still waiting... but grateful

We are still here waiting for baby's arrival. =) Bill and I are enjoying our last days together as a "single" married couple, since this will definitely be our last weekend together alone. I have really cherished these times together even though we're both eager to meet William. It reminds me of all that we have to be thankful for, since there is nothing we have that we did not receive from God as an expression of His grace in our lives. And we certainly have not been lacking in anything material or spiritual, by the grace of God. Our previous senior pastor CJ Mahaney gave an excellent message on how God's unmerited grace should affect our attitudes and lives by preventing us from getting "puffed up." That is, wrongly thinking that we ourselves have anything to do with anything good in our lives. Everything we have is a gift from God. CJ used this awesome quote from Spurgeon:

O Believer, learn to reject pride seeing that you have no ground for it. Whatever you are, you have nothing to make you proud. The more you have, the more you are in debt to God and you should not be proud of that which renders you a debtor. Consider your origin. Look back to what you were. Consider what you will have been but for divine grace.

Look upon yourself as you are now. Doesn't your conscience reproach you? Don't your thousand wanderings stand before you and tell you that you are unworthy to be called His son or daughter? And if He made you anything, aren't you taught thereby that it is grace which has made you to differ? Great Believer, you would have been a great sinner if God had not made you to differ.

O you, who are valiant for truth. Yet you would have been as valiant for error if grace had not laid hold of you. Therefore, don't be proud. Though you have a large estate, a wide domain of grace, once you did not have a single thing to call your own except your sin and misery. O, strange infatuation, that you who have borrowed everything, should think of exalting yourself.

The title of the message is "Deflating the Puffed Up Church." (It was preached on 11.05.06.) Hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

3 days or less left... until William makes his entrance into this world! Woohoo! We have much to be thankful for.

Do not be deceived, my beloved brothers. Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. Of his own will he brought us forth by the word of truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures.

James 1:16-18