Day: August 23, 2013

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God Is on Our Team

When I was helpless, he saved me. PSALM 116:6

As youngsters, we neighborhood kids would play street football. The minute we got home from school we’d drop the books and hit the pavement. The kid across the street had a dad with a great arm and a strong addiction to football. As soon as he’d pull in the driveway from work we’d start yelling for him to come and play ball. He couldn’t resist. Out of fairness he’d always ask, “Which team is losing?” Then he would join that team, which often seemed to be mine.

His appearance in the huddle changed the whole ball game. He was confident, strong, and most of all, he had a plan. We’d circle around him, and he’d look at us and say, “OK boys, here is what we are going to do.” The other side was groaning before we left the huddle. You see, we not only had a new plan, we had a new leader.

He brought new life to our team. God does precisely the same. We didn’t need a new play; we needed a new plan. We didn’t need to trade positions; we needed a new player. That player is Jesus Christ, God’s firstborn Son.

In the Grip of Grace

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Blessing Our Enemies

Luke 6:27-28

As stories make their way to us from the persecuted church, we hear about Christians who, though beaten, harassed, and jailed, respond with unimaginable grace and dignity. These saints have learned to apply Christ’s command to “love your enemies,” even in the harshest of circumstances.

We may never face a beating for our faith, but we will run across people who hate and mistreat us. The easy and natural response is to dislike them in return, but harboring ill will chokes our witness with resentment. Instead, Jesus instructs us to love our adversaries and to treat them well. The Greek word is agape—it means “unconditional love,” which is not a soft feeling based on the attractive nature or appearance of the other person. Agape forms through an act of our will. When we choose to love, our emotions follow the decision of our mind.

A right response to an enemy will prove beneficial to him. God has a redemptive plan in mind for his life, and we have an opportunity to help show him the way to the Lord. A bitter or angry response on our part will serve only to feed our adversary’s desire to cause harm. The natural urge to return one wrong for another can be subdued only through prayer, the most powerful weapon in our arsenal. Instead of begging the Father to defeat our enemy, we can ask Him for the opportunity to express genuine Christlike love in the face of opposition. That’s the kind of prayer He delights to answer. And when we are privileged to meet the need of someone who despises us, we might just see an amazing change in his life.

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Ungodly Lifestyles

“For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, Without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good, Traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God.” (2 Timothy 3:2-4)

The warning in the previous verse to our text for today insists that “perilous times” will characterize the last days. This list describes the types of people who will dominate the last days, and it is frightful.

The “self love” of these people is demonstrated by internal motivations driven by the sin nature. Such people will be “covetous”; the Greek term means “fond of silver.” They will also be “boasters” (braggarts) who revel in their sinful behavior. That boasting is driven by a “proud” spirit that is arrogant, willing to show off gaudy ostentations of their conquests. Such behavior, of course, leads them to be “blasphemers,” speaking evil with low, vulgar taunts designed to be injurious.

Part of this list includes Greek words with an “un” prefix. There are those who are un-persuadable by parents, obstinate, stubborn, and inflexible. Many are un-thankful, without grace, without thanks, and without any pleasantry. All are un-holy, without the nature to be just or moral. Some are un-affectionate, without a natural love for family or friends. There are also those who are un-reconcilable, not able to make or keep a promise.

Finally, there will be those who are diabolos (like the devil). They are slanderous liars, “incontinent” (without self control), savage “despisers” who are opposed to “those who are good.” They will be treacherous, rash, and “high minded” people who are “lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God.” Not fun to think about.

But, “greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world” (1 John 4:4). HMM III

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And so it came to pass that they escaped all safe to land

“And the rest, some on boards, some on broken pieces of the ship. And so it came to pass that they escaped all safe to land.” (Acts 27:44.)

THE marvelous story of Paul’s voyage to Rome, with its trials and triumphs, is a fine pattern of the lights and shades of the way of faith all through the story of human life. The remarkable feature of it is the hard and narrow places which we find intermingled with God’s most extraordinary interpositions and providences.

It is the common idea that the pathway of faith is strewn with flowers, and that when God interposes in the life of His people, He does it on a scale so grand that He lifts us quite out of the plane of difficulties. The actual fact, however, is that the real experience is quite contrary. The story of the Bible is one of alternate trial and triumph in the case of everyone of the cloud of witnesses from Abel down to the latest martyr.

Paul, more than anyone else, was an example of how much a child of God can suffer without being crushed or broken in spirit. On account of his testifying in Damascus, he was hunted down by persecutors and obliged to fly for his life, but we behold no heavenly chariot transporting the holy apostle amid thunderbolts of flame from the reach of his foes, but “through a window in a basket,” was he let down over the walls of Damascus and so escaped their hands. In an old clothes basket, like a bundle of laundry, or groceries, the servant of Jesus Christ was dropped from the window and ignominiously fled from the hate of his foes.

Again we find him left for months in the lonely dungeons; we find him telling of his watchings, his fastings, and his desertion by friends, of his brutal and shameful beatings, and here even after God has promised to deliver him, we see him for days left to toss upon a stormy sea, obliged to stand guard over the treacherous seaman, and at last when the deliverance comes, there is no heavenly galley sailing from the skies to take off the noble prisoner; there is no angel form walking along the waters and stilling the raging breakers; there is no supernatural sign of the transcendent miracle that is being wrought; but one is compelled to seize a spar, another a floating plank, another to climb on a fragment of the wreck, another to strike out and swim for his life.

Here is God’s pattern for our own lives. Here is a Gospel of help for people that have to live in this every day world with real and ordinary surroundings, and a thousand practical conditions which have to be met in a thoroughly practical way.

God’s promises and God’s providences do not lift us out of the plane of common sense and commonplace trial, but it is through these very things that faith is perfected, and that God loves to interweave the golden threads of His love along the warp and woof of our every day experience.— Hard Places in the Way of Faith.

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The unsearchable riches of Christ

“The unsearchable riches of Christ.” Ephesians 3:8

My Master has riches beyond the count of arithmetic, the measurement of reason, the dream of imagination, or the eloquence of words. They are unsearchable! You may look, and study, and weigh, but Jesus is a greater Saviour than you think Him to be when your thoughts are at the greatest. My Lord is more ready to pardon than you to sin, more able to forgive than you to transgress. My Master is more willing to supply your wants than you are to confess them. Never tolerate low thoughts of my Lord Jesus. When you put the crown on His head, you will only crown Him with silver when He deserves gold.

My Master has riches of happiness to bestow upon you now. He can make you to lie down in green pastures, and lead you beside still waters. There is no music like the music of His pipe, when He is the Shepherd and you are the sheep, and you lie down at His feet. There is no love like His, neither earth nor heaven can match it. To know Christ and to be found in Him—oh! this is life, this is joy, this is marrow and fatness, wine on the lees well refined. My Master does not treat His servants churlishly; He gives to them as a king giveth to a king; He gives them two heavens—a heaven below in serving Him here, and a heaven above in delighting in Him for ever. His unsearchable riches will be best known in eternity.

He will give you on the way to heaven all you need; your place of defence shall be the munitions of rocks, your bread shall be given you, and your waters shall be sure; but it is there, THERE, where you shall hear the song of them that triumph, the shout of them that feast, and shall have a face-to-face view of the glorious and beloved One. The unsearchable riches of Christ! This is the tune for the minstrels of earth, and the song for the harpers of heaven. Lord, teach us more and more of Jesus, and we will tell out the good news to others.

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Sick for his Lord

“I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, if ye find my beloved, that ye tell him, that I am sick of love.” Song 5:8

Such is the language of the believer panting after present fellowship with Jesus, he is sick for his Lord. Gracious souls are never perfectly at ease except they are in a state of nearness to Christ; for when they are away from Him they lose their peace. The nearer to Him, the nearer to the perfect calm of heaven; the nearer to Him, the fuller the heart is, not only of peace, but of life, and vigour, and joy, for these all depend on constant intercourse with Jesus. What the sun is to the day, what the moon is to the night, what the dew is to the flower, such is Jesus Christ to us. What bread is to the hungry, clothing to the naked, the shadow of a great rock to the traveller in a weary land, such is Jesus Christ to us; and, therefore, if we are not consciously one with Him, little marvel if our spirit cries in the words of the Song, “I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, if ye find my beloved, tell Him that I am sick of love.”

This earnest longing after Jesus has a blessing attending it: “Blessed are they that do hunger and thirst after righteousness”; and therefore, supremely blessed are they who thirst after the Righteous One. Blessed is that hunger, since it comes from God: if I may not have the full-blown blessedness of being filled, I would seek the same blessedness in its sweet bud-pining in emptiness and eagerness till I am filled with Christ. If I may not feed on Jesus, it shall be next door to heaven to hunger and thirst after Him. There is a hallowedness about that hunger, since it sparkles among the beatitudes of our Lord. But the blessing involves a promise. Such hungry ones “shall be filled” with what they are desiring.

If Christ thus causes us to long after Himself, He will certainly satisfy those longings; and when He does come to us, as come He will, oh, how sweet it will be!