Bucket Full of Grace

In Acts 12, Herod has the crown, the chains, and the crowd—but God has the last word. A study of human power versus the sovereign Power of God. What Is Reverential Capitalization? Before we open Acts 12, look again at the title of this post: power vs. Power . The difference is one capital letter, and it is doing all the work. That little device has a name. It is called reverential capitalization — the practice of capitalizing words that refer to God as a kind of typographic bow. You have seen it your whole life: He , Him , His , the Almighty , the Lord — the capital letter signaling that the One being spoken of is in a category by Himself. It is worth being honest about what this convention is and is not. Reverential capitalization is a devotional tradition, not a feature of the original text. Hebrew has no uppercase and lowercase letters; the earliest Greek manuscripts were written entirely in capitals, with no spaces, so they drew no such distinction either. The ESV — the translati...

Drawn:  Intimacy with God Intimacy is what we call the experience of really knowing and being known by another person. We frequently use spatial language when describing this experience like closeness or nearness . An intimate friend is someone we feel very close to; they know us at a deep level. If something happens that damages the intimacy with our friend, they feel distant from us. Or a person who doesn’t know us intimately knows us at a surface  level. But of course intimacy is not spatial but relational. We all know what it’s like to be sitting right next to a person and be physically near but we feel distant and we can feel close to a person who is four thousand miles away . What makes us feel intimate with another person? While there are many ingredients to intimacy and each close relationship we have has a different recipe, common to all of them is trust . We cannot be close with a person we don’t trust. Trust is at the heart of intimacy. The more we trust s...