Max Lucado Daily: LEAVE THE DEVIL NO CHOICE
Scripture says, “Put on the full armor of God, that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes” (Ephesians 6:11). Your battle—your real battle—is with your archenemy, the Devil. He has held this stronghold in your life for years. You’ve tried everything to overcome it— discipline; self-help books; pop-culture gurus; but nothing helps.
But now you come in God’s power with God at center stage and Jesus in your heart. You come not with hope of a possible victory, but with assurance of complete victory. You sing songs of redemption and declare scriptures of triumph. “He is not here; for He is risen” (Matthew 28:6). “We are more than conquerors through Christ” (Romans 8:37). “I can do all things through Christ” (Philippians 4:13). As you do, the demons will begin to scatter. They have no choice but to leave. The Devil cannot stand to stay where God is praised and pondered. Call upon God and leave the Devil no choice!
From God is With You Every Day
2 Chronicles 26
King Uzziah
The people of Judah then took Uzziah, who was only sixteen years old, and made him king in place of his father Amaziah. The first thing he did after his father was dead and buried was to recover Elath for Judah and rebuild it.
3-5 Uzziah was sixteen years old when he became king and reigned for fifty-two years in Jerusalem. His mother was Jecoliah from Jerusalem. He behaved well in the eyes of God, following in the footsteps of his father Amaziah. He was a loyal seeker of God. He was well trained by his pastor and teacher Zechariah to live in reverent obedience before God, and for as long as Zechariah lived, Uzziah lived a godly life. And God prospered him.
6-8 He ventured out and fought the Philistines, breaking into the fortress cities of Gath, Jabneh, and Ashdod. He also built settlements around Ashdod and other Philistine areas. God helped him in his wars with the Philistines, the Arabs in Gur Baal, and the Meunites. The Ammonites also paid tribute. Uzziah became famous, his reputation extending all the way to Egypt. He became quite powerful.
9-10 Uzziah constructed defense towers in Jerusalem at the Corner Gate, the Valley Gate, and at the corner of the wall. He also built towers and dug cisterns out in the country. He had herds of cattle down in the foothills and out on the plains, had farmers and vinedressers at work in the hills and fields—he loved growing things.
11-15 On the military side, Uzziah had a well-prepared army ready to fight. They were organized by companies under the direction of Jeiel the secretary, Maaseiah the field captain, and Hananiah of the general staff. The roster of family leaders over the fighting men accounted for 2,600. Under them were reinforcement troops numbering 307,000, with 500 of them on constant alert—a strong royal defense against any attack. Uzziah had them well-armed with shields, spears, helmets, armor, bows, and slingshots. He also installed the latest in military technology on the towers and corners of Jerusalem for shooting arrows and hurling stones. He became well known for all this—a famous king. Everything seemed to go his way.
16-18 But then the strength and success went to his head. Arrogant and proud, he fell. One day, contemptuous of God, he walked into The Temple of God like he owned it and took over, burning incense on the Incense Altar. The priest Azariah, backed up by eighty brave priests of God, tried to prevent him. They confronted Uzziah: “You must not, you cannot do this, Uzziah—only the Aaronite priests, especially consecrated for the work, are permitted to burn incense. Get out of God’s Temple; you are unfaithful and a disgrace!”
19-21 But Uzziah, censer in hand, was already in the middle of doing it and angrily rebuffed the priests. He lost his temper; angry words were exchanged—and then, even as they quarreled, a skin disease appeared on his forehead. As soon as they saw it, the chief priest Azariah and the other priests got him out of there as fast as they could. He hurried out—he knew that God then and there had given him the disease. Uzziah had his skin disease for the rest of his life and had to live in quarantine; he was not permitted to set foot in The Temple of God. His son Jotham, who managed the royal palace, took over the government of the country.
22-23 The rest of the history of Uzziah, from start to finish, was written by the prophet Isaiah son of Amoz. When Uzziah died, they buried him with his ancestors in a field next to the royal cemetery. His skin disease disqualified him from burial in the royal cemetery. His son Jotham became the next king.
Our Daily Bread reading and devotion
Friday, August 12, 2016
Read: Romans 12:1–8
Place Your Life Before God
So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.
3 I’m speaking to you out of deep gratitude for all that God has given me, and especially as I have responsibilities in relation to you. Living then, as every one of you does, in pure grace, it’s important that you not misinterpret yourselves as people who are bringing this goodness to God. No, God brings it all to you. The only accurate way to understand ourselves is by what God is and by what he does for us, not by what we are and what we do for him.
4-6 In this way we are like the various parts of a human body. Each part gets its meaning from the body as a whole, not the other way around. The body we’re talking about is Christ’s body of chosen people. Each of us finds our meaning and function as a part of his body. But as a chopped-off finger or cut-off toe we wouldn’t amount to much, would we? So since we find ourselves fashioned into all these excellently formed and marvelously functioning parts in Christ’s body, let’s just go ahead and be what we were made to be, without enviously or pridefully comparing ourselves with each other, or trying to be something we aren’t.
6-8 If you preach, just preach God’s Message, nothing else; if you help, just help, don’t take over; if you teach, stick to your teaching; if you give encouraging guidance, be careful that you don’t get bossy; if you’re put in charge, don’t manipulate; if you’re called to give aid to people in distress, keep your eyes open and be quick to respond; if you work with the disadvantaged, don’t let yourself get irritated with them or depressed by them. Keep a smile on your face.
INSIGHT:
Tradition has it that the apostle Peter brought the gospel to Rome. This is unlikely as there is no historical evidence that Peter was ever in Rome. The gospel was probably brought into Rome in two ways. First, among the three thousand converted on the day of Pentecost, there were “visitors from Rome” (Acts 2:10). These converted returnees could have brought the gospel back home. Second, because it was the capital city of the Roman Empire, thousands of other believers (visitors, tourists, soldiers, traders, businessmen, and migrants) would have come into Rome. These visiting believers would have brought the gospel with them.
Shaping Your Thoughts
By David McCasland
Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Romans 12:2
When Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase “the medium is the message” in 1964, personal computers were unknown, mobile phones were science fiction, and the Internet didn’t exist. Today we understand what great foresight he had in predicting how our thinking is influenced in this digital age. In Nicholas Carr’s book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, he writes, “[The media] supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I’m online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.”
I like J. B. Phillips’s paraphrase of Paul’s message to the Christians in Rome: “Don’t let the world around you squeeze you into its own mould, but let God re-mould your minds from within, so that you may prove in practice that the plan of God for you is good, meets all his demands and moves towards the goal of true maturity” (Rom. 12:2). How relevant this is today as we find our thoughts and the way our minds process material affected by the world around us.
Let God’s Spirit, not the world, shape your mind.
We cannot stem the tide of information that bombards us, but we can ask God each day to help us focus on Him and to shape our thinking through His presence in our lives.
Father in heaven, still and focus my mind, quiet my heart, and fill me with Your thoughts throughout this day.
Let God’s Spirit, not the world, shape your mind.
My Utmost for His Highest, by Oswald Chambers
Friday, August 12, 2016
The Theology of Resting in God
Why are you fearful, O you of little faith? —Matthew 8:26
When we are afraid, the least we can do is pray to God. But our Lord has a right to expect that those who name His name have an underlying confidence in Him. God expects His children to be so confident in Him that in any crisis they are the ones who are reliable. Yet our trust is only in God up to a certain point, then we turn back to the elementary panic-stricken prayers of those people who do not even know God. We come to our wits’ end, showing that we don’t have even the slightest amount of confidence in Him or in His sovereign control of the world. To us He seems to be asleep, and we can see nothing but giant, breaking waves on the sea ahead of us.
“…O you of little faith!” What a stinging pain must have shot through the disciples as they surely thought to themselves, “We missed the mark again!” And what a sharp pain will go through us when we suddenly realize that we could have produced complete and utter joy in the heart of Jesus by remaining absolutely confident in Him, in spite of what we were facing.
There are times when there is no storm or crisis in our lives, and we do all that is humanly possible. But it is when a crisis arises that we instantly reveal upon whom we rely. If we have been learning to worship God and to place our trust in Him, the crisis will reveal that we can go to the point of breaking, yet without breaking our confidence in Him.
We have been talking quite a lot about sanctification, but what will be the result in our lives? It will be expressed in our lives as a peaceful resting in God, which means a total oneness with Him. And this oneness will make us not only blameless in His sight, but also a profound joy to Him.
WISDOM FROM OSWALD CHAMBERS
We are not fundamentally free; external circumstances are not in our hands, they are in God’s hands, the one thing in which we are free is in our personal relationship to God. We are not responsible for the circumstances we are in, but we are responsible for the way we allow those circumstances to affect us; we can either allow them to get on top of us, or we can allow them to transform us into what God wants us to be. Conformed to His Image, 354 L
A Word with You, by Ron Hutchcraft
Friday, August 12, 2016
The Wound Underneath - #7720
When you hear a helicopter going over, you probably look up. I know I do. But it's probably not a major emotional experience for you. It is for Megan's Dad. She told me that she and her Dad were outside recently when a chopper flew over. In her words, "My Dad suddenly hit the deck." In other words, he just instinctively fell to the ground. Now, you could look at that reaction and say, "Is he a little strange, or what?" No, not strange. He's a Vietnam Veteran. Obviously, Megan was really surprised by her father's unusual behavior. So she said, "What's wrong, Dad?" He said, "It's just part of post-Vietnam trauma. When I hear a chopper, it just triggers something inside. I'm suddenly in combat again." That's when Megan understood.
I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "The Wound Underneath."
That father's hard-to-explain behavior is because of some of the battles in his past. He's not the only one. It may be that some past battles help explain what's behind the actions and attitudes of someone you're having a hard time dealing with.
Jesus, of course, knew that, and He had the wonderful ability to look beyond the deeds of a person to their needs. It's an outlook-one He wants you and me to have. Now our word for today from the Word of God, Luke 18:35. "As Jesus approached Jericho, a blind man was sitting by the roadside begging. When he heard the crowd going by, he asked what was happening. They told him, Jesus of Nazareth is passing by. He called out, 'Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!' Those who led the way rebuked him and told him to be quiet, but he shouted all the more, 'Son of David, have mercy on me!' Jesus stopped and ordered the man to be brought to Him." What follows is the miraculous healing of this blind man. And Luke concludes, "When all the people saw it, they also praised God."
Now to the folks in Jericho that day, that blind man was a noisy, stubborn nuisance. They want to make a good impression on Jesus, and here's this man screaming obnoxiously. The people see nuisance. Jesus sees need. He knows that behind those screams is a man with a desperate need. And the man everybody else is trying to shut up Jesus stops for, responds to, reaches out to.
When you try seeing the need behind someone's deed, it just changes the way you treat that person. Like Megan. She could understand, and even sympathize with her Dad's dramatic reaction to the chopper overhead when she knew the pain in his past that made him react that way.
There's probably someone in your world who needs that kind of understanding from you right now. It may be someone who has hurt you deeply, mistreated you, used you, or even attacked you. You may be increasingly annoyed or irritated or angry with someone whose attitude or actions or approach really rub you the wrong way. But there's a good chance there's pain underneath the way they are. Past battles that have almost programmed them to respond in a way that they think will protect them from more pain.
Sometimes when people are bleeding emotionally, they bleed on us. If that person was injured in front of your house and physically bleeding, you'd respond with compassion and you'd do all you could to stop the bleeding. I don't think you'd even get angry with them for getting blood on you. Now it may be that someone you know is bleeding emotionally from past wounds, and they just don't need one more person who wounds them even though their behavior seems to invite a harsh response.
When you try understanding the needs behind their deeds, you can finally respond as Jesus told us to: "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you" (Luke 6:27-28). That person you struggle with doesn't need any more wounds. No, they need someone who will, in Jesus' love, help heal those wounds.
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