Blessed Night, Loves 😊

I Pray All Is Well With Everyone… And Your Hearts And Minds Are Full Of Love, Joy, And Compassion… For All God’s Children… And All God’s Creation. Most Of Us Understand The Power Of Love… For It Is Inherent In Each And Every One Of Us. Our Life Stream Is Love – Which Is Our “Mighty I AM Presence” – The Spirit And Power Of The Living God… That Will Never Fail Us. And It Is A Fact… That Love – Our Loving Energy – Is The Only Power In The Whole Wide World That Is Our Salvation… From All The Darkness And Hordes Of Evil… That Seek Control… And Our Destruction.

We’ve Heard About It And Read About It Repeatedly… Constantly… Time And Time Again… Century After Century – About The Power Of Love – From Someone… Somewhere; So We Know! But Whether Or Not Mankind – The Living Temples Of The Living God On This Earth – Accept And Acknowledge This Power Or Not… Love Is… What It Is. And It Is In Mankind’s Best Interest… Especially During This Shifting Cycle… To Utilize It! Amen… 🤗💜💜💜

Give Thanks And Praises For Love And Life…🙏🏾💞

And Y’all Be Love… 💗💗💗

Luke 9:23-28

“… We must accustom ourselves to all instances of self-denial and patience (Luke 9:23). This is the best preparative for martyrdom. We must live a life of self-denial, mortification, and contempt of the world; we must not indulge our ease and appetite, for then it will be hard to bear toil, and weariness, and want for Christ. We are daily subject to affliction, and we must accommodate ourselves to it, and acquiesce in the will of God in it, and must learn to endure hardship. We frequently meet with crosses in the way of duty; and though we must not pull them upon our own heads, yet, when they are laid for us, we must take them up, carry them after Christ, and make the best of them.

We must prefer the salvation and happiness of our souls before any secular concern whatsoever. Reckon upon it: (1) That he who to preserve his liberty or estate, his power or preferment, nay, or to save his life denies Christ and his truths, willfully wrongs his conscience and sins against God will be not only, not a saver, but an unspeakable loser in the issue, when profit and loss come to be balanced. He that will save his life upon these terms will lose it, will lose that which is of infinitely more value, his precious soul. (2) We must firmly believe also that, if we lose our life for cleaving to Christ and our religion, we shall save it to our unspeakable advantage; for we shall be abundantly recompensed in the resurrection of the just, when we shall have it again, a new and an eternal life. (3) That the gain of all the world, if we should forsake Christ, and fall in with the interests of the world, would be so far from countervailing the eternal loss and ruin of the soul, that it would bear no manner of proportion to it (Luke 9:25).

If we could be supposed to gain all the wealth, honour, and pleasure in the world by denying Christ, yet when by so doing we lose ourselves to all eternity, and are cast away at last, what good will our worldly gain do us?

Observe: In Matthew and Mark, the dreadful issue is a man’s losing his own soul, here it is losing himself, which plainly intimates that our souls are ourselves. Animus cujusque is est quisque – The soul is the man; and it is well or ill with us, according as it is well or ill with our souls. If they perish forever, under the weight of their own guilt and corruption, it is certain that we are undone. The body cannot be happy if the soul be miserable in the other world; but the soul may be happy, though the body be greatly afflicted and oppressed in this world. If a man be himself cast away, ē zēmiōtheis – if he be damaged, or if he be punished, si mulctetur – if he have a mulct put upon his soul by the righteous sentence of Christ, whose cause and interest he has treacherously deserted, if it be adjudged a forfeiture of all his blessedness, and the forfeiture be taken, where is his gain? What is his hope?

We must, therefore, never be ashamed of Christ and his gospel, nor of any disgrace or reproach that we may undergo for our faithful adherence to him and to it (Luke 9:26). For whosoever shall be ashamed of me and of my words, of him shall the Son of man be ashamed, and justly. When the service and honour of Christ called for his testimony and agency, he denied them, because the interest of Christ was a despised interest, and everywhere spoken against; and therefore, he can expect no other than that in the great day. When his case calls for Christ’s appearance on his behalf, Christ will be ashamed to own such a cowardly, worldly, sneaking spirit, and will say, “He is none of mine; he belongs not to me.”

As Christ had a state of humiliation and of exaltation, so likewise has his cause. They, and they only that are willing to suffer with it when it suffers, shall reign with it when it reigns; but those that cannot find in their hearts to share with it in its disgrace, and to say, If this be to be vile, I will be yet more vile, shall certainly have no share with it in its triumphs.

Observe here: How Christ, to support himself and his followers under present disgraces, speaks magnificently of the lustre of his second coming, in prospect of which he endured the cross, despising the shame. He shall come in his own glory. This was not mentioned in Matthew and Mark. He shall come in the glory of the Mediator, all the glory which the Father restored to him, which he had with God before the worlds were, which he had deposited and put in pledge, as it were, for the accomplishing of his undertaking, and demanded again when he had gone through it.

Now, O Father, glorify thou me (John 17:4-5). He shall come in all that glory which the Father conferred upon him when he set him at his own right hand, and gave him to be head over all things to the church, in all the glory that is due to him as the assertor of the glory of God, and the author of the glory of all the saints. This is his own glory. He shall come in his Father’s glory. The Father will judge the world by him, having committed all judgment to him; and therefore will publicly own him in the judgment as the brightness of his glory and the express image of his person. He shall come in the glory of the holy angels. They shall all attend him, and minister to him, and add everything they can to the lustre of his appearance. What a figure will the blessed Jesus make in that day. Did we believe it, we should never be ashamed of him or his words now.

Lastly, To encourage them in suffering for him, he assures them that the kingdom of God would now shortly be set up, notwithstanding the great opposition that was made to it, Luke 9:27. “Though the second coming of the Son of man is at a great distance, the Kingdom of God shall come in its power in the present age, while some here present are alive.” They saw the Kingdom of God when the Spirit was poured out, when the gospel was preached to all the world and nations were brought to Christ by it; they saw the Kingdom of God triumph over the Gentile nations in their conversion, and over the Jewish nation in its destruction.

Luke 9:28: We have here the narrative of Christ’s transfiguration, which was designed for a specimen of that glory of his in which he will come to judge the world, of which he had lately been speaking, and, consequently, an encouragement to his disciples to suffer for him, and never to be ashamed of him. We had this account before in Matthew and Mark, and it is well worthy to be repeated to us, and reconsidered by us, for the confirmation of our faith in the Lord Jesus, as the brightness of his Father’s glory and the Light of the world, for the filling of our minds with high and honourable thoughts of him, notwithstanding his being clothed with a body, and giving us some idea of the glory which he entered into at his ascension, and in which he now appears within the veil, and for the raising and encouraging of our hopes and expectations concerning the glory reserved for all believers in the future state.

Here is one circumstance of the narrative that seems to differ from the other two evangelists that related it. They said that it was six days after the foregoing sayings; Luke says that it was about eight days after, that is, it was that day seven-night, six whole days intervening, and it was the eighth day. Some think that it was in the night that Christ was transfigured, because the disciples were sleepy, as in his agony, and in the night his appearance in splendour would be the more illustrious; if in the night, the computation of the time would be the more doubtful and uncertain; probably in the night, between the seventh and eighth day, and so about eight days.

… We are here told that Christ had this honour put upon him when he was praying: He went up into a mountain to pray, as he frequently did (Luke 9:28), and as he prayed, he was transfigured. When Christ humbled himself to pray, he was thus exalted. He knew before that this was designed for him at this time and therefore seeks it by prayer. Christ himself must petition out the favours that were purposed for him, and promised to him: Ask of me, and I will give thee, Psalms 2:8. And thus, he intended to put an honour upon the duty of prayer, and to recommend it to us. It is a transfiguring, transforming duty, if our hearts be elevated and enlarged in it; so as in it to behold the glory of the Lord, we shall be changed into the same image from glory to glory (2 Corinthians 3:18).

By prayer we fetch in the wisdom, grace, and joy, which make the face to shine. Luke does not use the word transfigured – metamorphōthē (which Matthew and Mark used), perhaps because it had been used so much in the Pagan theology, but makes use of a phrase equivalent, to eidos tou prosōpou heteron – the fashion of his countenance was another thing from what it had been; his face shone far beyond what Moses’s did when he came down from the mount; and his raiment was white and glistening – it was exastraptōn – bright like lightning (a word used only here), so that he seemed to be arrayed all with light, to cover himself with light as with a garment.

It was said in Matthew and Mark that Moses and Elias appeared to them; here it is said that they appeared in glory, to teach us that saints departed are in glory, are in a glorious state; they shine in glory. He being in glory, they appeared with him in glory, as all the saints shall shortly do. We are here told what the subject was of the discourse between Christ and the two great prophets of the Old Testament:

They spoke of his decease, which he should accomplish at Jerusalem. Elegon tēn exodon autou – his exodus, his departure; that is, his death. The death of Christ is here called his exit, his going out, his leaving the world. Moses and Elias spoke of it to him under that notion, to reconcile him to it, and to make the foresight of it the more easy to his human nature. The death of the saints is their exodus, their departure out of the Egypt of this world, their release out of a house of bondage.

Some think that the ascension of Christ is included here in his departure; for the departure of Israel out of Egypt was a departure in triumph, so was his when he went from earth to heaven. This departure of his he must accomplish; for thus it was determined, the matter was immutably fixed in the counsel of God, and could not be altered. He must accomplish it at Jerusalem though his residence was mostly in Galilee, for his most spiteful enemies were at Jerusalem, and there the Sanhedrim sat that took upon them to judge of prophets. Moses and Elias spoke of this, to intimate that the sufferings of Christ, and his entrance into his glory, were what Moses and the prophets had spoken of.

Our Lord Jesus, even in his transfiguration, was willing to enter into a discourse concerning his death and sufferings, to teach us that meditations on death, as it is our departure out of this world to another, are never unseasonable, but in a special manner, seasonable when at any time we are advanced, lest we should be lifted up above measure. In our greatest glories on earth, let us remember that here we have no continuing city.”

Complete Commentary on the Whole Bible, by Matthew Henry, 1706