bodies, nerves that register agony, and finite minds. Then He gave us our basic moral vocabulary: Courage means facing danger when you have something to lose. Integrity means holding the line when it costs you. Love means making yourself vulnerable for someone else. You do not get to build the room, lock the door from the outside, demand that we live by your definitions at the cost of our lives, and then claim you are exempt from the meaning of words you invented. Servants of gods who have never suffered tell us not to judge their gods by earthly experience and promise that the afterlife will make all things right That promise collapses on its own terms. A ruler's character does not do a complete 180 at the grave. If a god stays safe while we bleed, his eternity reads as hush money, a payoff tossed at broken creatures to buy their silence. If he can dismiss horrific grief down here as an inscrutable mystery, what stops him from doing the exact same thing ten billion years into eternity? You cannot trust the promises of a sovereign whose moral integrity you are forbidden from verifying. The ancients never asked their gods to suffer. Their deities ruled through raw power and total detachment; nobody expected heaven to have a conscience. It took modern exhaustion for humanity to finally put the charge as a dare: if you think this existence is so easy, take on flesh and do it yourself. The staggering reality of the gospel is that God called our bluff two thousand years before we were brave enough to speak it. And He did not send a surrogate. If God sent an angel or a prophet into our realm while He waited outside, the charge of cowardice would still stand. Christianity alone claims that the uncreated Architect entered His own building (John 1:14). Christ refused to treat divinity as armor (Philippians 2:6-8). Because the children had flesh and blood, He shared in the exact same humanity (Hebrews 2:14). He sweated blood in Gethsemane, the Lawgiver stood in the dock of a corrupt court, and the Author let the actors nail Him to the stage. When He beat death, He kept the damage. He showed Thomas the puncture wounds in His hands and His side (John 20:27). Even when the veil of eternity is pulled back in Revelation 5:6, the figure at the center of the throne is a Lamb standing, as though it had been slain. The collateral for eternity has been posted in historical blood. This is why suffering people can be overwhelmingly proud to call this God our God. Every other faith asks us to spend our lives apologizing for an aloof deity, rationalizing His absence and defending a spectator who never stepped into the fire. The cross kills that shame forever. We bow to a King who left the bunker, walked into the shrapnel, and earned the right to look a suffering race in the eye. When suffering humanity stands at the end of time and asks heaven, "What do you know about pain?", Christ will hold out scarred hands.

A staggering number of David’s Psalms circle a single, relentless demand: that God annihilate the wicked, and do it quickly. The man who prayed them would not have survived the answer. He asks God to break their teeth, drag them into the nets they hid for others, and strike with terrifying speed. When heaven moves too slowly, he presses again: Why do the wicked prosper? How long, O Lord? At the time, David’s moral geometry was simple. He was a fugitive hiding in caves while King Saul hunted him with the machinery of an empire. In Adullam, the lines were clean. David was the righteous victim; his enemies were the oppressors; his prayers were the desperate cries of a man begging God to level an impossible playing field. Then David got the throne. And the geometry collapsed. From the palace balcony, he becomes the very archetype he had spent years cursing. He spots Bathsheba. He takes her. When she becomes pregnant, he writes a murder contract, forcing her husband, Uriah, to carry his own death sentence to the front lines. Uriah dies. David takes the widow. Then came nearly a year in which Scripture records no confession, no repentance, and no confrontation. David lived under the comfortable presumption of sovereign immunity. He had become the powerful man who crushes the weak and assumed heaven didn’t notice. When Nathan enters the throne room, he tells a story: a rich landowner with vast herds steals and slaughters a poor neighbor’s single, cherished pet lamb. David’s prosecutorial instinct detonates. He flies into a rage and passes sentence: The man deserves to die, and must restore the lamb fourfold because he showed no pity. Nathan looks at him and delivers the four words that should haunt anyone in love with their own moral outrage: “You are the man.” David had laid his own trap. He declared a death sentence on himself, and the fourfold restitution he demanded became the currency of his family’s destruction. Four of his sons died untimely deaths. The sword never left his house. The pit David dug was the pit he fell into. The great theological irony of David’s life though is that if God had answered David’s earlier prayers at the speed he demanded, David would have been dead before Bathsheba’s child drew its first breath. If heaven operated on the hair-trigger timeline of human indignation, judgment would have struck the palace the moment Uriah fell. David would never have made it to Nathan. No space to confront his depravity, no season to mourn, and no life left to utter, “I have sinned against the Lord,” no breath left to write Psalm 51. The very slowness of God that David spent years complaining about was the only reason he survived his own reign. The cry of “How long, O Lord?” is not foreign to Scripture. The martyrs beneath the altar in Revelation raise it too. What Scripture never grants us is a stopwatch on everyone’s guilt except our own. We are recklessly impatient in our prayers for justice. When wronged, we demand cosmic vindication yesterday. We treat God’s hesitation as indifference, or worse, incompetence. We forget that if God answered our prayers for judgment with the speed we demand for others, none of us would survive our hypocrisy. The standard we want applied to our enemies would incinerate us when our private failures catch up with our public righteousness. The delay of God is mercy with a long horizon: the terrifying, tender patience of a God who refuses to execute the wicked on our schedule because He intends to leave room for repentance on His. Before you ask heaven to move fast against the evil in front of you, make sure you can survive the speed of your own theology.

The 7 chosen in Acts 6 all have Greek names, Stephen and Philip among them. The complaint came from the Greek speaking widows, so the people feeling overlooked got leaders from their own side. jayms.com/bible-study-tools-…

The family court is more than just an old boys club. It's the high temple of the patriarchy. It takes a mother who has left an abusive man and forces her to hand her children back to him. It silences her. It blames her for protecting them. It treats his desire for control as a right and her resistance as the problem. This is not justice. It is social engineering. A system designed to maintain male authority over women and children long after the relationship has ended. The family court doesn’t just fail to protect. It actively reinforces who is allowed to have power inside the family. 📚The System Is The Weapon amzn.eu/d/0fMYKCDT 🆘️ If you're in court or at risk of being in court instruct me directly: nataliepage.co.uk/cases/

In Romans 7:24, Paul laments, "What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death?" The fact that he asks ‘who’ instead of ‘what’ is the exact point where Christianity breaks away from every other religion in history. The modern secularist denies the need for spiritual salvation, yet feels the crushing weight of reality. Their defining epiphany of adulthood is the harsh discovery that nobody is coming to rescue them. We inhabit a wretched world, and the prevailing logic dictates that to survive it, you must build your own raft and navigate the storm alone. Conversely, almost every religious or philosophical framework operates on the axis of a what. What can save me? A ritual, a moral code, or a disciplined practice. We naturally prefer a what because a system allows us to remain in the driver's seat. It feeds our human pride. If redemption is merely a mechanism we can master, we retain control. We call the shots. If we execute the instructions correctly, we earn the reward and take the credit. The fundamental flaw of a what is that it possesses no agency. A system cannot reach into a grave and pull a dead man into the light. It always presupposes that you have the internal horsepower to save yourself. Even when other faiths point to a divine creator, that deity typically functions only as a lawgiver. They provide the instruction manual and the scale to weigh your deeds. They stand safely on the shoreline and shout instructions on how to swim, but the burden of performance remains entirely on your shoulders. The god of a system is just the author of a what. Christianity abandons this premise entirely by introducing a true Who. For someone to save you, they cannot be trapped in the exact same woeful condition. A drowning man cannot save another drowning man. Your savior cannot be confined to the same sinking ship. You need an outside actor who has already conquered the water and is standing on solid ground. A Who demands absolute surrender, stripping you of your autonomy and forcing you to admit total spiritual bankruptcy. When Paul reached his breaking point, staring at the exhausting civil war between his flesh and spirit, he did not ask for a better system or a more optimized theology. He recognized that an instruction manual is useless to a corpse. A dead man does not resurrect by studying the laws of anatomy, he requires an outside actor. To cry out for a person is to step completely out of the driver's seat. It means you are no longer the active agent in the transaction. You become the recipient. The agonizing pressure to perform evaporates because the heavy lifting is handed over to a substitute. Paul names that substitute in the very next breath: "Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord." Jesus is the only Who qualified to execute the rescue because He is not trapped in the wreckage, and He is the only God willing to get His hands dirty. He is not a distant judge shouting swimming techniques from the shore. He is the outside actor who dove into the current, absorbed the penalty, and walked out of the grave under His own power. Every other system demands that you build your own ladder to heaven. Jesus stepped into the broken tent with you and became the door.