Zach turned 12 yesterday and that means it was an important day in the Gregory tribe.  Years ago we borrowed the idea of a bar berith (son of the covenant) party from our friends, the Fosters.  This is not your normal birthday party, but is a special time where family and friends gather to encourage the young boy or girl (a bat berith) in their transition into young manhood or womanhood.  It is also a time to charge them to not make life about themselves, but about serving the redemptive purposes of God.

 It is important for us as parents to provide some transitional times in our kids lives to help them move along.  It is maybe more important for us to help them realize that life is not about them.  This party does both and is cool because it includes our extended family and our community.  It encouraged Zach  and also provided him with a lot of accountability.  We don’t do a whole lot real well, but this bar berith sure seems to be a good thing.  Each of our children has looked forward to their 12th birthday like no other and remember it like no other (even though I even ask them to memorize a portion of Scripture and recite it to everyone.  Zach had Psalm 1).

This also provides a great excuse to buy our sons some really cool swords.  These only have symbolic significance of course. (with all apologies to the nice cactus we had in AZ)  The sharp edges just give us a chance to talk about being a useful tool in God’s hands (and safety).

If you would ever like to know more about this kind of thing feel free to give us a call.

If you haven’t ever read Oswald Chambers let me encourage you to find “My Utmost for His Highest” and work through it.  If you have spent time with his challenging insights in the past, maybe this would be a good year to do so again.  Here is a stout word from today’s entry:

“For Christ sent me not to baptize, but to preach the gospel.” 1 Corinthians 1:17

Paul states here that the call of God is to preach the gospel; but remember what Paul means by “the gospel,” viz., the reality of Redemption in our Lord Jesus Christ. We are apt to make sanctification the end-all of our preaching. Paul alludes to personal experience by way of illustration, never as the end of the matter. We are nowhere commissioned to preach salvation or sanctification; we are commissioned to lift up Jesus Christ (John 12:32). It is a travesty to say that Jesus Christ travailed in Redemption to make me a saint. Jesus Christ travailed in Redemption to redeem the whole world, and place it unimpaired and rehabilitated before the throne of God. The fact that Redemption can be experienced by us is an illustration of the power of the reality of Redemption, but that is not the end of Redemption. If God were human, how sick to the heart and weary He would be of the constant requests we make for our salvation, for our sanctification. We tax His energies from morning till night for things for ourselves - some thing for me to be delivered from! When we touch the bedrock of the reality of the Gospel of God, we shall never bother God any further with little personal plaints.

The one passion of Paul’s life was to proclaim the Gospel of God. He welcomed heart-breaks, disillusionments, tribulation, for one reason only, because these things kept him in unmoved devotion to the Gospel of God.

I don’t know about you, but I would benefit from re-reading this every morning and keeping it at the front of my brain.