Stand Firm

 Hi friends,

Toward the end of 1 Corinthians, Paul exhorts the church to 'stand firm' and to 'let nothing move you.' (1 Cor. 15:58). This short instruction and exhortation caught my attention and so I decided to journal it my Bible. It is all to easy to get swayed by pressures around us and inside of us to move away from the truth, to compromise in order to get along, and to waver in the face of fear. All of this was familiar to Paul, but he stood firm in Christ and encouraged others to do the same.

When I was journaling this verse, I started thinking about how easy it is in Bible journaling to isolate a small little instruction like this, journal it in a page, and perhaps apply it in wrong ways because we haven't paid careful attention to the context of what we are journaling. There are so many examples of verses taken out of context and used in almost slogan-like fashion within Christianity, that it is easy for these words of wisdom to become twisted to mean something they are not meant to. I have to remind myself of this as a Bible journaler because the nature of what we do is to focus in on one verse. It is important to me that when I share about the page I've created, that I share the context and its location in the wider teaching of Scripture.

Returning to this page and the exhortation "stand firm, let nothing move you" I thought about how important this is to understand in context. After all, we are not to stand firm in sin, or in ignorance, or in immaturity, or in opinions. We are to be moved by the love and compassion of God, we are to move toward Christ and to those around us he calls us to minister to. We are to be moved away from toxic thinking and toward godly attitudes. It is not just in anything and everything that we are to stand firm and to let nothing move us. To see the context of this verse we have to read around it, and in this case the previous verse tells us something important: God has given us the victory (over death and sin) through our Lord Jesus Christ. It is this victory that we are to stand firm in, and to let nothing move us from. 

I played around with some gouache on this page, using the sweet images from Be a Flamingo and colouring with an aquabrush and the mixed colours. The text was stamped with a combination of alpha sets: Lollipop Alpha, Sunshine Girl Alpha, and Playful Alpha. 

Let's stand firm in the victory of Christ and not be moved from it.

Be blessed...

x Amy x