The Lord’s provision doesn’t rest on the strength of our gratitude.
A Bit of Earth is about the garden, but it’s also about us—as we are made from dirt.
This is an excerpt from Broken Bonds: A Novel of the Reformation by Amy Mantravadi (1517 Publishing, 2024), pgs. 24-27

All Articles

God has gifted pastors with a terrible privilege. We’re invited to go inside peoples’ pain. A stranger stands emotionally naked in front of us begging, “I can’t get what he did out of my head. Please, help me!”
When I was a young boy I was constantly trying to assert my superiority over my siblings. I had to be the best at everything, and it was easy to believe I was the best.
Jesus is the heart of the Gospel, and the Gospel is Good News. But it is always Good News that comes to us best on the lips of another.
With a new year comes many new things. In the corporate world, we again introduced to our yearly performance review.
Just as we believe ourselves to be forgiven because God sees us in Christ, so to forgive others is to see them as God sees them in Christ. To forgive, in other words, is to put God’s eyes in our eyes and our eyes in God’s eyes.
I have this really terrible habit. A habit that involves my car and days-old coffee and a willpower so weak that nine out of ten coffee cups get left behind.
How long, O Lord, will the voice of children’s blood cry out to You from the ground?
The rich young ruler’s inquiry to the Lord Jesus in Mark 10:17–22 (along with Matt. 19:16–22; Luke 10:25–28) remains increasingly prescient for us today.
Blood is the thing. In the Scriptures, sin must be covered or "atoned for" as it's called, by blood.
Some things, once they are deemed disgusting or contaminated, permanently carry that quality with them. These things are even thought to be “contagious,” negatively affecting whatever they come into contact with.
In a world where science tells us that everything is deteriorating and we’re all one day closer to our physical death it’s nice to think that there might be something we are getting better at.
At the Passover, when Jesus said, "Take, eat, this is my body... take, drink, this is the New Testament in my blood, which is given and shed for you for the forgiveness of sins," he wasn't inventing a "new" thing.