Max Lucado Daily: UNPACK YOUR BAGS
Do you question your place in God’s family? Do you fear his impending rejection? Do you wrestle with doubt-laced questions, such as… Am I really in God’s family? What if God changes his mind?
Lord knows, he has reason to do so. We wonder, “Will God turn me out?” Employers do. Coaches kick players off the team. Teachers expel students from school. Parents give birth to children and abandon them at a bus station. How do we know God won’t do the same? After all, he is holy and pure, and we are anything but. Is it safe to trust our place in God’s family?
God answered this question at the cross. When Jesus died, the heavenly vote was forever cast in your favor. He declared for all to hear, This child is my child! My covenant will never change.
From God is With You Every Day
Isaiah 33
The Ground Under Our Feet Mourns
Doom to you, Destroyer,
not yet destroyed;
And doom to you, Betrayer,
not yet betrayed.
When you finish destroying,
your turn will come—destroyed!
When you quit betraying,
your turn will come—betrayed!
2-4 God, treat us kindly. You’re our only hope.
First thing in the morning, be there for us!
When things go bad, help us out!
You spoke in thunder and everyone ran.
You showed up and nations scattered.
Your people, for a change, got in on the loot,
picking the field clean of the enemy spoils.
5-6 God is supremely esteemed. His center holds.
Zion brims over with all that is just and right.
God keeps your days stable and secure—
salvation, wisdom, and knowledge in surplus,
and best of all, Zion’s treasure, Fear-of-God.
7-9 But look! Listen!
Tough men weep openly.
Peacemaking diplomats are in bitter tears.
The roads are empty—
not a soul out on the streets.
The peace treaty is broken,
its conditions violated,
its signers reviled.
The very ground under our feet mourns,
the Lebanon mountains hang their heads,
Flowering Sharon is a weed-choked gully,
and the forests of Bashan and Carmel? Bare branches.
10-12 “Now I’m stepping in,” God says.
“From now on, I’m taking over.
The gloves come off. Now see how mighty I am.
There’s nothing to you.
Pregnant with chaff, you produce straw babies;
full of hot air, you self-destruct.
You’re good for nothing but fertilizer and fuel.
Earth to earth—and the sooner the better.
13-14 “If you’re far away,
get the reports on what I’ve done,
And if you’re in the neighborhood,
pay attention to my record.
The sinners in Zion are rightly terrified;
the godless are at their wit’s end:
‘Who among us can survive this firestorm?
Who of us can get out of this purge with our lives?’”
15-16 The answer’s simple:
Live right,
speak the truth,
despise exploitation,
refuse bribes,
reject violence,
avoid evil amusements.
This is how you raise your standard of living!
A safe and stable way to live.
A nourishing, satisfying way to live.
God Makes All the Decisions Here
17-19 Oh, you’ll see the king—a beautiful sight!
And you’ll take in the wide vistas of land.
In your mind you’ll go over the old terrors:
“What happened to that Assyrian inspector who condemned and confiscated?
And the one who gouged us of taxes?
And that cheating moneychanger?”
Gone! Out of sight forever! Their insolence
nothing now but a fading stain on the carpet!
No more putting up with a language you can’t understand,
no more sounds of gibberish in your ears.
20-22 Just take a look at Zion, will you?
Centering our worship in festival feasts!
Feast your eyes on Jerusalem,
a quiet and permanent place to live.
No more pulling up stakes and moving on,
no more patched-together lean-tos.
Instead, God! God majestic, God himself the place
in a country of broad rivers and streams,
But rivers blocked to invading ships,
off-limits to predatory pirates.
For God makes all the decisions here. God is our king.
God runs this place and he’ll keep us safe.
23 Ha! Your sails are in shreds,
your mast wobbling,
your hold leaking.
The plunder is free for the taking, free for all—
for weak and strong, insiders and outsiders.
24 No one in Zion will say, “I’m sick.”
Best of all, they’ll all live guilt-free.
Our Daily Bread reading and devotion
Wednesday, October 05, 2016
Read: Ephesians 4:25–32
What this adds up to, then, is this: no more lies, no more pretense. Tell your neighbor the truth. In Christ’s body we’re all connected to each other, after all. When you lie to others, you end up lying to yourself.
26-27 Go ahead and be angry. You do well to be angry—but don’t use your anger as fuel for revenge. And don’t stay angry. Don’t go to bed angry. Don’t give the Devil that kind of foothold in your life.
28 Did you use to make ends meet by stealing? Well, no more! Get an honest job so that you can help others who can’t work.
29 Watch the way you talk. Let nothing foul or dirty come out of your mouth. Say only what helps, each word a gift.
30 Don’t grieve God. Don’t break his heart. His Holy Spirit, moving and breathing in you, is the most intimate part of your life, making you fit for himself. Don’t take such a gift for granted.
31-32 Make a clean break with all cutting, backbiting, profane talk. Be gentle with one another, sensitive. Forgive one another as quickly and thoroughly as God in Christ forgave you.
INSIGHT:
Paul tells his readers to “get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice” (Eph. 4:31). The Greek word translated “get rid of” is artheto, and it means to lift something for the purpose of carrying it off or putting it away. Getting rid of sinful and destructive behavior requires that we allow the Holy Spirit to remove those things that mark our former life (4:17–24) so that the compassion and forgiveness of Christ (v. 32) will flourish.
Good Medicine
By Lawrence Darmani
A cheerful heart is good medicine. Proverbs 17:22
Careless driving, rising tempers, and use of foul language among some taxi and minibus drivers are a constant source of traffic fights in our city of Accra, Ghana. But one traffic incident I witnessed took a different turn. A bus was almost hit by a careless taxi driver. I expected the bus driver to get angry and yell at the other driver, but he didn’t. Instead, the bus driver relaxed his stern face and smiled broadly at the guilty-looking taxi driver. And the smile worked wonders. With a raised hand, the taxi driver apologized, smiled back, and moved away—the tension diffused.
A smile has a fascinating effect on our brain chemistry. Researchers have found that “when we smile it releases brain chemicals called endorphins which have an actual physiological relaxing effect.” Not only can a smile diffuse a tense situation, but it can also diffuse tension within us. Our emotions affect us as well as others. The Bible teaches us to “get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice. Be kind and compassionate to one another” (Eph. 4:31–32).
We find joy when we learn to live in Jesus’s love.
When anger or tension or bitterness threatens our relationship with the Lord and with others, it helps to remember that “a cheerful heart is good medicine” for our own joy and well-being.
Think about a time when you were angry with someone or when you had an argument. How did you feel inside? What parts of your life did it affect?
We find joy when we learn to live in Jesus’s love.
My Utmost for His Highest, by Oswald Chambers
Wednesday, October 05, 2016
The Nature of Degeneration
Just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned… —Romans 5:12
The Bible does not say that God punished the human race for one man’s sin, but that the nature of sin, namely, my claim to my right to myself, entered into the human race through one man. But it also says that another Man took upon Himself the sin of the human race and put it away— an infinitely more profound revelation (see Hebrews 9:26). The nature of sin is not immorality and wrongdoing, but the nature of self-realization which leads us to say, “I am my own god.” This nature may exhibit itself in proper morality or in improper immorality, but it always has a common basis— my claim to my right to myself. When our Lord faced either people with all the forces of evil in them, or people who were clean-living, moral, and upright, He paid no attention to the moral degradation of one, nor any attention to the moral attainment of the other. He looked at something we do not see, namely, the nature of man (see John 2:25).
Sin is something I am born with and cannot touch— only God touches sin through redemption. It is through the Cross of Christ that God redeemed the entire human race from the possibility of damnation through the heredity of sin. God nowhere holds a person responsible for having the heredity of sin, and does not condemn anyone because of it. Condemnation comes when I realize that Jesus Christ came to deliver me from this heredity of sin, and yet I refuse to let Him do so. From that moment I begin to get the seal of damnation. “This is the condemnation [and the critical moment], that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light…” (John 3:19).
WISDOM FROM OSWALD CHAMBERS
It is perilously possible to make our conceptions of God like molten lead poured into a specially designed mould, and when it is cold and hard we fling it at the heads of the religious people who don’t agree with us.
Disciples Indeed
A Word with You, by Ron Hutchcraft
Wednesday, October 05, 2016
In my early days of trying to figure out the world of computers, my friends would shake their heads. Sometimes they still do today, because I guess I could be a special challenge in the techy stuff. I mean, in the early days, someone saw me turning off my computer without going through all the steps you're supposed to. I didn't know until they told me that day. Probably my friend was shaking their head as they watched me. He showed me how to bring up on my screen an option called "shutdown". When you activate the shutdown mode, the computer displays a special shutdown screen that stays on while the internal shutdown work is going on. Then, suddenly, your computer is off. Well, when I asked my technically normal friend what shutdown mode was, he gave me a simple answer, knowing my techno-dork limitations. He said, "Your computer is cleaning out a lot of junk that's accumulated in there; any unfinished business from whatever commands it's been given since the last shutdown." Oh, that sounds good to me. Now I never end what I'm doing without going through shutdown mode. Neither should you.
I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "Before You Turn Off Your Day."
Our word for today from the Word of God comes from Psalm 4. It's God's description of how you and I are supposed to shut down before we turn off for the day. Beginning with verse 4, it says, "When you are on your beds, search your hearts and be silent." That reminds me of David's prayer, "Search me, O God, and know my heart." Before you go to sleep, search through your heart for any garbage that has accumulated during the day: that anger, that unforgiveness, that resentment, that lust, the coveting, the comparing you did, the gossip you got sucked into, the negative attitudes, maybe someone you've treated sinfully. Don't shut down until you've cleaned out the junk of the day by bringing it to Jesus in repentance right there on your bed.
But there's more in God's shutdown sequence. It says, "Offer right sacrifices and trust in the Lord." At the end of every day, there will always be bases you didn't get covered. I have plenty of them. And our minds are cluttered with the tyranny of the undone. No matter how much you do, no matter how good your heart and your intentions are, your efforts will always leave something unfinished, maybe even a mess.
"Offer right sacrifices" means you do all you can; you offer God your best efforts. Then where your best leaves off, you "trust in the Lord' to cover the rest. God's night-night mode for us is to clean out the failures of the day, the wounds of the day, the discouragements of the day, the worries, the hard feelings, the things we're dreading about tomorrow, and to one-by-one leave those totally in His very capable hands. He'll even be working on them while you're sleeping if you really make it His business and you get it out of your hands and clearly in His.
As the Apostle Paul said in 2 Timothy 1:12, "I know whom I have believed, and I am convinced He is able to guard what I've committed to Him until that day." And when you've done that, you can go to sleep saying, "Lord, I've done all I can today. The rest is up to You. I'm glad You'll be working while I'm sleeping. "
And here's the blessed result. "I will lie down and sleep in peace; for You alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety." Isn't that great?
So clean out the junk before you shut down. And go to sleep with one thing and only one on your mind – your Jesus.
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