Tomb of Kings

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Tomb of Kings Now Open! - Biblical Archaeology Society

After more than a decade of renovations totaling almost one million euros 

Hebrews 13:3

"Remember the prisoners, as though in prison with them, and those who are ill-treated, since you yourselves also are in the body." Hebrews 13:3

Today in History

Today in History
1968
Helen Keller Dies

On June 1, 1968, Helen Keller died in Easton, Connecticut, at the age of 87. Blind and deaf from infancy, Keller circumvented her disabilities to become a world-renowned writer and lecturer.

Helen Adams Keller was born on June 27, 1880, on a farm near Tuscumbia, Alabama. A normal infant, she was stricken with an illness at 19 months, probably scarlet fever, which left her blind and deaf. For the next four years, she lived at home, a mute and unruly child.

Special education for the blind and deaf was just beginning at the time, and it was not until after Helen’s sixth birthday that her parents had her examined by a physician interested in the blind. He referred the Kellers to Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone and a pioneer in teaching speech to the deaf. Bell examined Helen and arranged to have a teacher sent for her from the Perkins Institution for the Blind in Boston.

The teacher, 20-year-old Anne Sullivan, was partially blind. At Perkins, she had been instructed how to teach a blind and deaf student to communicate using a hand alphabet signaled by touch into the student’s palm. Sullivan arrived in Tuscumbia in March 1887 and immediately set about teaching this form of sign language to Helen. Although she had no knowledge of written language and only the haziest recollection of spoken language, Helen learned her first word within days: “water.”

Keller later described the experience: “I knew then that ‘w-a-t-e-r’ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, and set it free.”

Under Sullivan’s dedicated guidance, Keller learned at a staggering rate. By April, her vocabulary was growing by more than a dozen words a day, and in May she began to read and arrange sentences using raised words on cardboard. By the end of the month, she was reading complete stories.

One year later, the seven-year-old Keller made her first visit to the Perkins Institution, where she learned to read Braille. She spent several winters there and in 1890 was taught to speak by Sarah Fuller of the Horace Mann School for the Deaf.

Keller learned to imitate the position of Fuller’s lips and tongue in speech, and how to lip-read by placing her fingers on the lips and throat of the speaker. In speaking, she usually required an interpreter, such as Sullivan, who was familiar with her sounds and could translate.

When she was 14, Keller entered the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf in New York City. Two years later, with Sullivan at her side and spelling into her hand, she enrolled at the Cambridge School for Young Ladies in Massachusetts. In 1900, she was accepted into Radcliffe, a prestigious women’s college in Cambridge with classes taught by Harvard University faculty.

She was a determined and brilliant student, and while still at Radcliffe her first autobiography, The Story of My Life, was published serially in The Ladies Home Journal and then as a book. In 1904, she graduated cum laude from Radcliffe.

Keller became an accomplished writer, publishing, among other books, The World I Live In (1908), Out of the Dark (1913), My Religion (1927), Helen Keller’s Journal (1938), and Teacher (1955). In 1913, she began lecturing, with the aid of an interpreter, primarily on behalf of the American Foundation for the Blind.

Her lecture tours took her several times around the world, and she did much to remove the stigmas and ignorance surrounding sight and hearing disorders, which historically had often resulted in the committal of the blind and deaf to asylums.

For her work on behalf of the blind and the deaf, she was widely honored and in 1964 was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, by President Lyndon B. Johnson.

“My life has been happy because I have had wonderful friends and plenty of interesting work to do,” Helen Keller once wrote, adding, “I seldom think about my limitations, and they never make me sad. Perhaps there is just a touch of yearning at times, but it is vague, like a breeze among flowers. The wind passes, and the flowers are content.”

The People God Wants

The People God Wants by Rick Warren

“Walk with the wise and become wise, for a companion of fools suffers harm.” Proverbs 13:20

You and I can never be the kind of people God wants us to be on our own. We were never intended to do life that way. We all need people who are teaching us, sharing their lives with us, investing in us, and encouraging us to grow.

The Bible tells us, “Walk with the wise and become wise, for a companion of fools suffers harm” (Proverbs 13:20).

In fact, to be all that God calls you to be, you need to learn from at least four kinds of people:

Mentors.
These are your coaches. I’ve had nine different mentors in my life. No one can teach you everything you need to know. One person will teach you in one area. Another person will teach you about something else.

Role models.
These are people who are already doing or have already done what you want to do. Many of the skills you’ve learned in your life, you’ve learned by watching others.

Partners.
You need co-workers and colleagues who are in your profession, people to support and challenge you on what God wants to do through your life.

Friends.
Friends don’t necessarily help you with your goals. They’re just friends. They love you no matter what you do. You can mess up, and they still love you. A friend walks alongside you when everyone else walks out. That’s when you know who your true friends are.

Trying to live life solo isn’t just lonely. It works against God’s design for us.

Find your people, and make yourself available and vulnerable to them and how God wants to use them in your life.

Thoughts on Colossians 3:9-10

Thoughts on Colossians 3:9-10 by John W. Ritenbaugh
"Do not lie to one another, since you have put off the old man with his deeds, (10) and have put on the new man who is renewed in knowledge according to the image of Him who created him."

We will conform to our image of God.

Whatever our image of God is, we will make an effort—expend energy—to become like it. We had better be sure that it is the right image!

Conforming will take place just as surely as a child born into a human family will conform to the image of that family—particularly the parents—and pick up their characteristics, whether they want to or not. This is a true principle, which Paul is speaking about here, only in a spiritual vein.

Since the Christian is to be "renewed in knowledge according to the image of Him who created him," he cannot be renewed in knowledge unless he is conforming to the right image.

What Moses did when he was forty amounted to this: He knew about God, but he did not know God. He had head-knowledge of God, of the prophecy that God made to Abraham in Genesis 15:13-16, of the fact that the four hundred years were almost up, and that, counting Levi, he was of the fourth generation of Israelites who had been in Egypt.

He had head-knowledge, but he did not really know God. Therefore, he jumped the gun. Although he was excited and zealous, he was way off-base in terms of God's plan. However, in the intervening forty years, he came to know God. As he did, his beliefs about God changed, and thus his convictions also changed. They became more in harmony with the true knowledge of God.

Strong belief must be present, but it also must be right or it is out of sync with God. Those strongly held beliefs will not produce the right fruit because the way of life will not correspond with the true image of God. In other words, if our knowledge of God is not correct, it will not produce the right fruit because it does not conform to the true image of God.

At forty years of age, Moses' image of God was wrong. In his excitement and in his zeal, he went out, but he did not produce the right fruit. He could not because his image of God was incorrect. Forty years later, after spending so many years in the wilderness, his image of God was more correct, much clearer. Did it produce the right fruit? Yes, it did. Israel was released from its slavery because Moses was in harmony with God's will. The image of God was right, and he was conforming to it.

If our image of God is wrong, then our way of life will not be consistent with God's. Just like Moses, we need time for this process of coming to know God to take place.

Thoughts on Today's Verse

"Be careful not to do your 'acts of righteousness' before men, to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven." Matthew 6:1

Thoughts on Today's Verse by Phil Ware

Compassion is not for personal glory, just as it is not a private internal emotion. Christian compassion must always motivate us to act in the best interest and for the greater good of those in need, without calling attention to ourselves or our sacrifices.

God provides what we need to bless others and takes care of the reward when our goal is to please him and to be used by him to bless others who are in need.

My Prayer...

Loving God and tender Shepherd, use me each day to be a blessing to someone in need. Please open my eyes and ears to see those around me who need emotional support or financial help. Please give me the courage to bless them and lead them closer to you. In Jesus' name I pray. Amen.

When the Looting Starts.....

“When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” President Trump

“We are a nation in pain, but we must not allow this pain to destroy us. We are a nation enraged, but we cannot allow our rage to consume us. We are a nation exhausted, but we will not allow our exhaustion to defeat us,” Joe Biden

The two quotes above, spoken by the president and former vice-president regarding the turmoil in our cities, have generated as much debate as have the protests themselves.

One must presume that both men care deeply about this nation or they would be using their later years for enjoying the fruits of their years of labor rather than having any interest in the most demanding job in the world.

President Trump, the wealthiest leader the country has ever had, could be luxuriating at Mar-a-Lago rather than securing in a bunker at the White House. Joe Biden could be the grand old man of Delaware after serving as its senator for decades and ascending to the role of vice president for the previous administration.

But, both men, septuagenarians, are sacrificing the years when most would be in retirement to rise up to the challenges of the day. What motivates them?

As president, Donald Trump has endured relentless criticism from the left-leaning media since before he took the oath of office. He has been subjected to more scrutiny than the combined examination of all his predecessors. He has been mocked and vilified.

Joe Biden enjoys the support of the media and the respect that is denied the current office-holder but one still must wonder why a man approaching 80 years of age would subject himself to the rigor of high office. Perhaps it is because being a breath away from the seat of power for eight years compels a man to want to occupy it.

Whatever their reasons, we must respect them for their willingness to sacrifice the years when most would sit back and enjoy the fruit of their labors for a cause greater than themselves--whether or not we agree with their points of view.

And that brings us back to the quotes at the top of this post.

With which man would you stand regarding their views of the nation's (the world's) response to the murder of George Floyd?

I speak as only one person when I say, "Both."

While I might find Joe Biden's words to be admirable and though they might be reflective of my own outrage for the unconscionable treatment a man, a fellow citizen, a brother in Christ, were it my business, my home, my life's savings that were in jeopardy because of the protests that have become violent, I might want the government to step in.

My opinion may mean nothing in the large scheme of things. My tears for George Floyd may simply roll into the Sea of Sorrow that we must weep for the injustice that destroyed his life. Hatred and retaliation will not restore his life or guarantee rights to all citizens, regardless of the color of their skin.

Anyone old enough to have been alive in the 60s and cognizant of the events of those days is aware that burning and looting are not new to this terrible blot upon our nation. And those old enough to remember know the violent response to injustice do not solve the matter.

Police brutality, like the outrage it generates, come not because of a lack of laws. Police personnel are trained in the skill of prisoner restraint--and that training is designed to do just that -- restrain, not kill.

Protestors have every right to demand that their voice against injustice rise up to be heard, but loud voices do not destroy the labor of other people's lives.

The thoughts expressed here are nothing but the pondering of an old woman whose heart is broken because the evil events of her youth still beset her grandchildren's generation.

Yet I understand that in the decades of my life, the heart of man has not changed. The reign of evil over mankind has not been unseated. The Biblical truth that the evil one "comes to steal, kill and destroy" is still true.

But, another truth yet remains. There is a Savior who has sacrificed Himself so each of us who are dead in trespasses and sin can be "washed in the blood of the Lamb."

As we do that -- one person at a time -- we will make our small corner of this fallen planet a little more like the Heaven we want to attain, the Heaven where George Floyd now reigns with the Jesus to whom he gave his life.