Calvary Baptist Church Ennis Tx

09/07/2026

Matthew Ch.9 Wednesday lets have a great conversation.

09/06/2026

Isaiah 66:7-9 The Great Miracle of Restoration

09/05/2026

09/04/2026

**Title:** Before You Could Ask
**Scripture:** Isaiah 66:7-9 (KJV)

There are moments when the answer arrives before you've finished forming the question. The door opens before your hand finds the handle. Help appears before the need fully surfaces. These aren't coincidences. They're fingerprints.

The prophet Isaiah recorded something almost too extraordinary to sit with quietly:

> "Before she travailed, she brought forth; before her pain came, she was delivered of a man child. Who hath heard such a thing? who hath seen such things? Shall the earth be made to bring forth in one day? or shall a nation be born at once? for as soon as Zion travailed, she brought forth her children. Shall I bring to the birth, and not cause to bring forth? saith the Lord: shall I cause to bring forth, and shut the womb? saith thy God."
> — Isaiah 66:7-9 (KJV)

Read it slowly. Before the labor. Before the pain. Before the moment of crisis that would seem to demand an answer—the answer had already come. A nation, born in a single day. A deliverance that outran the suffering meant to precede it.

God does not scramble. He does not survey the damage and then begin to think. Whatever has been entrusted to His keeping is already held within purposes that were settled before the need was ever felt. That isn't a pleasant religious idea. It is the testimony of people who passed through fire and came out the other side, shaking their heads at how prepared the path already was.

The two questions in verse nine carry everything. *Shall I bring to the birth, and not cause to bring forth? Shall I cause to bring forth, and shut the womb?* The questions answer themselves. God does not begin a work to abandon it mid-journey. He does not carry something to the edge of completion and then withdraw. What He starts, He finishes. What He promises, He produces. The logic is His own, and it is immovable.

This runs against how anxiety tends to work. Anxiety insists on projecting forward—cataloguing all the ways a thing might unravel, all the reasons the promise might fail to hold. And it is not hard to find evidence that things do unravel. People disappoint. Plans collapse. The suffering that should have produced something sometimes seems only to produce more suffering. In those seasons, Isaiah 66 isn't a quick answer. It is a deeper invitation. Not to pretend the pain is absent, but to place it inside a larger story—one authored by a God who was already moving before the trouble arrived.

Zion still travailed in verse eight. The birth that came before the labor in verse seven did not erase the ache of verse eight. Both are true. God's preemptive faithfulness does not always mean ease. It means companionship. It means that whatever arrives, you are not meeting it alone, and the outcome has not been left to chance. The One who opened the possibility of new life is the same One committed to seeing it through.

There is something quietly steadying about that. Not triumphant—just settled. The kind of settled that lets a person breathe again, tend what is in front of them, and trust what they cannot yet see.

Whatever is still in the waiting, whatever feels overdue or uncertain or too far along to fail and too fragile to succeed—it is held. And the One holding it has never once delivered half a promise.

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Lord, I confess that I often treat my fears as though they're more reliable than Your faithfulness. I watch a situation and start counting all the ways it might not hold together, forgetting that You were already there before I arrived at the question. Forgive me for the small faith that calculates Your goodness based on what I can see.

I don't always understand the timing. I don't always feel the certainty I'd like to feel. But I am asking today for the quiet courage to trust what You have started—to believe that what You bring to the edge of birth, You will carry all the way through. Let that settle something in me that worry has kept restless.

I bring this before You in the name of Jesus, who was Himself the promise kept before the world knew how to ask for Him, and whose finished work is the surest proof that You have never once abandoned what You began. Amen.

09/01/2026

Coffee, Donuts and the Word Of God. 😋

08/30/2026

Romans 5:3-6 Why Suffering: Endeavor To Persevere

08/28/2026

**Title:** When the Wound Asks Why
**Scripture:** Romans 8:18 (KJV)

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There are questions that don't stay politely inside theology books. They follow us into hospital waiting rooms, into sleepless nights, into the ordinary Tuesday afternoon when something breaks that we weren't prepared to lose. The question of pain is not abstract. It never was.

"For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us." — Romans 8:18 (KJV)

Paul wrote those words. And here is what makes them worth sitting with: he didn't write them from comfort. He wrote them as a man who had been beaten, shipwrecked, imprisoned, and left for dead. He wasn't offering a theory. He was offering a testimony—one forged in the particular heat of a life that had known real cost.

Still. Those words can feel enormous to hold when the pain is fresh and present and yours.

There's something honest that has to happen before those words can do their full work in us. Pain demands acknowledgment before it will accept comfort. A wound that's been dismissed doesn't heal well. And God, of all presences, is not one who requires us to pretend. The Psalms are too raw for that. Gethsemane is too honest for that. The cross is too costly for that. Whatever else we believe about suffering, we believe it was not kept at a distance by the One who made us.

That matters more than it might first seem.

When pain arrives—the kind that doesn't resolve quickly, the kind that raises the old question of whether any of this is held by anyone—the temptation is to locate God somewhere far off, watching unmoved. But the witness of Scripture quietly refuses that picture. Not because it minimizes the darkness, but because it keeps placing God inside it. Emmanuel. God with us. Not God above us, narrating our pain with detachment. Present. Near. Acquainted, as Isaiah said, with grief.

This doesn't explain everything. It was never meant to. There are corners of suffering where explanation would feel like an insult, where what's needed isn't an answer but a hand. And even there, perhaps especially there, something about the nature of God reaches in. Not to fix immediately what He may be forming slowly. But to be there.

C.S. Lewis, after all his careful thinking about pain, found himself face to face with grief's rawness when he lost his wife. His notebooks from that season read less like a theologian and more like a man crying in an empty house. What he discovered—not instantly, not without a fight—was that God had not moved. The silence had felt like absence. It wasn't. There's something in that worth carrying: the felt distance of God in suffering is not the final word on His actual nearness.

Paul's reckoning in Romans 8 isn't denial. It's a long gaze that holds present suffering and coming glory in the same hand and refuses to let either one cancel the other. Suffering is real. So is the glory. The weight of one does not erase the promise of the other. That is not a small thing to believe. It is, in fact, an act of genuine faith—not cheerful pretending, but a trust that what God is doing runs deeper than what we can presently see.

Not every question gets answered this side of eternity. Some wounds leave scars that are still visible when we arrive. But the One who bore His own scars through resurrection didn't set them aside. He showed them. And somehow in that showing, He sanctified the reality that suffering marks us without defeating us.

The glory that is coming is not a forgetting. It is a completing.

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*Lord, there are things I carry that I cannot explain and have not fully made peace with. I don't always know how to hold suffering and trust You at the same time—and yet here I am, still reaching. Teach me to believe, not just when the way is clear, but in the long middle stretches where I have to trust that You are working what I cannot yet see. Still my need to resolve what You may be using. Let me rest in what I know of Your character when I cannot yet see Your hand. I ask this through Jesus, who bore the worst of this broken world and came through it with the marks still showing—and with grace still flowing. Amen.*

08/23/2026

Romans 8:18 Why Suffering: Salt and Light