Greetings,

As I shared with my students this week was a challenge in persevering through the weariness that has beset upon many, self-included. One of the wearisome tasks was telling my son Cameron, his grandma died. As expected he took it quite hard. I purposely have held off telling him because he just entered treatment on the day she dies and his counselors and that time suggested we wait.

It did lead to some good conversation; how much his grandma loved him and constantly prayed he would get victory over his addiction and do so by coming to know the Lord. I shared it would be a great honor to her that if the day she died would also mark the first day of your eventual victory over your addiction. He agreed and we had some further discussion in the power of addictions. Not just alcohol and drugs, but also in unhealthy eating, watching TV, even exercising. How addictions our way of coping with life’s hurts of lost relationships, failures, etc. However, those addictions never bring us the peace we seek but that peace can only be found in Jesus. I could share more, but in short please pray for God to open Cameron’s heart to fully understand loving Jesus is not just so He will take away the pain, which He can do, but loving Jesus forgiveness of sins, freedom from the slavery of sin and finding purpose in life by serving Him.

This week saw a couple of more current students being paroled. Adam, Dixon since August 2017. You might remember Adam from the person who used A. C. as his name when submitting prayer requests. Adam was by all indications a strong believer. If his parole plans remained as planned he paroled to Iowa to be reunited with his wife Anika and daughter Jenna. Where he hopes to get all to attend church regularly. He knows there were struggles ahead. Especially in the strained relationship between mother and daughter.

The other parolee was Joshua, Sheridan since September 2019. My heart grieves that I can’t say Joshua was a strong believer. Joshua was more of a back of the classroom talker or listener to a talker. He did at times ask sin ere questions about fatherhood and questions related to Christianity. Please pray those tidbits that Joshua may have actually heard and asked about would go with him outside the gate and that God would use those as prompts for him to increase his desire to know Christ fully.

This week’s message that I’ll ask the chaplains to distribute.

As always but can never be expressed enough thank you for the prayers.

To Him be the glory in ALL things and to Him alone!

Scott Kalas
Soldiers of Christ Prison Ministries

Weekly Message

This week was a personal challenge in perseverance, it was full of weariness, lack of motivation. Thus Wednesday’s night message ‘The Heart of Christ’ was a much-needed one. It was based on the book ‘Gentle and Lowly’ by Dane Ortlund and Matthew 11:28–29 (ESV): Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.

Many of us if not all of us at least at times develop a warped view of Jesus. We think he is austere and annoyed with us in our constant messing up. But the truth is the heart of Jesus welcomes and warms the weary. He invites us in, he isn’t holding us back. He warms us, refreshes us, restores us, protects us, He gives us life.

To understand the heart of Jesus is to understand why the Gospel is Good News. What do we mean when we say the heart? The heart is not your emotions, the heart is what theologians call the seat of your affections. It is where all those emotions like love, hatred, joy, fear, and zeal.

The heart is what moves us to act one way or the other, to choose one thing over another, or reject one thing and not another thing. Proverbs 27:19. Your heart tells everybody who you are. As Jesus says it is what comes out of your mouth. Matthew 6:21, Proverbs 4:23. Our responsibility is to maintain, keep our hearts in the right frame of spiritual health. How we understand the heart of Jesus determines how you respond, react, or relate to Him. We see three things in Mathew 11:28-29; the invitation, the invited, and the inviter.

The invitation is when Jesus says ‘come to me’ He is not saying come nearer to me physically, Jesus is saying to believe in Him, to believe what He says about Himself, the Father, salvation, sin, hell, heaven, the Kingdom. Believing in Christ means we now derive our life from Him. It is an invitation to draw near to Him by faith.

The invited is Jesus inviting us to Himself? In one sense we like to say Jesus invites everybody to repent and believe the Gospel. We are to preach the Gospel to all but Jesus is inviting a specific kind of person. He is calling those who are a burden, weary, come to Him and you will find rest. Matthew 5:3–6. Jesus invites the hungry, the thirsty, the weary, the tired. Those who have been exposed to their greatest needs and cannot find satisfaction, salvation in themselves, or anywhere else. The invited is you, everyone, but more specifically you when you finally have seen you have no hope of redemption, purpose, or live in yourself alone.

The Inviter. An invitation must come from a trustworthy Inviter. How can we know we can trust Jesus? He says He is gentle and lowly in heart. He is humble, accepting, and approachable. Jesus is the most understandable person in the universe. He knows what it is to be tempted and tried.

We when sin, we often are the mindset we need to be good, consistent in not doing the sin we are convicted of before we can feel we can approach Him. That is not the way He is gentle and lowly in heart. He is approachable.

How you understand the heart of Christ will determine how you approach Him and relate to Him. We must ask am I cold, apathetic, bored or am I tempted, weak, failing, anxious, fearful, angry, bitter, frustrated of the things outside of my control? We then need to ask how and why am I weary, what is making me this way? We must admit we are weighed down, tired, and know you can’t make yourself right on my own. So, we look to the One who can. The one who accepts me with my burden not because I deserve it but because He loves the weary, the sinful, the wayward.

It is through His life, death, and resurrection that He makes you fit for heaven, for eternity, it is through His work of grace not your work of grace. His work of living a perfectly righteous life, dying on the cross for sins and conquering death in His resurrection from the grace. In all of that Jesus accomplishes everything necessary for us to be made whole. That remaking, that becoming happens the moment we believe.

This doesn’t mean all the things that cause unrest, anger, fear, will go away but He will give you rest from those things in your soul and heart and mind. In truth, it is only Jesus who can do it.

This is a summation of the whole message. I wish I could bring it to you in full, but for now, I must be content in what I can bring you and you must be content in what you can receive 1 Chronicles 16:11; Proverbs 14:30, 28:6 Luke 12:15; 2 Corinthians 12:10; Philippians 4:11-13; 1 Timothy 6:6-8. You are in my thoughts, heart, and prayers daily. Omnia ad gloriam Dei et ad solum Deum (All glory to God and God alone). I love and miss you.