Cross Way Publications Monthly News
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Poem of the Month
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Awesome God
By: Mary Carden
You are an awesome God
To give Your Son,
That we may have life
and our victories won.
Our pains are great,
But so was Yours.
There are times we fall,
But with Your strength we endure.
Our tears flow free,
But You cried too.
We cannot understand, Father,
But we know You do.
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Poet Notables
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1. We were able to cover all of our 2010 expenses, thanks to our wonderful contributors. We would especially like to thank Dina DeRosa, Gabriele Embry, Laurie Jenkins, and Linda Reich for their December donations, which went towards renewing our domain name for another year.
2. Welcome to our December 2010 members. Please be sure to stop by their Poet Pages to enjoy their poetry:
Jamie S. Alexander
Paul Ballinger
David Carroll
John and Bonnie Corley
Van Davis Corwith
Emily S. Deshotel
Harold Heater JR
Branch Isole
Stacie Michelle Lawless
Cheryl Leadbeater
Dzunisani Ian D. Mhlongo
Marco Osiris
John L. Stevens
Steven J. Turner
Roy Weaver
Timothy Whitt
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Staff Notes
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1. Goodbye to 2010! It was a busy year, and we had many new poets register to share their words with us. Thank you to our site monitors, Gabriele Embry and Laurie Jenkins for responding to registration requests so quickly. We are pleased to report that our domain and webhosting g expenses have been paid, and we will be able to keep the website open for at least another year. We would like to thank those who contributed financially to the site for making this possible. We welcome you to 2011, and hope everyone will be very blessed.
2. We are developing a new Front Page for our website, and will be creating an "In Memory Of" section for Jerry Hoffman, the founder of Cross Way Publications. If you knew Jerry and would like to include a quote or short poem about him for his page, please email us at webmaster@christianpoetry.org.
3. The "comments" area of our website has been hit with spam again. We are monitoring it and trying to delete any invalid comments as they are posted, but please email us if any get through to your page.
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Scripture of the Month
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Habakkuk 3:3-6 (NKJV)
3 God came from Teman,
The Holy One from Mount Paran. Selah
His glory covered the heavens,
And the earth was full of His praise.
4 His brightness was like the light;
He had rays flashing from His hand,
And there His power was hidden.
5 Before Him went pestilence,
And fever followed at His feet.
6 He stood and measured the earth;
He looked and startled the nations.
And the everlasting mountains were scattered,
The perpetual hills bowed.
His ways are everlasting.
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This Month's Devotional Thought
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Our God is an awesome God! The prophet Habakkuk expresses the greatness of God in poetic fashion. He speaks of God's glory, His brightness, His flashing rays, and His power. Our God measures the earth - He knows its dimensions and divides the allotments; He knows its volume, its density; He weighs it: He weighs the activities of its inhabitants, He knows the bulk and the level of our sinfulness and the distance we stray from His will. With the purest justice He measures out what is the proper sentence - always tempered with mercy. And so Habakkuk reveals that He comes surrounded with that which we dread: pestilence before Him and fever behind Him - with the idea of withholding it from some while imposing it on others - which startles the nations: Their defenses become as naught, they thought they were like mountains, but they crumble before them. Who is it that can cross the everlasting God and expect no repercussions?
Our God is an awesome God! The glory of our God is an "unapproachable light in whom no man has seen or can see", (I Timothy 6:16); and so it has been veiled from us. The prophet of old put it like this: "He had rays flashing from His hand, and there His power was hidden", (Habakkuk 3:4). The power of God is all-powerful and infinitely immeasurable but finitely exposed. We are given the tiniest of glimpses into the power of God. The God who created all things and is now sustaining all things, by the word of His power, is incalculably more omnipotent than what He has demonstrated in His work of creation or in the way He now holds it all together. Nothing is too difficult for Him.
A display of the power of God can be seen as we look to Jesus who was able to lay down His life for us and take it back up again, (John 10:17-18). He died for our sins and rose again for our justification. His saving power forgives us and wipes our slates clean, and it only comes to us as we are spiritually quickened to faith in the finished work of Christ - by His life-giving power.
Do we have a diminished idea of how great our God is? Is our God too small? Do we sometimes assume God to be no greater than our own imagination? If God were no greater than what we can imagine Him to be, then He would not be God. Our limited capacity to understand Him or His mighty works is, in itself, an indication that the Almighty God is to be worshipped as the One who is indeed Almighty.
To say that God is Almighty is to say that He can effortlessly do anything that does not contradict Himself. He can do anything as easily as He can do anything else. When we speak of His majesty and power we must remember that nothing He does is hard for Him to do, depletes His energy, or stretches His capability.
We would do well to carry this thought with us into the New Year. We will all be faced with a host of unforeseen challenges in our lives, but our God already knows what they will be and He, by His power and grace, will undergird us to meet and overcome even the most critical and serous things. Remember the words of the palmist: "The Lord is the strength of my life", (Psalm 27:1). - His desire is to be our strength. If we could only begin to touch the surface of that notion - to understand the strength of the One who is the strength of our lives. We can lay it all on Him - commit it all over to His care, and see how the hidden power of God comes alive, works His miracles, and meets our needs as He knows best.
If we weaken our perception of God's power, we also weaken our faith. If we do not recognize His boundless power we cannot trust Him to do "exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think", (Ephesians 3:20).
Philip Hoffman
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Quote of the Month
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"The actual exercise of God's power does not represent its limits. God can do all he wills (and does) but need not do all he can (and does not). That is to say, God's infinite power is manifested in the works of creation, but is not exhausted by them. God could have created more than he has, if he so pleased. What God has done, therefore, is no measure of what he could have done or can do."
From Sam Storms
