Today’s goofy holiday is National Cherry Cobbler Day!! Joe is a big cobbler fan, especially peach and cherry, his two favorites.
But why the name cobbler? A recent article on AllRecipes.com shared that cobbler is usually topped with batter or biscuits instead of crust. Cobbler’s name comes from its sometimes cobbled texture, which is a result of spooning or dropping the topping over the fruit rather than distributing it equally. This way, the filling can peek through.
It’s also World Telecommunication Day, This day is a reminder of how important communication is in our lives and it got its start in 1969 when the International Telecommunication Union was founded. Read more about it HERE
I was born on May 17, 1956, in Rocky Mount, North Carolina.
I started boxing at the Palmer Park, Maryland rec center when I was 13
I won an Olympic gold medal at the 1976 games in Montreal.
I won multiple world titles in five different weight divisions, Welterweight, Super Welterweight, Middleweight, and Super Middleweight.
I retired in 1982 for a brief time due to a detached retina.
I gained widespread fame for my speed, agility, and boxing skills, which earned me the nickname “Sugar” for my sweet fighting style.
After retiring from boxing in 1997, I’ve remained involved in the sport as a boxing analyst, motivational speaker, and philanthropist, inspiring and making a positive impact on future generations of boxers.
I am Sugar Ray Leonard! Congratulations to Brenda from Fredericktown, who guessed correctly and wins the We The Kingdom CD.
Today Joe shared a classic 1914 Christmas story in a devotional from James Banks called, “When Peace Breaks Out.” Read this inspiring story from Our Daily Bread by clicking here.
Name an item you’d need to dress up as Santa Claus! 1- Santa Hat (40 votes) 2- Beard (24) 3- Big Belly (9) 4- Red Pants/Belt (5) 5- Suspenders/Black Boots (2)
Congratulations to Rebecca from Butler, who guessed correctly and wins the Veggie Tales DVD, “The Star of Christmas.”
Today’s Monday Motivation comes from Psalm 111 and author Bill Crowder – How Great Is Our God! What things instill a sense of awe and wonder in you? How can you praise God for his marvelous works today? Click here to read this inspiring word from Our Daily Bread.
Name a body part that begins with the letter “E”… 1- Ear (33 votes) 2- Eye (31) 3- Elbow (25) 4- Esophagus (7)
Congratulations to Jim from Mount Vernon, who guessed the top two correctly and wins the $5 gift card to Round Hill Dairy Ice Cream.
Dylan shared today’s Our Daily Bread devotional, ‘The Power of Love.’ Click here to read it.
Our second devotional comes from what Joe shared at the 2020 Valentine’s Banquet:
Late last year (2019), I had the chance to read a fantastic book called Hidden Christmas by Pastor Timothy Keller.
Chapter 2 of this book dives in to the importance of the genealogy of Jesus. Keller spends some time focused on the fact that Matthew doesn’t start his Gospel with “once upon a time.” As he writes, “that is the way of fairy tales or legendary fantasy stories.” He starts with what? The genealogy of Jesus. Keller writes that this is critical because Matthew is grounding who Jesus Christ is…and what he does…in history, with a genealogy. In Matthew 1 we learn that Jesus is not a metaphor. He is real. This all happened.
Just before Peter Jackson released the first of his Lord of the Rings trilogy of movies in 2001, there were a number of articles by literary critics and other cultural elites lamenting the popular appeal of fantasies, myths, and legends. They were saying that so many of them promoted regressive views. In other words, modern people are supposed to be more realistic. We should realize that things are not black and white but grey, and happy endings are cruel because life is not like that.
One critic in the New Yorker magazine even wrote that to give into stories like Lord of the Rings “betrays a reluctance to face the finer shades of life that verges on the cowardly.”
So why does Hollywood keep recycling fairy tales, fantasy and super heroes? You might answer, well, it’s because people hunger for them. Okay then, again, why? I mean, the great fairy tales and legendary stories like “Beauty and the Beast,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “Excalibur”…none of those things really happened and they’re not factually true.
But…they seem to fulfill a set of longings in the human heart.
I would also add that some of the more realistic fiction and love stories that we watch in these days also reflect those longings in the human heart. Keller writes that deep in the human heart there are these realistic desires to experience the supernatural, go on great adventures, to escape death, to know love that we can never lose, to not age but live long enough to realize our creative dreams and maybe even to fly, and communicate with non-human beings and obviously, triumph over evil.
If the stories are well told, we find them incredibly moving and satisfying. Why is that? Keller argues it’s because even though we know that factually those stories didn’t happen, our hearts long for those things; and quite honestly, they scratch that itch.
Beauty and the Beast tells us that there’s a love that can break out of the beastliness that we have created for ourselves. Sleeping Beauty tells us we are in a kind of sleeping enchantment in there is a noble prince who can come and destroy it. We hear the stories, we see the stories, and they stir us because deep inside our hearts we believe or want to believe, that these things are true. Death should not be the end. We should not lose our loved ones. Evil should not triumph. Our heart senses that even though the stories themselves aren’t true, the underlying reality behind the stories somehow ought to be. But our minds say no and the critics say no…when you give yourself to fairy tales and you really believe in moral absolutes and the supernatural and the idea that we could live forever that’s not reality, and it’s cowardly to give yourself to it.
But then we come to the Christmas story. And at first glance The book of Matthew looks like the other legends. A story about someone from a different world who breaks into our world and has miraculous powers and can calm the storm and heal people and raise people from the dead. Then his enemies turn on him and he is put to death and it seems like all hope is over but finally he rises from the dead and saves everyone! We read that and we think: another great fairy tale. It looks like the Christmas story is just one more of those stories…
But Matthew does not start his Gospel with “Once upon a Time.” He says this is no fairytale. Jesus Christ is NOT just one more lovely story pointing to these underlying realities. Jesus IS the underlying reality to which all the stories point. Jesus has come from that eternal supernatural world that we sense is there; that our hearts know is there; even though our heads may say no. Keller writes, “at Christmas, Jesus punched a hole between the ideal and the real; the eternal and the temporal; and came into our world. That means if Matthew was right, there IS an evil sorcerer in this world and we ARE under enchantment; there IS a noble prince who has broken the enchantment, and there IS love from which we can never be parted and we WILL indeed fly someday and will defeat death; and in this world even as Psalms says, “the trees will dance and sing.”
1st John 4: 9-11puts it this way: “this is how God showed his love among us. He sent his one and only son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.”
So Keller writes, even though we know that these fairy tales aren’t factually true, the truth of Jesus means all the stories we love are not escapism at all. In a sense, they will come true in Him.
The gospel means all the best stories will be proved in the ultimate sense, true!
During an indoor game of hide and seek, name a specific place where kids hide: 1- closet (63 votes) 2- under a bed (17) 3- behind a couch (9) 4- under a table (4)
Congratulations to Ron from Mount Vernon, who guessed correctly and wins a WNZR drawstring backpack!
Today for Monday Motivation, we returned to Our Daily Bread to talk about what there is to look forward to after celebrating a holiday such as Christmas. Read the full devotional from Adam R. Holz HERE.
We also covered New Years as 2022 is quickly approaching! Tim Gustafson shares a story from Ezekiel in his devotional entitled “Back to the Basics”.
Name a book that could knock you out if someone hit you over the head with it.
Dictionary 39
Encyclopedia 25
Bible 14
Phone Book 14
War & Peace 6
Congratulations to Aranae of Fredericktown for correctly guessing our top two answers! She wins the $5 gift card to Everlasting Cup for today. Make sure to tune in tomorrow for your next chance to win!
Today we’re sharing Monday Motivation from Pastor Tim Keller…
The word Immanuel means, as we learn in Matthew 1:23, “God with us.” The coming of the Christ child fulfilled what Isaiah wrote in chapter 7, verse 14: “the virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.”
In his book Hidden Christmas, Pastor Timothy Keller shares that for centuries, the Jewish religious leaders and scholars had known that prophecy, but did not think that it should be taken literally. They thought it was simply predicting the coming or arrival of some great leader through whose work, God would be present with his people.
However, Matthew writes that this promise is greater than anyone imagined! It did not come true figuratively, but literally. Jesus Christ is “God with us” because the human life in Mary’s womb was a miracle performed by God himself. Then Jesus, with his life, his claims and his resurrection, convinced his closest followers that he was not just a prophet telling them how to find God, but God himself coming to find us.
Keller writes that this claim, that Jesus is God, gives us the greatest possible hope. Why? Because it means this world is not all that there is…it means that there is life and love after death and it means that evil and suffering will one day end.
And it is not just hope for the world, but hope for you and me personally. A God who was only holy would have not come to us in Jesus. He would have just demanded that we pull ourselves together and be moral and holy enough to be worthy of relationship with him. But our God is fully holy and fully human – so he doesn’t send someone else – he comes himself! Jesus is one of us – and that should give us all hope!
The word Immanuel means, as we learn in Matthew 1:23, “God with us.” The coming of the Christ child fulfilled what Isaiah wrote in chapter 7, verse 14: “the virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.”
So what is the purpose of “God with us?” What does “with him” mean? Pastor Timothy Keller, in his book Hidden Christmas, writes that the purpose of the incarnation is that we would have relationship with him. In Jesus, the unapproachable God of the Old Testament becomes a human being who can be known and loved. Through faith, we can know this love.
This is a complete shift from the Old Testament. Think about this: anytime anyone drew near to God in the Old Testament, it was terrifying! God appears to Abraham as a smoking furnace; to Israel as a pillar of fire; to Job as a hurricane or tornado. When Moses asks to see the face of God in Exodus 33, he was told what? That it would kill him…that he could only get close to God’s back. When Moses came down off the mountain in Exodus 34, his face was SO BRIGHT with radiance that the people could not look at him!
So Pastor Keller asks this: can you imagine if Moses were alive today and heard the message of Christmas? What would he say? How would he react? What if Moses heard John 1:14 “the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us – we have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son?”
Keller thinks Moses would say, “Do you know what this means? This is the very thing I was denied! Through Jesus, you can meet God. You can know him personally and without terror. Do you realize what’s going on? Where’s your joy? Where’s your amazement? This should be the driving force of your life!”
And why did God show up this time in the form of a baby instead of fire? Because this time He has come not to bring judgment but to bear it; to take away the barrier between humanity and God. Jesus is God with us!
Congratulations to: Lyle from Howard and Paul from Mount Vernon!Name two gifts that are difficult to wrap:
1- Basketball (34 votes) 2- Football (19) 3- Stuffed animals (14) 4- a pet (7) 5- a bike (4)
Congratulations to Brenda from Fredericktown, who guessed correctly and wins a $5 gift card to Everlasting Cup!
Today we shared from the Our Daily BreadChristmas devotional book, ‘Celebrating Jesus.’
Jonathon shared ‘Mary Knew’ from Dave Branon:
Four-year-old Kaitlyn was oblivious to everything else in the room. There were no thoughts of stockings hung and wrapped presents. She was simply content to play with our manger scene and its nativity characters. What piqued my interest was something else she was doing as she moved Mary, Joseph, and the Babe around: She was singing “Mary, did you know?” over and over-words she had heard sung by others. As she held Mary, she poignantly asked her if she knew who her precious baby boy was. Kaitlyn’s question for Mary is the vital one everyone needs to answer. Do we know that Jesus is the One predicted in Genesis 3 to strike Satan’s heel (v. 15)-to gain victory over Satan, sin, and death by His death on the cross? Do we know that He’s the Messiah promised in Isaiah 53 and the One Micah prophesied would be born in Bethlehem hundreds of years later? (5:2). We know that His name-Jesus-means that He will save His people from their sins (MATTHEW 1:21). We also know that Mary’s baby grew up and chose to die on the cross as the Savior of the world (LUKE 1:31; 2:30-32). The “Son of the Most High” (1:32) has invited us to know Him and be loved by Him. May we choose to know Jesus, our precious Savior, more and more each day!
Joe shared ‘Captain of a Motley Crew’ from Glenn Packham:
As a child, I always found Christmas Eve one of the most A exciting days of the year. I knew there would be presents in the morning, a feast that night, and a candlelight service at church. But it was also exciting because I never knew who was going to end up at our house for dinner. My parents loved inviting people who were alone or had nowhere to go to come share a meal with us. Folks from church, from their places of work, our friends from school-it was always a motley crew. David was on the run from King Saul and in need of good friends to surround him (1 SAMUEL 22:1-2). He needed the right community to help him in his crisis. Instead, what he found were hundreds of men who were also in trouble-those “in trouble or in debt or… discontented” (v. 2). Yet, David became captain over the motley crew and they trusted him. Jesus-the true and better David-is exactly the kind of person who gathered those around Him that society had discarded. Throughout the gospels, it’s often the sick and the disabled, the outcast, and the sinner who find belonging and healing in Jesus. The church is meant to be a kind of cave of Adullam (v. 1). It’s not a perfect community, but a ragtag group in need of a loving, healing Captain.
Name a place that’s open on Christmas Day: 1. Grocery store/Walmart/Kroger (23 votes) 2. Gas stations (20) 3. Fast Food restaurants (19) 4. Waffle House/Denny’s (12) 5. Movie theaters (8) 6. Airports (5) 7. Hospitals (3) 8. Hotels (2)
Congratulations to Tysha from Mount Vernon, who guessed correctly and wins the $5 gift card to Everlasting Cup.
Driving Notes 