Max Lucado Daily: Holy Hostility
Many insist God loves us so much he cannot be angry at our evil. They don't understand that love is always angry at evil! Paul said in Romans 1:18, "God is against all the evil and wrong things people do."
This is a revelation to many who assume God is a harried high-school principal, too busy monitoring the planets to notice us. He is not. God says his anger is directed against any thing and any one who suppresses the knowledge of truth. God loves his children, and hates what destroys them. It simply means that he loves you and hates what you become when you turn from him.
Call it holy hostility! A righteous hatred of wrong. A divine disgust. The question isn't, "How dare a loving God be angry?" It's, "How could a loving God feel anything less?"
From In the Grip of Grace
Mark 3:1-19
Jesus Heals on the Sabbath
Another time Jesus went into the synagogue, and a man with a shriveled hand was there. 2 Some of them were looking for a reason to accuse Jesus, so they watched him closely to see if he would heal him on the Sabbath. 3 Jesus said to the man with the shriveled hand, “Stand up in front of everyone.”
4 Then Jesus asked them, “Which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save life or to kill?” But they remained silent.
5 He looked around at them in anger and, deeply distressed at their stubborn hearts, said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and his hand was completely restored. 6 Then the Pharisees went out and began to plot with the Herodians how they might kill Jesus.
Crowds Follow Jesus
7 Jesus withdrew with his disciples to the lake, and a large crowd from Galilee followed. 8 When they heard about all he was doing, many people came to him from Judea, Jerusalem, Idumea, and the regions across the Jordan and around Tyre and Sidon. 9 Because of the crowd he told his disciples to have a small boat ready for him, to keep the people from crowding him. 10 For he had healed many, so that those with diseases were pushing forward to touch him. 11 Whenever the impure spirits saw him, they fell down before him and cried out, “You are the Son of God.” 12 But he gave them strict orders not to tell others about him.
Jesus Appoints the Twelve
13 Jesus went up on a mountainside and called to him those he wanted, and they came to him. 14 He appointed twelve[a] that they might be with him and that he might send them out to preach 15 and to have authority to drive out demons. 16 These are the twelve he appointed: Simon (to whom he gave the name Peter), 17 James son of Zebedee and his brother John (to them he gave the name Boanerges, which means “sons of thunder”), 18 Andrew, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Thomas, James son of Alphaeus, Thaddaeus, Simon the Zealot 19 and Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him.
Footnotes:
Mark 3:14 Some manuscripts twelve—designating them apostles—
Our Daily Bread reading and devotion
Wednesday, September 03, 2014
Read: Lamentations 3:19-33
I remember my affliction and my wandering,
the bitterness and the gall.
20 I well remember them,
and my soul is downcast within me.
21 Yet this I call to mind
and therefore I have hope:
22 Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed,
for his compassions never fail.
23 They are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
24 I say to myself, “The Lord is my portion;
therefore I will wait for him.”
25 The Lord is good to those whose hope is in him,
to the one who seeks him;
26 it is good to wait quietly
for the salvation of the Lord.
27 It is good for a man to bear the yoke
while he is young.
28 Let him sit alone in silence,
for the Lord has laid it on him.
29 Let him bury his face in the dust—
there may yet be hope.
30 Let him offer his cheek to one who would strike him,
and let him be filled with disgrace.
31 For no one is cast off
by the Lord forever.
32 Though he brings grief, he will show compassion,
so great is his unfailing love.
33 For he does not willingly bring affliction
or grief to anyone.
Insight
For 2 years the Babylonians lay siege to Jerusalem. Conditions within the besieged city were desperate and deplorable. Starvation during the siege even led to cannibalism (2 Kings 25:1-4; Lam. 2:20; 4:10). Sadly, Jeremiah witnessed the destruction of the city and temple (Jer. 52:12-27). In five emotionally charged dirges, or funeral laments (one for each chapter of Lamentations), he described the sufferings of the people and the reasons for their suffering. But he also wrote of hope in the midst of despair (Lam. 3:21-32) and of restoration that would come (5:19-22).
Hope To Continue On
By Anne Cetas
Through the Lord’s mercies we are not consumed, because His compassions fail not. They are new every morning. —Lamentations 3:22-23
The solar-powered airplane Solar Impulse can fly day and night without fuel. Inventors Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg hope to fly it around the world in 2015. While the plane flies all day by solar power, it gathers enough energy to be able to fly all night. When the sun rises, Piccard says, “It brings the hope again that you can continue.”
The idea of sunrise bringing us hope makes me think of Lamentations 3 from our Bible reading for today: “This I recall to my mind, therefore I have hope. Through the Lord’s mercies we are not consumed, because His compassions fail not. They are new every morning” (vv.21-23). Even when God’s people were in the depths of despair while the city of Jerusalem was being invaded by the Babylonians, the prophet Jeremiah said they had reason to hope—they still had the Lord’s mercies and compassions.
Sometimes our struggles seem worse at night, but when sunrise comes it brings hope again that we can continue. “Weeping may endure for a night,” the psalmist says, “but joy comes in the morning” (Ps. 30:5).
Thank You, Lord, for the hope You send with each sunrise. Your mercies and compassions are new every morning!
New mercies every morning,
Grace for every day,
New hope for every trial,
And courage all the way. —McVeigh
Each new day gives us new reasons to praise the Lord.
My Utmost for His Highest, by Oswald Chambers
Wednesday, September 03, 2014
Pouring Out the Water of Satisfaction
He would not drink it, but poured it out to the Lord —2 Samuel 23:16
What has been like “water from the well of Bethlehem” to you recently— love, friendship, or maybe some spiritual blessing ( 2 Samuel 23:16 )? Have you taken whatever it may be, even at the risk of damaging your own soul, simply to satisfy yourself? If you have, then you cannot pour it out “to the Lord.” You can never set apart for God something that you desire for yourself to achieve your own satisfaction. If you try to satisfy yourself with a blessing from God, it will corrupt you. You must sacrifice it, pouring it out to God— something that your common sense says is an absurd waste.
How can I pour out “to the Lord” natural love and spiritual blessings? There is only one way— I must make a determination in my mind to do so. There are certain things other people do that could never be received by someone who does not know God, because it is humanly impossible to repay them. As soon as I realize that something is too wonderful for me, that I am not worthy to receive it, and that it is not meant for a human being at all, I must pour it out “to the Lord.” Then these very things that have come to me will be poured out as “rivers of living water” all around me (John 7:38). And until I pour these things out to God, they actually endanger those I love, as well as myself, because they will be turned into lust. Yes, we can be lustful in things that are not sordid and vile. Even love must be transformed by being poured out “to the Lord.”
If you have become bitter and sour, it is because when God gave you a blessing you hoarded it. Yet if you had poured it out to Him, you would have been the sweetest person on earth. If you are always keeping blessings to yourself and never learning to pour out anything “to the Lord,” other people will never have their vision of God expanded through you.
A Word with You, by Ron Hutchcraft
Wednesday, September 03, 2014
Where's My Book? - #7213
Back in the day when our kids were in school, you didn't really need to pay to go to a circus. You just could come to our house around 7:00 or 8:00 o'clock in the morning; any time before the school bus came. The boys were trying to find their socks and their shoes, or car keys, homework, contact lenses, glasses - mayhem. So many times they get home from school and things kind of landed wherever they landed, and they had to figure out where that was the next morning. The problem is, the next morning you can't remember where you left it, so you panic to find your stuff in those moments that you have to leave for school, because that's pretty unforgiving when school begins when the bus comes. So it was not unusual to hear in our house an old question ringing through the halls, "Mom, Dad, book?" And finding it? Well, everything depended on it.
I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "Where's My Book?"
Our word for today from the Word of God comes from 2 Kings 22, and I'll begin reading with verse 8. The story takes place as young King Josiah has taken over as the ruler of Judah. And he's taken over after a period of great evil in the land. And he commissions Hilkiah, the high priest, and Shaphan, the secretary, to begin to mobilize and clean out the temple, because it was a mess; it had fallen into disrepair.
Here's what the Bible says, "Hilkiah, the high priest, said to Shaphan, the secretary, 'I have found the Book of the Law in the temple of the Lord.' He gave it to Shaphan, who read it. Then Shaphan, the secretary, went to the king." So he gets the book, and takes it into the presence of the king. Now, verse 13, Hilkiah says, "Go and inquire of the Lord for me and for the people and for all Judah about what is written in this book that has been found. Great is the Lord's anger that burns against us because our fathers have not obeyed the words of this book; they have not acted in accordance with all that is written there concerning us."
They didn't know what was in God's book. They had lost God's Book somewhere in the shuffle. That's happened in some churches. That's happened in some of our lives. Back in the 1940s Billy Graham was an unknown student preacher. He had his Bible. He started to preach some crusades and people began to take note of him. By the late 1940's he was sort of a rising star in the preaching circuit. But he had a crisis of faith because a friend of his had gone off to seminary; a liberal seminary in the East and came back with more questions than he had answers.
Billy Graham resolved that crisis of doubt that day as he went out in the woods, laid that Bible on a stump, knelt beside that stump, and poured out his heart to God and said, "From this moment on, I will accept this as your total authority, God, as coming from you." From that time on Billy Graham's ministry was known for these three words, "The Bible says... The Bible says..." He had settled once and for all the final word, the final authority. That's what we've got to do.
When you come to Christ you base your life on these three words, "The Bible says..." But how about the rest of our life? How do you make your cultural decisions, your family decisions, your money decisions, your entertainment decisions? You see, the Bible is God's final word, and many times as you look at what we do in our private lives it's like we lost the book. It's buried again. Oh, we go visit it on Sunday. We read it occasionally. But is it the final authority no matter what our culture says, no matter what the opinion polls say, no matter what everybody at the office or at school says. Is it, "The Bible says..."?
God has spoken, and without God's Word it doesn't matter how nice the idea sounds or how charismatic the presenter of that idea is, it's just a nice idea. I can almost hear God running through our lives sometimes like our kids did back in the school days crying, "Where's My book?"