Max Lucado Daily: Let God Be Enough
There’s never enough, it seems.
Not enough time, luck, credit, wisdom, intelligence. So we worry. But worry doesn’t work!
Jesus said, “Look at the birds. They don’t plant or harvest or store food in barns, for your heavenly Father feeds them. And aren’t you far more valuable to him than they are? Can all your worries add a single moment to your life? You can dedicated a decade of anxious thoughts to the brevity of life and not extend it by one minute. Worry accomplishes nothing.”
Jesus doesn’t condemn legitimate concern for responsibilities. It’s the continuous mind-set of worry that dismisses God’s presence. It subtracts God from the future, faces uncertainties with no faith, and tallies up the challenges of the day without entering God into the equation.
Jesus said, “Whatever you ask for in prayer, believe you have received it, and it will be yours!”
Let God be enough!
Psalm 34
A psalm of David, regarding the time he pretended to be insane in front of Abimelech, who sent him away.
I will praise the Lord at all times.
I will constantly speak his praises.
2 I will boast only in the Lord;
let all who are helpless take heart.
3 Come, let us tell of the Lord’s greatness;
let us exalt his name together.
4 I prayed to the Lord, and he answered me.
He freed me from all my fears.
5 Those who look to him for help will be radiant with joy;
no shadow of shame will darken their faces.
6 In my desperation I prayed, and the Lord listened;
he saved me from all my troubles.
7 For the angel of the Lord is a guard;
he surrounds and defends all who fear him.
8 Taste and see that the Lord is good.
Oh, the joys of those who take refuge in him!
9 Fear the Lord, you his godly people,
for those who fear him will have all they need.
10 Even strong young lions sometimes go hungry,
but those who trust in the Lord will lack no good thing.
11 Come, my children, and listen to me,
and I will teach you to fear the Lord.
12 Does anyone want to live a life
that is long and prosperous?
13 Then keep your tongue from speaking evil
and your lips from telling lies!
14 Turn away from evil and do good.
Search for peace, and work to maintain it.
15 The eyes of the Lord watch over those who do right;
his ears are open to their cries for help.
16 But the Lord turns his face against those who do evil;
he will erase their memory from the earth.
17 The Lord hears his people when they call to him for help.
He rescues them from all their troubles.
18 The Lord is close to the brokenhearted;
he rescues those whose spirits are crushed.
19 The righteous person faces many troubles,
but the Lord comes to the rescue each time.
20 For the Lord protects the bones of the righteous;
not one of them is broken!
21 Calamity will surely destroy the wicked,
and those who hate the righteous will be punished.
22 But the Lord will redeem those who serve him.
No one who takes refuge in him will be condemned.
Footnotes:
34 This psalm is a Hebrew acrostic poem; each verse begins with a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet.
Our Daily Bread reading and devotion
May 07, 2015
Read: Luke 18:1-8
Parable of the Persistent Widow
One day Jesus told his disciples a story to show that they should always pray and never give up. 2 “There was a judge in a certain city,” he said, “who neither feared God nor cared about people. 3 A widow of that city came to him repeatedly, saying, ‘Give me justice in this dispute with my enemy.’ 4 The judge ignored her for a while, but finally he said to himself, ‘I don’t fear God or care about people, 5 but this woman is driving me crazy. I’m going to see that she gets justice, because she is wearing me out with her constant requests!’”
6 Then the Lord said, “Learn a lesson from this unjust judge. 7 Even he rendered a just decision in the end. So don’t you think God will surely give justice to his chosen people who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off? 8 I tell you, he will grant justice to them quickly! But when the Son of Man[a] returns, how many will he find on the earth who have faith?”
Footnotes:
18:8 “Son of Man” is a title Jesus used for himself.
INSIGHT: Parables have often been defined as “earthly stories with heavenly meanings.” Usually taken from the everyday things of life, they contain memorable truths encased in ordinary illustrations. One of the primary features of Luke’s gospel is its emphasis on the teachings of Jesus through parables. Luke records 27 of Jesus’ parables, more than any other gospel account. These include the good Samaritan (ch. 10), the mustard seed (ch. 13), and the prodigal son (ch. 15). Matthew contains 22 parables, while Mark includes only 9. Interestingly, John’s gospel contains no parables at all.
The Squeaky Wheel
By Lawrence Darmani
The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective. —James 5:16 niv
“The squeaky wheel gets the oil” is a popular proverb. As a child I rode my bicycle for long distances between home and school, and the squeaky sounds of the wheels drew my attention to the need to lubricate them.
In Luke 18, the widow’s persistent request to the judge for justice against her adversary made her sound like a “squeaky wheel” until she got the result she needed. Luke explains that Jesus told this story to teach us the need to pray continually and not to give up, even if it appears that the answer to our prayer is delayed (vv.1-5).
God is certainly not an unjust judge who must be harassed before He responds to us. He is our loving Father who cares about us and hears us when we cry to Him. Regular, persistent prayer draws us closer to Him. It may feel like we are a squeaky wheel, but the Lord welcomes our prayer and encourages us to approach Him with our cries. He hears us and will come to our aid in ways that we may not expect.
As Jesus teaches in Matthew 6:5-8, constant prayer does not require long periods of “vain repetitions.” Rather, as we bring our needs before God “day and night” (Luke 18:7) and walk with the One who already knows our needs, we learn to trust God and wait patiently for His response.
For Further Study
To read more about prayer, check out the online booklet Why God Doesn’t Answer Me at www.discoveryseries.org/hp112
Don’t give up—God hears you when you pray!
My Utmost for His Highest, by Oswald Chambers
May 07, 2015
Building For Eternity
Which of you, intending to build a tower, does not sit down first and count the cost, whether he has enough to finish it… —Luke 14:28
Our Lord was not referring here to a cost which we have to count, but to a cost which He has already counted. The cost was those thirty years in Nazareth, those three years of popularity, scandal, and hatred, the unfathomable agony He experienced in Gethsemane, and the assault upon Him at Calvary— the central point upon which all of time and eternity turn. Jesus Christ has counted the cost. In the final analysis, people are not going to laugh at Him and say, “This man began to build and was not able to finish” (Luke 14:30).
The conditions of discipleship given to us by our Lord in verses 26, 27, and 33 mean that the men and women He is going to use in His mighty building enterprises are those in whom He has done everything. “If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple ” (Luke 14:26). This verse teaches us that the only men and women our Lord will use in His building enterprises are those who love Him personally, passionately, and with great devotion— those who have a love for Him that goes far beyond any of the closest relationships on earth. The conditions are strict, but they are glorious.
All that we build is going to be inspected by God. When God inspects us with His searching and refining fire, will He detect that we have built enterprises of our own on the foundation of Jesus? (see 1 Corinthians 3:10-15). We are living in a time of tremendous enterprises, a time when we are trying to work for God, and that is where the trap is. Profoundly speaking, we can never work for God. Jesus, as the Master Builder, takes us over so that He may direct and control us completely for His enterprises and His building plans; and no one has any right to demand where he will be put to work.
A Word with You, by Ron Hutchcraft
Don't Ever Get Used to the Smell - #6606
May 7, 2012
Years ago I had some friends who lived near a heavy industrial area where the mills filled the air with a shall we say very distinctive aroma; well, actually, smell would be a better word for it. It was sort of a sulfur-like, rotten eggs type of odor. When you first went there, you would sniff and you'd go, "What is that?" And the people who lived there would say, "What's what?" See, they'd lived around the stink so long, it didn't even register any more. Well, you know, there are some smells you should never get used to.
I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "Don't Ever Get Used to the Smell."
Our word for today from the Word of God comes from the prophet Ezekiel. He is receiving his instructions from the Lord in the form of a vision, and here's what it says in chapter 9, verse 2. "With the six men, I saw one clothed in linen who had a writing kit at his side. They came in and stood beside the bronze altar. Now the glory of the God of Israel went up from above the cherubim, where it had been, and moved to the threshold of the temple. Then the Lord called to the man clothed in linen who had the writing kit at his side, and said to him, 'Go throughout the city of Jerusalem and put a mark on the foreheads of those who grieve and lament over all the detestable things that are done in it.'"
Okay, God is saying here, "I'm looking for some people who don't gloss over the sin around them; people who grieve over sin." Well, they were hard to find then; they're hard to find now. Those kind of people were special then, and they're special now. People who don't get so used to being in the middle of sin that they don't notice the smell any more.
Chances are that you come in daily contact with a lot of sinful garbage; lying that's considered just to be smart business, an acceptance of adultery, a flippant attitude toward sexual purity. Like the two guys sitting next to me at the pizza place recently. One very casually said to the other one, and pardon my bluntness, but this is the way he stated it, "So, did he get laid yet?" See, that's casual about something God calls sacred. It's a flippant "who cares" approach to a sacred act of love, created by God for a lifetime bond. Well, how does that make you feel?
See, we're around it so much sometimes it doesn't break our heart any more, but it breaks God's heart all the time, and He's looking for people whose heart it can break. We hear people treat God's name, Jesus' name, like dirt. Jesus, the name at which every knee will bow. There are attitudes that amount to nothing less than idol worship, and we're no longer bothered by it: living for money, living for a guy or a girl, living for your music, living for the next party, living for your children. It's time we prayed, "God, give me back my sense of spiritual smell."
Unless we get with God daily and see what He sees, feels what He feels, we will be worn down, we're going to be eroded until, honestly, sin really doesn't look that bad. Imagine telling a drunk driving joke to a man who kept saying, "Please, I don't think it's funny." You say, "What is your problem?" "Because a drunk driver killed my son."
See, that's how God feels about the sin that we take so lightly. It killed His Son. You want to see what sin looks like? It's God's Son hanging by nails from a tree. Ask God to make you wise about what is good, and innocent about what is evil rather than being intrigued by it.
Sin stinks! It's the rotting odor of death, no matter how glamorously it is perfumed. So, don't get used to the smell.
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