Month: June 2025

Links for the Weekend (2025-06-13)

Posted onAuthorRyan Higginbottom

Each Friday, I’ll post links to 3–5 resources from around the web you may want to check out.

How Do I Leave My Sin at the Foot of the Cross?

Katie Laitkep offers some advice related to this common Christian expression: leaving your sin at the cross.

You must continue to rely on Jesus for everything—day by day, moment by moment. This is the part we often get wrong. We start out at the cross, knowing we’re in need of God’s mercy, but then we begin to drift––trying to manage, fix, or perfect ourselves apart from the grace that saved us. We proclaim the first part of Galatians 2:20 with our lips: “I have been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.” But if our lives told the story, they might read more like this: “The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God controlling everything myself.”

Taking a Closer Look at Psalm 22

Daniel Stevens offers a helpful overview of Psalm 22 and then looks at the way the author of Hebrews quotes this psalm. (There is a video accompanying this article.)

And even for apologetic purposes, Psalm 22 often gets used because here, in this psalm of David, we do seem to have a description of Jesus’s death at the crucifixion—that his joints are stretched out, his heart melts away like wax, and we even find within it people dividing his garments and casting lots (Ps. 22:18). So Psalm 22 does meet us with the crucifixion scene. It is a prophecy, even as it is a psalm, telling us of how Jesus was to die. And Jesus wanted us to see it that way.

Battling Negative Body Image

Many Christians—indeed many humans—struggle with negative body image. However, Christians have tools to combat such negative messages.

The trouble is that a negative body image rarely remains contained to occasional frustration—it quickly grows to impact how we function. Adverse thoughts about how our bodies look often spur negative feelings about ourselves—about our value, our ability to contribute to society, and even our perception of our worth to others. To make things worse, those feelings may even lead to bodily harm as a way to cope with difficult emotions or to force our bodies to measure up to the desired ideal.

On the WPCA Blog This Week

This week on the blog we published an article I wrote called Joy: An Engine of Christian Hope. If you haven’t already seen it, check it out!

Note: Washington Presbyterian Church and the editors of this blog do not necessarily endorse all content produced by the individuals or groups referenced here. 

Joy: An Engine of Christian Hope

Posted onAuthorRyan Higginbottom

In sorrow, we reach for hope because we see how far we are from the fulfillment of God’s promises. We can harness this distance to long for what we do not have.

Joy is a more pleasant path to hope. We can turn God’s delightful provisions into opportunities for hope: we have a small taste now of the promised full experience yet to come and we can train ourselves to look ahead.

The joyful engine of hope can be dangerous, however. Few of us are tempted to seek out sorrow in order to grow in hope, yet that is a pitfall where joy is concerned. We may delight in the person, experience, feeling, or blessing of God so much that we forget it is from God. Many people have valued the gift over the Giver and so put their hearts in peril.

May we all grow in Christian hope, seeing in each blessing the future that is to come. Here are three concrete examples, in which I link joyful experiences to what God has promised about the future.

Feasting

It’s no accident that almost every celebration involves good food, where we elevate meals from mere sustenance to something special and delicious. It should be no surprise that the Bible points to a grand feast in the new earth.

Then I heard what seemed to be the voice of a great multitude, like the roar of many waters and like the sound of mighty peals of thunder, crying out,
“Hallelujah!
For the Lord our God
    the Almighty reigns.
Let us rejoice and exult
    and give him the glory,
for the marriage of the Lamb has come,
    and his Bride has made herself ready;
it was granted her to clothe herself
    with fine linen, bright and pure”—
for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints.
And the angel said to me, “Write this: Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.” And he said to me, “These are the true words of God.” (Revelation 19:6–9)

When God’s people (the Bride) are united with his Son (the Lamb), the celebration will be glorious, and it will involve food. When we are gathered around a joyful table now, we can catch the scent of the wonderful aromas to come.

Fellowship

Most Christians have probably shared conversations or experiences with other believers that leave them overflowing with gratitude. There’s nothing like connecting with others who share the deepest and highest desires of our hearts.

And while “fellow pilgrims” are given to us in this life for encouragement and help, we don’t leave fellowship behind at death. We will also have friends and companions in the new earth.

Since we have the same spirit of faith according to what has been written, “I believed, and so I spoke,” we also believe, and so we also speak, knowing that he who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus and bring us with you into his presence. (2 Corinthians 4:13–14)

We will go with others into the presence of God.

When Jesus heard this, he marveled and said to those who followed him, “Truly, I tell you, with no one in Israel have I found such faith. I tell you, many will come from east and west and recline at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, (Matthew 8:10–11)

As God gathers in those from many nations, they will “recline at table’ with each other and with the patriarchs.

The sweet fellowship we share with others in Christ on earth is a foretaste of our heavenly communion.

Rest

If we could bottle up the feelings of contentment, relaxation, and peace that come on vacation, we’d have a best-selling product on our hands. Even a weekend or a long night of uninterrupted sleep can be an enormous blessing.

This is the blessing of reprieve. Broadly speaking, we are looking for relief from the curse pronounced to our first parents in the garden. As many have noted, this is not the curse of work, but it is a curse upon work. And sometimes we groan under those thorns and thistles when we just want to make it through another day.

Rest is good, and it offers a glimpse of heaven.

No longer will there be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him. (Revelation 22:3)

It’s hard for us even to imagine a world in which nothing is cursed, but such a world is coming!

For if Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken of another day later on. So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, for whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from his works as God did from his. (Hebrews 4:8–10)

We need not work for our salvation; Jesus’s work accomplishes this for us. This rest pictures the Sabbath rest for God’s people. As tired and worn out and frustrated as you feel now, there is rest for you in the future.

Joy to Hope

All of the joys God gives us in this life are blessings by themselves.

But many of these joys are joyful precisely because they give us a small picture of larger masterpiece. If hope is the joyful expectation that God will keep his promises, then these small, temporary blessings can direct our attention to our fuller, lasting future.

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Links for the Weekend (2025-06-06)

Posted onAuthorRyan Higginbottom

Each Friday, I’ll post links to 3–5 resources from around the web you may want to check out.

Is There a Future for Church Grandpas and Grandmas?

Trevin Wax reflects on his family history of Bible readers and wants to cast a vision for creating future church grandmas and grandpas.

The beautiful truth about church grandparents is that anyone can become a super-reader of the Bible. You don’t need a degree. My grandparents weren’t part of the “knowledge class.” Some went to college; others didn’t. Some read widely; others were content with Reader’s Digest or the latest from John Grisham. I probably won’t be discussing Dostoevsky’s The Idiot or Kierkegaard’s existentialism with my grandmothers anytime soon. But we sure can talk about the Gospels. They know the stories of Jesus backward and forward. They’ve immersed themselves in the Psalms. They explore the Epistles as regularly and perhaps more reverently than most New Testament scholars. The Bible is life to them.

How do I encourage and help my child who is shy and anxious in social situations?

Here’s a helpful video from a CCEF counselor about how to help children who are shy and anxious. (There is a video with a transcript at this link.)

So preparing ahead of time is going to be essential. And how do you prepare? What do you do? Well, it’s helpful to encourage your son or daughter to put into words both what scares them in these settings and what they want to have happen, what they want to do in that particular setting that they’re going into. And when you start to talk to your son or daughter about what’s going on inside, what they’re fearing, what scares them, and what they’re looking forward to, well, you’ll see essentially two things, both fears and then desires.

Where Two Are Gathered

Our poem of the week: Where Two Are Gathered, by Coby Dolloff. This poem reflects on the presence of the Holy Spirit when Christians gather together.

Note: Washington Presbyterian Church and the editors of this blog do not necessarily endorse all content produced by the individuals or groups referenced here.