Max Lucado Daily: Come to Me
How does a person get relief from shame, embarrassment, anger?
In Matthew 11:28, Jesus said, "Come to Me, all of you who are tired and have heavy loads, and I will give you rest. Accept my teachings and learn from Me, because I am gentle and humble in spirit, and you will find rest for your lives. . ."
I can see you shaking your head. I've tried that. I've read the Bible. I've sat on the pew-but I've never received relief. Could it be you went to religion and you didn't go to God? Could it be you went to a church, but never saw Christ?
"Come to Me" the verse reads. Jesus is the solution for weariness of the soul. Go to Him. Admit you have soul secrets you've never dealt with. He already knows what they are.
Go to Him! He's just waiting for you to ask Him to help!
From When God Whispers Your Name
Ezekiel 42
The Rooms for the Priests
Then the man led me northward into the outer court and brought me to the rooms opposite the temple courtyard and opposite the outer wall on the north side. 2 The building whose door faced north was a hundred cubits long and fifty cubits wide.[a] 3 Both in the section twenty cubits[b] from the inner court and in the section opposite the pavement of the outer court, gallery faced gallery at the three levels. 4 In front of the rooms was an inner passageway ten cubits wide and a hundred cubits[c] long.[d] Their doors were on the north. 5 Now the upper rooms were narrower, for the galleries took more space from them than from the rooms on the lower and middle floors of the building. 6 The rooms on the top floor had no pillars, as the courts had; so they were smaller in floor space than those on the lower and middle floors. 7 There was an outer wall parallel to the rooms and the outer court; it extended in front of the rooms for fifty cubits. 8 While the row of rooms on the side next to the outer court was fifty cubits long, the row on the side nearest the sanctuary was a hundred cubits long. 9 The lower rooms had an entrance on the east side as one enters them from the outer court.
10 On the south side[e] along the length of the wall of the outer court, adjoining the temple courtyard and opposite the outer wall, were rooms 11 with a passageway in front of them. These were like the rooms on the north; they had the same length and width, with similar exits and dimensions. Similar to the doorways on the north 12 were the doorways of the rooms on the south. There was a doorway at the beginning of the passageway that was parallel to the corresponding wall extending eastward, by which one enters the rooms.
13 Then he said to me, “The north and south rooms facing the temple courtyard are the priests’ rooms, where the priests who approach the Lord will eat the most holy offerings. There they will put the most holy offerings—the grain offerings, the sin offerings[f] and the guilt offerings—for the place is holy. 14 Once the priests enter the holy precincts, they are not to go into the outer court until they leave behind the garments in which they minister, for these are holy. They are to put on other clothes before they go near the places that are for the people.”
15 When he had finished measuring what was inside the temple area, he led me out by the east gate and measured the area all around: 16 He measured the east side with the measuring rod; it was five hundred cubits.[g][h] 17 He measured the north side; it was five hundred cubits[i] by the measuring rod. 18 He measured the south side; it was five hundred cubits by the measuring rod. 19 Then he turned to the west side and measured; it was five hundred cubits by the measuring rod. 20 So he measured the area on all four sides. It had a wall around it, five hundred cubits long and five hundred cubits wide, to separate the holy from the common.
Our Daily Bread reading and devotion
Read: Psalm 42:1-5
For the director of music. A maskil[c] of the Sons of Korah.
1 As the deer pants for streams of water,
so my soul pants for you, my God.
2 My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.
When can I go and meet with God?
3 My tears have been my food
day and night,
while people say to me all day long,
“Where is your God?”
4 These things I remember
as I pour out my soul:
how I used to go to the house of God
under the protection of the Mighty One[d]
with shouts of joy and praise
among the festive throng.
5 Why, my soul, are you downcast?
Why so disturbed within me?
Put your hope in God,
for I will yet praise him,
my Savior and my God.
Footnotes:
Psalm 42:1 In many Hebrew manuscripts Psalms 42 and 43 constitute one psalm.
Psalm 42:1 In Hebrew texts 42:1-11 is numbered 42:2-12.
Psalm 42:1 Title: Probably a literary or musical term
Psalm 42:4 See Septuagint and Syriac; the meaning of the Hebrew for this line is uncertain.
Place Of Water
November 27, 2013 — by Bill Crowder
The water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life. —John 4:14
East Africa is one of the driest places on earth, which is what makes “Nairobi” such a significant name for a city in that region. The name comes from a Masai phrase meaning “cold water,” and it literally means “the place of water.”
Throughout history, the presence of water has been both life-giving and strategic. Whether a person lives in a dry climate or a rainforest, water is a nonnegotiable necessity. In a dry and barren climate, knowing where to find the place of water can mean the difference between life and death.
Our spiritual life also has certain nonnegotiable elements. That is why Jesus, upon encountering a spiritually thirsty woman at a well, declared to her that He alone could provide living water. He told her, “Whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst. But the water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life” (John 4:14).
Like the deer mentioned in Psalm 42:1-2 who pants for water, our souls thirst for God and long for Him (63:1). We desperately need the sustenance that comes only from Jesus Christ. He is the source of living water that refreshes our hearts.
Rivers of living water,
Rivers of life so free,
Flowing from Thee, my Savior,
Send now the rivers through me. —Wood
Jesus is the fountain of living water.
My Utmost for His Highest, by Oswald Chambers
November 27, 2013
The Consecration of Spiritual Power
. . . by whom the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world —Galatians 6:14
If I dwell on the Cross of Christ, I do not simply become inwardly devout and solely interested in my own holiness— I become strongly focused on Jesus Christ’s interests. Our Lord was not a recluse nor a fanatical holy man practicing self-denial. He did not physically cut Himself off from society, but He was inwardly disconnected all the time. He was not aloof, but He lived in another world. In fact, He was so much in the common everyday world that the religious people of His day accused Him of being a glutton and a drunkard. Yet our Lord never allowed anything to interfere with His consecration of spiritual power.
It is not genuine consecration to think that we can refuse to be used of God now in order to store up our spiritual power for later use. That is a hopeless mistake. The Spirit of God has set a great many people free from their sin, yet they are experiencing no fullness in their lives— no true sense of freedom. The kind of religious life we see around the world today is entirely different from the vigorous holiness of the life of Jesus Christ. “I do not pray that You should take them out of the world, but that You should keep them from the evil one” (John 17:15). We are to be in the world but not of it— to be separated internally, not externally (seeJohn 17:16).
We must never allow anything to interfere with the consecration of our spiritual power. Consecration (being dedicated to God’s service) is our part; sanctification (being set apart from sin and being made holy) is God’s part. We must make a deliberate determination to be interested only in what God is interested. The way to make that determination, when faced with a perplexing problem, is to ask yourself, “Is this the kind of thing in which Jesus Christ is interested, or is it something in which the spirit that is diametrically opposed to Jesus is interested?”
A Word with You, by Ron Hutchcraft
Dropping Everything For the Rescue - #7013
Wednesday, November 27, 2013
It was the night before Thanksgiving. Boy, the Hutchcraft house was a very busy place! We were cleaning house like crazy. Everybody — I mean all five of us were cleaning house. We were decorating the house for the holiday weekend, hustling around getting ready to go get Grandma at the airport, a couple of folks in the kitchen working on some of the elements of dinner tomorrow, including my mincemeat pie. I'm the only one who will eat it and that's great!
Well, I think my oldest son was about six at the time. I remember that he called to us from the top of that winding staircase that went up to his room, and his Mom went to the bottom of the stairs. And he said, "What do you want me to do with this big nail I found in my room?" And Mom said, "Just bring it down here." And so she turned away, and as she did, he slipped, tumbled down the stairs, landed head first. By the time he hit at the bottom of the stairs he was bleeding all over the place.
Well, I want you to know, there were some pretty anxious moments. We didn't know if the nail had gone into his skull. We didn't know what had caused the bleeding. Now, as it turned out, he had only hit a corner of a file cabinet at the bottom and he needed two stitches in the emergency room. Thank the Lord he was okay. But I'll tell you one thing, when he fell, the pies stopped, the decorating was forgotten. We made other arrangements for getting Grandma. No one was thinking Thanksgiving Dinner. Everybody dropped everything!
I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "Dropping Everything For the Rescue."
Now our word for today from the Word of God. We're in Genesis chapter 14, and I'm going to begin reading at verse 11. We'll be reading about Abram and his nephew Lot. "The four kings who were making war against Sodom and Gomorrah seized all the goods from Sodom and Gomorrah and all their food; then they went away. They also carried off Abram's nephew Lot and his possessions, since he was living in Sodom."
Well, that of course enrages and concerns his Uncle Abram. And we find out "When Abram heard that his relative had been taken captive, he called out the 318 trained men born in his household and went in pursuit." By the way, they do end up engaging the enemy and they rescue Lot.
Lot had made a bad choice. He ended up living in Sodom; a place he never should have chosen. And as a result of his bad choices, he ended up in a mess. In spite of that, when he was in trouble, Abram dropped everything to rescue him. He applied all of his resources, got every man he could muster. He threw everything into helping recover a loved one in trouble.
There's a model there for you and me. When someone you love is in trouble, you do whatever it takes to rescue them. Just like our family when we changed all of our plans that Thanksgiving Eve because of one child who was in danger. Maybe someone close to you is in trouble right now; maybe not so much physical trouble like Lot, but maybe it's emotional trouble or spiritual danger.
The point is this: Have you rearranged your priorities to help bring them back, to meet their need? Maybe you're watching your marriage partner right now crying out in a lot of ways — directly or indirectly — for your love, for your time, your attention. Maybe you have a child who is showing signs of withdrawing or wandering; making some bad choices. Don't attack them, don't nag them. Rearrange your life to be together more. Maybe you have a friend or coworker who's hurting. Or it could be you have a chance right now to return to one of your parents many of the sacrifices they made for you because they need you now.
Remember you serve a Savior who often stopped and dropped everything to meet needs. Don't wait for a crisis. It takes much less time to prevent the crash than to pick up the pieces. You may have to cancel some meetings, sacrifice some personal preferences, limit your commitments, or maybe rearrange your lifestyle. But someone you love...their life may depend on it and they're crying out for your help. They're falling, they're hurting, they're bleeding like my son on those stairs that night.
And even if all the bleeding is inside, please drop everything to come running, and use your best resources to put that one you love back together again.
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