Sep 14, 2020 | Devotions
Close to six months of restricted activities have caused several of us to miss or to postpone some appointments. Meetings, get-togethers, doctors’ appointments, and more have had to be adjusted. You may have had to postpone an appointment with an eye doctor. If so let’s use this devotional to do an eye examination of a different sort.
Think about who you are. Each of us is a wonderful combination of mind and spirit and soul that feels and thinks and speaks. And when that wonderful combination expresses itself, we often use the word “I.” We speak up for the self within us and say “I feel” or “I think” or “I don’t want to.” This is the “I’ that the doctor wants to examine. The doctor who wants to see us is of course Jesus Christ.
You understand that Jesus, the Great Physician, knows us through and through. But He also expects us to know ourselves. When Jesus said, “If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross daily and follow Me” (Luke 9:23), He laid down the requirement that we know ourselves. This “self” He calls us to deny in order to follow Him, is simply the “I” that speaks up saying “I can” or “I will” or “I don’t understand.” What does Jesus mean? Does He want us to hate who we are or resist whatever gives us our identity?
Actually Jesus wants to give us a new identity in Him. God created each us to be unique. Hearing the call of Christ means God is inviting us in our uniqueness to become all we were created to be. Hearing and answering that call reveals there is a self within that resists. We discover that this self is often more in tune with the world than with the Lord’s call. To keep our selves healthy, we need an “I” exam.”
Thinking of who we are, the “I” that acts, cares, speaks, and feels isn’t a matter of “navel-gazing” or morbid self-absorption,. Neither is it a call for self-condemnation. Instead it is time with the Lord as He lovingly speaks, probes, and listens to us. Over the hour or day or however long it takes, the Lord helps us to be open and honest, setting aside our excuses for the times we have postponed our “appointments” with Him.
As any good physician does, the Lord often begins by listening to us. We have hurts, maybe even hates. We tell Him of our weaknesses and strengths, our hopes. We begin to recognize our difficulties in following Him, but perhaps we miss the real problems that keep us away. If so, He begins to ask questions. He is God and knows our answers, but He wants us to hear our own answers, too. Some of His “I” questions are difficult, even unpleasant, to answer. Our answers begin to tell us what sort of “I” we are. He may ask us to fill in the blanks below as we think about our wants. It’s a good chance for the “I” to speak up. (You will probably have more than one answer for each question. We are complex people.)
I want to be __________.
I want to get or to have ________.
I want to do __________.
I want to stop __________.
That little test was easy, wasn’t it? Probably not if we allow the real “I” within to answer. The questions are simple but they ask us to look into our wants and wishes. They are simple, but answered in the presence of the Lord who knows our hearts, they give us a picture of who we are. As we understand better who we are we can return to Jesus words. We can discover more of the “I” within that must be denied that we might follow our Lord.
Sep 7, 2020 | Devotions
The election season has started. Perhaps it never stopped after our last presidential election. But now it’s in full voice, bragging, accusing, spending, spending, spending. And with national elections come the truth squads, the fact-checkers who try to point out half-truths, claims with no basis in truth, and promises that in truth cannot be fulfilled. Because of the inflamed rhetoric, this season may not be much of a season of truth, but, as in all times, it is a season for truth.
Truth is often shadowed and shaped by folks who want to change our minds or our behavior. We can explore how those folks are becoming more effective and what that does to our spiritual lives is for another time. This column, then, is not a call for “fact-checking” this speech or that advertisement. I want to deal with something more basic, the move from absolute truth to relative truth that has been going on for a long time but is more evident now. I want to remember and remind you that Christian living and thinking must be based on truth—God’s truth.
Of course, we base our lives on God’s truth. What other kind of truth is there besides God’s truth? In terms of absolutes, there is no other truth that deals with human origin and destiny. Only God’s truth reveals humanity’s place in the creation. Only God has given humankind moral standards that allow us to flourish. But, for some time people with influence or those who want to gain influence have replaced God’s truth with a new “truth.” Specifically, truths of right and wrong have been set aside as no longer applicable.
Today, as a result of a half-century of teaching “new truth,” in schools of all sorts, public and private, grade school to graduate studies, the idea of right and wrong absolutes is out of favor. Tolerance, understanding, and acceptance are presented as alternatives to teaching what is right and wrong. After all, so says this “new truth,” a person’s or a group’s view of the world, their standards of right and wrong are based on their culture, their heritage, their place in society, their beliefs. As long as it works for them, it’s acceptable. Moral absolutes revealed truth, God and His one way only—none of these are really true so the “new truth” teaching goes. We’re going to become free when we grasp this new way of relating and accepting others. And remember, Jesus said, “and you will know the truth and the truth will make you free” (John 8:32, NASB). New truth surely leads to new freedom.
Folks wanting to use Jesus to support what they say is the truth love this verse. They present the latest intellectual fad or theory as the true way of seeing things, understanding matters. And, when you see that, you will be free, so their “pitch” goes. Of course they never call attention to the preceding verse, “If you continue in My word, then you are truly disciples of Mine and….” Jesus’ truth brings freedom as it is absorbed and practiced. Folks forget, also, Jesus challenging words, “I am the way, and the truth. and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me” (John 14:6 NASB). (My emphasis) Jesus is the truth, not simply a teacher or practitioner of truth.
The idea that a person or group, a culture or nation can set aside God’s truth is dangerous. Loosed from the Creator and His Son who died that we might be free in Him, human beings revert to the proud, self-determining disobedience of Adam and Eve. Still, we must not use intolerance, impatience, and rejection to oppose people who embrace the idea that right and wrong are totally culturally conditioned. You and I, also, are shaped by such things as our heritage, status, education, and family. We are not yet examples of God’s truth, but God is changing us.
Aug 31, 2020 | Devotions
Have you ever been a waiter? If not, you may be a waiter now. I don’t mean you are someone who waits on tables or customers. I mean you may be waiting for something such as the end of this pandemic problem or an answer to a job application. You may be waiting for the political scene or the economic situation to change for the better. Many of us are simply waiting for a chance to get on with normal life, life the way it used to be.
I hope you are waiting because waiting can be a healthy response to life today, particularly if you are waiting on the Lord. But waiting is not the only response to our present circumstances. Two other very common responses are to ignore what’s going on today or to endure it.
Some people are ignoring the problems we have. Their thought is that the virus hasn’t touched me so I will ignore all the alarms. My financial situation is secure, so I will spend what I want. No one is going to tell me what to do. They ignore the future and decide to live for the moment, to satisfy just themselves, to do whatever it is they want to do now. If that sounds selfish, it is.
Perhaps a more common response to the problems around us is simply to endure the present troubles. Their view is that social problems, economic struggles, political issues will go away in time. We’re thankful that these agonies haven’t touched us yet, they say. We will just put up with life as it is for a while. Thankfully settling down in their comfortable “nests,” they pass the time as painlessly as possible. There are other responses such as giving up on life and living every day in a gray fog or waiting.
The Bible has a good deal to say about waiting, specifically about waiting for the Lord. Most of these texts come from the Old Testament. But one of the greatest examples of waiting is the way in which the apostles waited in the years after Jesus’ ascension. They waited for Him to return, hoping, anticipating, and obeying. Until He returned, they waited and worked.
Psalm 130 was written by an Old Testament “waiter.” The psalm is his lament. And though it was one person’s experience, it came to be owned by the community of faith and was gathered into Psalms as part of the Psalms of Ascent. Most likely the Psalms of Ascent were sung or recited as worshipers went up to Jerusalem to worship. Sometimes these pilgrims were joyful. Sometimes they prayed these psalms because they were fearful, confused, and disoriented. They were going to worship, but their world seemed upside down. They couldn’t ignore their circumstances and did not want simply to endure the troubles.
A lament is typically a psalm of disorientation. Disorientation means life has lost its moral compass. Maybe the righteous are suffering, the wicked prospering. The powerful control the law and oppress the poor. Sin saturates public life. God is ignored or mocked. Sound familiar?
I think this is a psalm for today, a time when nothing seems right side up. Confusion, doubt, anger, even despair cause some to ignore life, some to endure life. Fear keeps us away from others when we need community. Anger makes us grasp at conspiratorial ravings. Doubt tempts us to think there is no end in sight to the crises on every hand. What can we do but wait?
The psalmist wrote his outcry out of the depths. The past was gone; the future was unknown. He was in a pit, a pit so deep there was no direction to look except up.
Would the Lord hear him? What if the Lord held his sin and failings against him? But touched by the Spirit, the poet understood that the Lord was to be feared in part because He forgives sin. Sin would not hold God at arm’s length. With God willing to forgive, only those who refused to take sin seriously and refused to seek God’s forgiveness had reason to fear God in this way.
So the writer cried out and then waited. Passive? No, He waited with the eagerness of a watchman waiting through the darkest hours of the night just before dawn. He waited with the confidence of a watchman who trusted morning would come because he knew day followed night. The Lord would hear and respond because He is faithful to His word. The Lord’s response would not be as “automatic” as day following night. But the Lord would hear and respond out of His lovingkindness, out of His faithfulness to His word.
Psalm 130 does not give us exactly what the writer did or did not do as he waited. But let me suggest some things we might do to make sure we are truly waiting. One, we need to live in hope. I don’t mean to hope things are going to get better. That’s not our call. We can hope in the Lord, trusting Him to act in His time and fashion. Two, we can change the motto “God’s got this” to “God’s got us in this” which is where He wants us. Whether we understand why the Lord has us here or not, we can trust that He has plans for us today. And they don’t include simply doing what we want (ignoring) or hunkering down out of sight (enduring). He wants us to wait expectantly, hopefully, trustfully.
Aug 24, 2020 | Devotions
Are there prayers you won’t pray? My
conviction is that the best way to offer requests to God is to let the Holy
Spirit lay matters on our heart. When God leads us in our asking we can be sure
He wants to act. When He does act, His will is accomplished; and we are
encouraged by the answer to our prayer. But what about when the Spirit
identifies matters in us?
Sometimes the Holy Spirit reminds us
of things in our lives that we need to deal with but we are reluctant to lay
them before the Lord. Sometimes He brings up resentments we don’t want God to
heal. We have nursed them for a long time. The Spirit can remind us of sins of
the past that we have not dealt with, neither confessing them nor repenting. He
may identify some attitude deep inside that we have long blamed on the way we were
brought up. We excuse ourselves, for the way we are or for what we have done. The
result may be we don’t really want God to deal with some matters the Holy
Spirit brings to mind. We don’t want to face them, and we don’t know how to
repent.
Psalm 103 is a great word-picture of
God’s willingness and ability to forgive our sin, all our sin. God remembers
our humanity. He knows we are dust. And in His steadfast love and compassion He
puts away our sin. God does not excuse our sin. He accepts Christ’s atonement
for our sin at Calvary. The result is our sin is not held against us. So why should
the Holy Spirit bring some of our past sin to mind? Is it Satan harassing us or
is it the Holy Spirit seeking to root out deeply buried attitudes, prejudices,
grievances against others?
Satan certainly wants to keep our
sins fresh in our minds. He wants us to feel guilty or even ashamed. Confession
is the key to overcoming Satan’s reminders. But God’s Spirit can bring the past
to mind in order to deal with sins of the heart and to prompt repentance. When
He does we are tempted to ignore Him and not to pray.
Often the Spirit deals with our deep
sins of attitude which may have roots in the past. Few of us would say we enjoy
our sin. But neither do we let go of it or deal with its deep roots. Instead, when
we recognize our sin of pre-judging others, we often go to some length to
justify or to rationalize our thinking. We easily explain to ourselves that our
prejudices against the poor, other races or nationalities, the homeless, other
kinds of Christians may have come from our experiences or education or family
setting. Whatever the source, though, these sins we harbor are still our sins,
not simply the sins of others against us. Do we want God to bring such
attitudes to our mind,? Do we want Him to do something about them in us? Do we
pray for the kind of healing that reaches deep within us and threatens to
change our long-lived attitudes? Do we want to repent? Or do we try to ignore
the Spirit’s prompting and to get on with our prayers.
Prayer over our prejudices is not
the only prayer we sometimes avoid. Often, over time, incidents of hurt,
failure, and sin from the past are forgotten or covered over. Sometimes the
Holy Spirit brings those past events forward because they can be the source of
our spiritual weakness and our inability to live the life God wants us to have.
Fear, anxiety, deep sadness can be rooted in a past that God wants to heal. God
does not dig up the past or rehash days gone by in order to keep us off-balance.
He knows the past can help or hurt us, and He always wants the best for us.
Prayer is a vital life-line in the
Kingdom of God. As such God intends it to be open and honest. That means God
wants to hear the prayers we won’t pray or are reluctant to pray.
Aug 17, 2020 | Devotions
A church sign near where we live reads, “Be the reason someone believes in the goodness of people.” It’s an encouraging thought, but I would like to change that sign. I would like for it read something such as “Be the reason someone believes in the goodness of God.” Or we might change it to refer to the mercy of God or His grace or God’s love, even God’s power.
The reason I began toying with that saying was because God kept reminding me of how concerned He is about His reputation. I began to notice how often God acts for His name’s sake. Sometimes that means God is doing something because of who He is. He is revealing His character. For instance, God leads us “in paths of righteousness for His name’s sake” (Ps. 23:3). He leads in right paths because of who He is—caring, trustworthy, purposeful, and more. But God also uses that “for My name’s sake” phrase to signal His concern for what others think about Him. (God is not conducting a popularity contest, but He cares because He loves us and is reaching out to humankind.)
Here are some examples from scripture of God’s concern for His reputation:
- Abraham argued that God, the Judge of all the earth, needed to maintain a reputation as one who acts justly and does not destroy the righteous with the wicked (Gen. 18:25).
- Moses argued “what will the Egyptians think” when God said He would destroy all Israel after the golden calf incident (Exod. 32:12). God said He would not destroy all Israel.
- The psalmist reminded Israel that despite their rebellion God cared for them “for the sake of His name that He might make His power known” (Psalm 106:8). Israel was to be God’s advertisement to the nations.
- God explained to Ezekiel why He did not destroy His people several times throughout their history. He relented for His name’s sake (Ezekiel 20:8, 14, 22).
- Paul wrote that the Jews gave God such a bad reputation that Gentiles blasphemed the name of God (Rom. 2:24). Presenting the gospel of Jesus Christ would change that.
In all these and more God is saying that His reputation among His own and among others is important. If for some reason people think God is distant, capricious, untrustworthy, or cruel, they may try to appease Him. They will not love or trust Him. If people come to think God is gracious and caring, it may be more difficult for them to turn away.
That takes us back to thinking about the church sign referred to above. What if we changed that so that it became a reminder that we can influence others’ view of God? What if we could be the reason someone believes in God’s mercy or in God’s power? Imagine having this on the dash of our car: “Be the reason someone believes God loves them.” Perhaps like you, my immediate thought is how to act in such a way that people think about God in a positive way. Then I realize that although actions may speak louder than words, actions by themselves seldom are enough. We have to let people know what it is that makes us tick, makes us different (if we are different).
Despite the turmoil in our land and our world, most of us live in safe neighborhoods where a certain level of civility is common. Lost neighbors as well as converted ones may do “random acts of kindness.” People who have no thought for God are as concerned about justice as those declared innocent before God through Christ. We even greet one another with a smile (through the mask) and a “How are you?” So, when we have the opportunity to serve a neighbor or friend, if we want our service to be linked to God’s love or greatness, we have to speak up. People may be influenced to believe in the goodness of people or not. We want them to believe in the goodness of God.
Aug 10, 2020 | Devotions
Most of us have heard something about the persecution faced by Christians in other lands. North Korea, China, India, and Iran are just some of the nations that are notorious for using political, economic, and social pressure to make it difficult to follow the Lord. But religious persecution is not new. Satan has used that tool for centuries. But it is not his only strategy and may not be his most effective. In our nation and others, Satan has found seduction to be an effective tool.
Satan’s seduction is more than immoral sexual activity. It is enticing people to believe in or to act in a way that is wrong.
Both persecution and seduction come under the heading of temptation. The Bible has much to say about temptation. It is common to all. We cannot escape it. God gives us tools to overcome it. The Lord taught us to pray, “Lead us not into temptation.” Temptation tries to take the heart out of Christian living, but not always by direct attack. Persecution uses fear to encourage or demand that we deny, hide, or weaken our relationship with the Lord. Seduction uses our own normal human need, desires, and wishes to encourage us to water down our relationship with the Lord and to be ineffective Christians.
In our country in the past, Christians have experienced some persecution. Undoubtedly, in the future, believers in the United States will experience increased persecution. Today, seduction seems to be Satan’s best tool in our land. Satan can use an advertising industry to make us want more, newer, or better. He has a political system in play that on the one hand seems unresponsive to our needs. Yet, on the other hand, it offers us the promise that the next set of leaders will solve all our problems. More, Satan uses our nation’s media and entertainment industries to stimulate our baser desires, anger, lust, self-interest, and desire to escape.
In the familiar parable of the sower, Jesus identified those who have received the gospel but are then seduced by Satan’s use of their desires. As Mark recorded it, Jesus referred to these folks as those “who have heard the word, but the worries of the world, and the deceitfulness of riches, and the desires for other things enter in and choke the word, and it becomes unfruitful (Mark 4:18-19, NASB).
This parable is not about who is saved and who is not. It is about effectiveness. And that is the “crunch” today in our nation. Millions of us give the correct answers to surveys and so testify that we are Christians. We believe, we pray, we go to church, etc. But these same surveys note that too many of us think the same way, have the same values, want the same things as our unbelieving neighbors, i.e., we are ineffective as Christ’s salt and light. We blame the times in which we live, the crises, etc. for not living consecrated lives when the truth is we are far too interested in ourselves, our standard of living, our future instead of in the Lord’s work.
Satan is seducing Christians; but the Bible has an answer (several answers). One verse gets at what Satan uses to entice us and how we can let the Lord defend us: “Delight yourself in the LORD; And He will give you the desires of your heart” (Psalm 37:4 NASB).
Human beings have desires. God built them into us. They are not immoral in themselves. They are not to be repressed or ignored to the point we lose touch with our humanity. But when we delight in the Lord, not simply believe or think about God or, even, worship, it is safe for God to give us the desires of our heart. Until then, Satan may give us the desires of our heart.
