Hey New York! Next weekend Living Proof Live is coming to you!
It has been a few years since the team has been to the fine state of New York so we have such anticipation for this next visit as we continue celebrating twenty years of Living Proof Live. Come join us, won’t you?
Have you ever had the chance to see Beth live? If the answer is no, here’s what you might expect at a Living Proof Live event…
- Hear a unique message specifically prepared for your city.
- Worship with Dove Award-winning worship leader Travis Cottrell.
- Laugh, pray, and study scripture with thousands of women from all walks of life.
- Leave with a renewed sense of calling, purpose, and love for Christ.
Sound good? Nothing could make us happier than to share a handful of special scholarship tickets. One of them has your name on it: if you’re a first-time attender and you’d like to join us but can’t swing the cost. All you need to do is give Kimberly Meyer a call at our office and she will set you up: toll free 888-700-1999 (Not an 800 prefix.)
We sure love Jesus and His Word, and want you to fall more in love with Him, too! He is our great hope and joy. For more specifics about this weekend at the Times Union Center, visit LifeWay.com here. We are praying that God’s presence would be personal, powerful and undeniably active this weekend. There will be a group of ladies excited that you are in the room. Come!
We are waiting expectantly for all Beth will bring to Albany. The Albany Team has been praying for each and every individual called to attend and praying against any barriers to participating.
Look, I am about to do something new; even now it is coming. Do you not see it? Indeed, I will make a way in the wilderness, rivers in the desert. (Isaiah 43:19)
So exciting! Wish I could be there!
I told my sisterinlaw about it. Praying she goes!
I prayed for your SIL- that she went and that she would be blessed by it.
What a powerful time in Albany! While this was not our first conference, this was our first time with Beth Moore. Friday night, my daughter and I were tired from our day and the drive, nonetheless, we left our first session feeling uplifted and welcomed. Saturday we left on fire!
True to form, I wasn’t home an hour and the devil started to attack. Suddenly,I became physically sick, I slipped and fell on a hardwood floor on the knee that I have been protecting since TKR in June, my puppy became strangely ill, and my husband’s blood sugar dropped dangerously low through the night. I recognized the attack for what it was and didn’t panic. We are all ok. The devil is strong, my spine, my God is stronger.
I am a co-leader for a bible study group who needs to hear, say Beth’s Albany NY Commissioning. Could a copy be sent to my email? Our final session will meet 11/5/18. We meet in at a local restaurant. Having the words for and reciting the commission would be powerful in many ways.
Thank you so much for all that you do for so many.
Hi Gloria,
We are glad to hear you are okay! I am forwarding your request to our correspondence team, and they will get that over to you as soon as they have it available.
Blessings!
So powerful when we come together with one voice and one heart! I praise God for giving me the opportunity to be able to join you all! Thank you to everyone who worked so selflessly and tirelesssly to bring it all together! We were blessed and I pray that not one of us left unchanged!
One request, if I may. I am confident that I request for many when asking if we may please get a copy of the story Beth read to us at the close of Friday night? Electronic or print, if this is agreeable, please let us know when it is available for purchase!
Thank you again for giving and serving us all as you do!
Walking in His grace,
Sonya
Hi Sonya,
I am forwarding your request to our correspondence team, and they will email you if they have this available.
Blessings!
I loved it! A bunch of us came from Ottawa, ON, Canada, and it was worth the drive!
When I was at the Living Proof Live event in Albany last weekend, and 2 things struck me:
1) that you were telling us not to lose our joy, and I thought of a cool way of remembering your point: “Don’t LOSE your joy: LOOSE your joy!”
2) You mentioned that you have read the story of Lot’s daughters 100s of times and still don’t know what to make of it. That struck my brain and it is still whizzing around, so I am going to send you that might help.
I listen to Brian Hardin’s Daily Audio Bible Podcast (www.dailyaudiobible.com) everyday (on my 3rd year) and he will go into the hard passages, that most try to skip over (i.e., the story of Jephthah in Judges 11:30-40), and really search to understand and explain them. I have heard his take on the story of Lot’s daughters and I have found the transcript of last years commentary on it. I think it will bless you.
In his commentaries, Brian looks both at what is stated in the bible text (of any passage) AND what is NOT stated. One thing that is glaringly absent from this difficult story (when you think to look for it) is any mention of seeking God, or mention of God’s input. It is a “descriptive” passage, NOT a “proscriptive” passage about what occurred after Lot left Sodom. It narrates what took place, NOT what SHOULD have taken place. [I bolded the most pertinent text]
Brian looks at many difficult passages this way
Commentary: Gen 19- Lot’s daughters’ story
Jesus says some riveting things today [Matthew 6:25-7:14] that are disruptive when they are juxtaposed against the way we live our lives and we’ll talk about that in a minute, but we can’t pass over the book of Genesis today because the passage in Genesis today is difficult. It’s difficult, what all happens. It starts out so interestingly.
Yesterday the promise of Isaac is given. Specifically, the Lord says, “about this time next year…” And we talked about that yesterday. Immediately after that, that is when they are heading down toward Sodom and Gomorrah. And we see something beautiful, this collaborative nature of God, this relational nature where he says, “how can I keep what I’m planning to do from Abraham?”
The plan is that God is going to go look at Sodom and Gomorrah and see if the evil that he is aware of is actually as bad as it seems. He tells Abraham and is so patient with Abraham, letting Abraham speak his mind. “Surely you wouldn’t do this if there were righteous people down there, if there are 50 people. What if you go down there and you find 50 people that are righteous, are you going to destroy the place?”
And God is like, “no,” and then it’s 45 and then its 40 and then its 30, then its 20, then its 10 and God is just patiently saying, “no, that’s not really how this works. I’m not going down there just for the sake of destruction. If it is completely evil, if it is completely irredeemable, then it is going to go away. But if there are righteous people there, that is not what I’m trying to do.”
I don’t have to retell the story. We just read the story. They go down. They find Lot. There is this strange scene that takes place. Lot takes the men into his house. The house is surrounded and they want to rape these guys. Lot is in this predicament and we see this kind of patriarchal society that they are living in at the time where Lot’s daughters, they don’t have the value of the guests and so Lot is offering his daughters to the mob. Yeah, that is just… I don’t live in that kind of society, so I can’t imagine that. But we are getting a look into the society, the culture of that part of the world at that particular time, but what ends up happening is that Lot’s guests pull Lot back in, they do not throw his daughters out, they seal the door, they blind the people, and they put the plan into action. The place is evil. So they get Lot out with his family, those that would go with them, and the place is destroyed. Lot’s wife, she looks back. There is plenty to contemplate right there because sometimes when God is leading us on and rescuing us, which he is constantly doing, we need to not be looking back. But anyway, Lot is like, “I can’t go to the mountains. I need to go to this little village of Zoar. Can I go there?”
And they are like, “Yeah, you can go there.” And he does. Then Sodom and Gomorrah are destroyed, but the next thing we find is that Lot and his daughters are hiding in the mountains. The place that he said he couldn’t go is the place he ended up. We don’t know exactly why, but they end up hiding in the mountains.
So here are two daughters and a father hiding in the mountains. Everything that they’ve had is destroyed. The life as they knew it is gone. Lot was prosperous. He lost it all and he lost his wife. So we can see that they have fallen into some serious hard times and the daughters have this conversation among themselves. And without a little context, it is confusing because what they are contemplating is having sex with their father, trying to get pregnant by their father, so all of a sudden we have this incest story in the Bible, a great way to begin week two. But let’s move into the story here.
These are young women. These are teenage women who had been betrothed to be married. Life as they knew it is gone. Their mom is gone. They’ve been offered up to a mob of men. They are in a pretty precarious situation. Their father, who had some means and had some respect because he was sitting in the city gate, has fallen on circumstances that changed everything. So now they are hiding in a cave with their dad. Their mom is gone. They are not going to be getting married to the men they were planning to be married to because they are gone as well. The city that they grew up in is gone and they are hiding. So what are their options? Their father is getting old. He is the only one in this patriarchal society that can speak up and defend them, but he doesn’t really have what he had before. They are all destitute, homeless, on the run. So they come up with this plan. If they can have male children, then those male children can take care of them as they age as mothers. There is a man to claim them and carry on the family story. But Lot is not going to last forever and the options aren’t what they used to be so they decide what they have to do is try to get pregnant.
So it is not like there was some crazy, weird lusty thing going on. It was more practical for them. A horrible option, but the best of the worst of the options. That is how this all happened. What we have to look at is our own heart when we read a story like this.
At least for me, I read this story for years and thought, “I just don’t get it. Why is God involved in incest? Why? What is going on here?” And it wasn’t until I really read and read and read the story that I began to realize, “Hang on, God’s role in this story was to rescue Lot and his family from the destruction of the evil that he was doing away with. That’s it. Everything that came next was all decisions that were made by the people who had been rescued in the first place.” So we don’t have this narrative of them crying out to God. Why didn’t they flee to Hebron and find Abraham, their uncle?
We can see pretty clearly our own stories overlaid here. People get to make choices and those choices get to matter. Every choice is a decision to walk down a certain path and that path is going to lead somewhere. It may lead to other forks in the road and it always does, but the choices that we make become the roadmap of the life that we live. It’s not right or true to blame God for every choice that we make that we have not consulted him in or walked with him on.
At the end of our New Testament reading today Jesus says there is a narrow path and that path leads to life, but it is a narrow gate and it’s a difficult road and few people find it. There is a wide highway that leads to destruction, but there is a narrow path that leads to life. And we walk that path when we walk with God. Blaming God that we get off that narrow path and on the wide road that leads to destruction when he didn’t do it and it’s not his fault, yeah, that’s not the kind of relationship that we’re looking for when we talk about a relationship with God. Have you ever been in a relationship where you got blamed all the time for things that you didn’t do? Or things were aimed at you and nuanced in a way that weren’t true? That’s horrible. It’s not a life-giving relationship. We have to understand we can’t have that posture of heart toward God and have a true intimate relationship. You can’t truly love somebody you don’t really actually trust. And we watch this play out in the book of Genesis.
God Bless!
Thank you Beth for a fabulousl conference!! We loved having you in Albany!! It was very educational and so much fun!! Several of us are hoping to get a copy of the beautiful story you read. Will it be published soon, or can you email?! Much love and many blessings!!
Hi there,
We are so happy you enjoyed it! We are hoping to publish it in the future, so if you would like to be notified when it becomes available, could you please send your request to [email protected] ?
Please be sure to let them know which LPL you are specifically referring too.
Blessings!!
Thank U for being U