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Max Lucado Daily: What Really Matters
A man once went to a minister for counseling.
“I’ve lost everything” he bemoaned.
“Oh,” the preacher responded, “I’m so sorry to hear you’ve lost your faith.”
“No,” the man corrected him, “I haven’t lost my faith.”
“Well then,” replied the preacher, “I’m sad to hear you’ve lost your character.”
“I didn’t say that,” the man corrected. “I still have my character.”
“Then I’m so sorry to hear you’ve lost your salvation.”
“That’s not what I said!” the man objected, beginning to lose patience.
The minister explained, “Well, you have your faith, your character, and your salvation. Seems to me, you have lost none of the things that really matter.”
We haven’t either. You and I could pray like the Puritan who sat down to a meal of bread and water. He bowed his head and declared, “All this and Jesus too?” Can’t we be equally content? Paul says in 1 Timothy 6:6, “Godliness with contentment is great gain!”
From Traveling Light
Zephaniah 1
The word of the Lord that came to Zephaniah son of Cushi, the son of Gedaliah, the son of Amariah, the son of Hezekiah, during the reign of Josiah son of Amon king of Judah:
Judgment on the Whole Earth in the Day of the Lord
2 “I will sweep away everything
from the face of the earth,”
declares the Lord.
3 “I will sweep away both man and beast;
I will sweep away the birds in the sky
and the fish in the sea—
and the idols that cause the wicked to stumble.”[a]
“When I destroy all mankind
on the face of the earth,”
declares the Lord,
4 “I will stretch out my hand against Judah
and against all who live in Jerusalem.
I will destroy every remnant of Baal worship in this place,
the very names of the idolatrous priests—
5 those who bow down on the roofs
to worship the starry host,
those who bow down and swear by the Lord
and who also swear by Molek,[b]
6 those who turn back from following the Lord
and neither seek the Lord nor inquire of him.”
7 Be silent before the Sovereign Lord,
for the day of the Lord is near.
The Lord has prepared a sacrifice;
he has consecrated those he has invited.
8 “On the day of the Lord’s sacrifice
I will punish the officials
and the king’s sons
and all those clad
in foreign clothes.
9 On that day I will punish
all who avoid stepping on the threshold,[c]
who fill the temple of their gods
with violence and deceit.
10 “On that day,”
declares the Lord,
“a cry will go up from the Fish Gate,
wailing from the New Quarter,
and a loud crash from the hills.
11 Wail, you who live in the market district[d];
all your merchants will be wiped out,
all who trade with[e] silver will be destroyed.
12 At that time I will search Jerusalem with lamps
and punish those who are complacent,
who are like wine left on its dregs,
who think, ‘The Lord will do nothing,
either good or bad.’
13 Their wealth will be plundered,
their houses demolished.
Though they build houses,
they will not live in them;
though they plant vineyards,
they will not drink the wine.”
14 The great day of the Lord is near—
near and coming quickly.
The cry on the day of the Lord is bitter;
the Mighty Warrior shouts his battle cry.
15 That day will be a day of wrath—
a day of distress and anguish,
a day of trouble and ruin,
a day of darkness and gloom,
a day of clouds and blackness—
16 a day of trumpet and battle cry
against the fortified cities
and against the corner towers.
17 “I will bring such distress on all people
that they will grope about like those who are blind,
because they have sinned against the Lord.
Their blood will be poured out like dust
and their entrails like dung.
18 Neither their silver nor their gold
will be able to save them
on the day of the Lord’s wrath.”
In the fire of his jealousy
the whole earth will be consumed,
for he will make a sudden end
of all who live on the earth.
Our Daily Bread reading and devotion
Read: Psalm 119:33-40
Teach me, Lord, the way of your decrees,
that I may follow it to the end.[a]
34 Give me understanding, so that I may keep your law
and obey it with all my heart.
35 Direct me in the path of your commands,
for there I find delight.
36 Turn my heart toward your statutes
and not toward selfish gain.
37 Turn my eyes away from worthless things;
preserve my life according to your word.[b]
38 Fulfill your promise to your servant,
so that you may be feared.
39 Take away the disgrace I dread,
for your laws are good.
40 How I long for your precepts!
In your righteousness preserve my life.
Stay Connected
June 13, 2013 — by C. P. Hia
Your Word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path. —Psalm 119:105
I woke up one morning and discovered that my Internet connection was not working. My service provider conducted some tests and concluded that my modem needed to be replaced, but the earliest they could do so was the next day. I panicked a little when I thought about being without the Internet connection for 24 hours! I thought, How am I going to survive without it?
Then I asked myself, Would I also panic if my connection with God was disrupted for a day? We keep our connection with God alive by spending time in His Word and in prayer. Then we are to be “doers of the Word” (James 1:22-24).
The writer of Psalm 119 recognized the importance of a connection to God. He asked God to teach him His statutes and give him understanding of His law (vv.33-34). Then he prayed that he would observe it with his whole heart (v.34), walk in the path of God’s commandments (v.35), and turn away his eyes from looking at worthless things (v.37). By meditating on God’s Word and then applying it, the psalmist stayed “connected” to God.
God has given us His Word as a lamp to our feet and a light to our path to lead us to Him.
May the mind of Christ my Savior
Live in me from day to day,
By His love and power controlling
All I do and say. —Wilkinson
To recharge your spiritual battery, plug into the Source.
My Utmost for His Highest, by Oswald Chambers
June 13, 2013
Getting There (3)
. . . come, follow Me —Luke 18:22
Where our individual desire dies and sanctified surrender lives. One of the greatest hindrances in coming to Jesus is the excuse of our own individual temperament. We make our temperament and our natural desires barriers to coming to Jesus. Yet the first thing we realize when we do come to Jesus is that He pays no attention whatsoever to our natural desires. We have the idea that we can dedicate our gifts to God. However, you cannot dedicate what is not yours. There is actually only one thing you can dedicate to God, and that is your right to yourself (see Romans 12:1). If you will give God your right to yourself, He will make a holy experiment out of you— and His experiments always succeed. The one true mark of a saint of God is the inner creativity that flows from being totally surrendered to Jesus Christ. In the life of a saint there is this amazing Well, which is a continual Source of original life. The Spirit of God is a Well of water springing up perpetually fresh. A saint realizes that it is God who engineers his circumstances; consequently there are no complaints, only unrestrained surrender to Jesus. Never try to make your experience a principle for others, but allow God to be as creative and original with others as He is with you.
If you abandon everything to Jesus, and come when He says, “Come,” then He will continue to say, “Come,” through you. You will go out into the world reproducing the echo of Christ’s “Come.” That is the result in every soul who has abandoned all and come to Jesus.
Have I come to Him? Will I come now?
A Word with You, by Ron Hutchcraft
Just Looking Is Losing - #6894
Thursday, June 13, 2013
I guess I'm just too sensitive. I feel guilty when I walk in a store, knowing I'm not going to buy anything. And some bored salesperson sees me come in, and then you see that look of hope, that look of expectancy on their face, "At last I can justify my existence. At last I've got a customer! At last I can accomplish something. At last I can sell something." And so they very pleasantly ask, "May I help you?" And then come those two most hated words to the ears of a salesperson, "Just looking." Suddenly they lose all interest in me and they retire dejectedly back to their corner. Did I say I'm too sensitive? Well, I'll tell you this, nobody ever gets very excited about someone who is just looking.
I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "Just Looking Is Losing."
Our word for today from the Word of God comes from John chapter 9. I'll begin reading at verse 13. It's the story of the man who had been born blind who Jesus healed. Now, Jesus has always been troubled by people who are just looking. For example in this passage, "They brought to the Pharisees the man who had been blind. Now the day on which Jesus had made the mud and opened the man's eyes was the Sabbath. Therefore, the Pharisees also asked Him how he had received his sight. 'He put mud on my eyes' the man replied, 'and I washed and now I see.' Some of the Pharisees said, 'This man is not from God for he does not keep the Sabbath.'"
This is amazing! You want to say to the Pharisees, "Guys, wake up! A man who could never see before was just healed! Do you understand what just happened?" And they are busy doing their theological analysis of the situation. They have no intention of buying into what Jesus is doing. They're just looking. Everywhere Jesus performed miracles it seemed that there were two groups of people: the "expectors" who had faith, who wanted to get in on the supernatural and who did, and the "dissectors" who stood off with their arms folded and said, "What shall we call this? Where does this fit in our theology?" And they saw no miracle.
What bothers me is that the dissectors were the religious folks, the spiritual veterans, the Bible people. That's me. That might be you. And they were always so busy analyzing the miracle they missed the miracle. You know, as you get more settled into Christian things and you know more Christian ideas, and hold more Christian jobs, a subtle numbness can start to grow inside of you. You go to church to watch God speak to others. You make spiritual events happen, but you stop letting them happen to you. You start to become a discusser of God's working rather than an experiencer of His working. You used to be an experience.
You start to become critical of His leaders and their methods. Can you see that creeping sleep in your soul? Somewhere you stepped out of the middle of God's life-changing work and you moved to the edges to watch, to analyze, to categorize, to criticize. Hey, it's cold out there. You show up at God's store, you look around, but you don't buy into the wonder of it all. Why don't you get back into the mainstream where the miracles are? Let God happen to you again, not just happen around you.
When Jesus is offering such supernatural merchandise, it would be a shame if you were just on the edges and just looking.