Max Lucado Daily: THE PROMOTION
For 20 years I was the senior minister of our church. I was happy to fill the role. But I was happiest preaching and writing. As the church increased in number, so did the staff. That meant more people to manage. And that meant spending more time doing what I didn’t feel called to do. I transitioned from senior minister to teaching minister.
A few people were puzzled. “Don’t you miss being the senior minister?” Translation: Weren’t you demoted? Earlier in my life I might have thought so. But I’ve come to see that God’s definition of a promotion, is a move toward your call. Don’t let someone promote you out of your call. Not every tuba player has the skills to direct the orchestra. If you can, then do. If you can’t, blast away on your tuba with delight!
From God is With You Every Day
Romans 12The Message (MSG)
Place Your Life Before God
12 1-2 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.
9-10 Love from the center of who you are; don’t fake it. Run for dear life from evil; hold on for dear life to good. Be good friends who love deeply; practice playing second fiddle.
11-13 Don’t burn out; keep yourselves fueled and aflame. Be alert servants of the Master, cheerfully expectant. Don’t quit in hard times; pray all the harder. Help needy Christians; be inventive in hospitality.
14-16 Bless your enemies; no cursing under your breath. Laugh with your happy friends when they’re happy; share tears when they’re down. Get along with each other; don’t be stuck-up. Make friends with nobodies; don’t be the great somebody.
17-19 Don’t hit back; discover beauty in everyone. If you’ve got it in you, get along with everybody. Don’t insist on getting even; that’s not for you to do. “I’ll do the judging,” says God. “I’ll take care of it.”
20-21 Our Scriptures tell us that if you see your enemy hungry, go buy that person lunch, or if he’s thirsty, get him a drink. Your generosity will surprise him with goodness. Don’t let evil get the best of you; get the best of evil by doing good.
Our Daily Bread reading and devotion
Friday, November 18, 2016
Read: Luke 22:39–46
A Dark Night
39-40 Leaving there, he went, as he so often did, to Mount Olives. The disciples followed him. When they arrived at the place, he said, “Pray that you don’t give in to temptation.”
41-44 He pulled away from them about a stone’s throw, knelt down, and prayed, “Father, remove this cup from me. But please, not what I want. What do you want?” At once an angel from heaven was at his side, strengthening him. He prayed on all the harder. Sweat, wrung from him like drops of blood, poured off his face.
45-46 He got up from prayer, went back to the disciples and found them asleep, drugged by grief. He said, “What business do you have sleeping? Get up. Pray so you won’t give in to temptation.”
INSIGHT:
The Bible speaks of God’s love for us in terms of a generous sacrifice. The apostle John writes of a God who “so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son” (John 3:16). To prove that God truly loves us, John directs us to Jesus’s sacrificial death: “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us” (1 John 3:16). Alluding to His own sacrificial love just hours before He went to the cross, Jesus said, “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13).
Love Without Borders
By Randy Kilgore
Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. John 15:13
During the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1900, missionaries trapped in a home in T’ai Yüan Fu decided their only hope for survival rested on running through the crowd that was calling for their deaths. Aided by weapons they held, they escaped the immediate threat. However, Edith Coombs, noticing that two of her injured Chinese students had not escaped, raced back into danger. She rescued one, but stumbled on her return trip for the second student and was killed.
Meanwhile, missionaries in Hsin Chou district had escaped and were hiding in the countryside, accompanied by their Chinese friend Ho Tsuen Kwei. But he was captured while scouting an escape route for his friends in hiding and was martyred for refusing to reveal their location.
Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. John 15:13
In the lives of Edith Coombs and Tsuen Kwei we see a love that rises above cultural or national character. Their sacrifice reminds us of the greater grace and love of our Savior.
As Jesus awaited His arrest and subsequent execution, He prayed earnestly, “Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me.” But He concluded that request with this resolute example of courage, love, and sacrifice: “Yet not my will, but yours be done” (Luke 22:42). His death and resurrection made our eternal lives possible.
Lord, may the world see our love for each other—and the deeds that come from it—as a great testimony to the bond of unity we have in You. May they want to know You too.
Only the light of Chr
My Utmost for His Highest, by Oswald Chambers
Friday, November 18, 2016
Winning into Freedom
If the Son makes you free, you shall be free indeed. —John 8:36
If there is even a trace of individual self-satisfaction left in us, it always says, “I can’t surrender,” or “I can’t be free.” But the spiritual part of our being never says “I can’t”; it simply soaks up everything around it. Our spirit hungers for more and more. It is the way we are built. We are designed with a great capacity for God, but sin, our own individuality, and wrong thinking keep us from getting to Him. God delivers us from sin— we have to deliver ourselves from our individuality. This means offering our natural life to God and sacrificing it to Him, so He may transform it into spiritual life through our obedience.
God pays no attention to our natural individuality in the development of our spiritual life. His plan runs right through our natural life. We must see to it that we aid and assist God, and not stand against Him by saying, “I can’t do that.” God will not discipline us; we must discipline ourselves. God will not bring our “arguments…and every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5)— we have to do it. Don’t say, “Oh, Lord, I suffer from wandering thoughts.” Don’t suffer from wandering thoughts. Stop listening to the tyranny of your individual natural life and win freedom into the spiritual life.
“If the Son makes you free….” Do not substitute Savior for Son in this passage. The Savior has set us free from sin, but this is the freedom that comes from being set free from myself by the Son. It is what Paul meant in Galatians 2:20 when he said, “I have been crucified with Christ….” His individuality had been broken and his spirit had been united with his Lord; not just merged into Him, but made one with Him. “…you shall be free indeed”— free to the very core of your being; free from the inside to the outside. We tend to rely on our own energy, instead of being energized by the power that comes from identification with Jesus.
WISDOM FROM OSWALD CHAMBERS
Always keep in contact with those books and those people that enlarge your horizon and make it possible for you to stretch yourself mentally. The Moral Foundations of Life, 721 R
A Word with You, by Ron Hutchcraft
Friday, November 18, 2016
Staying Afloat - #7790
One summer our staff had a picnic at the home of one of our volunteers. And this volunteer has a swimming pool. Actually a few people came prepared to go in the pool that day, but I knew one of them would be our son-in-law. He was there only minutes before he was in his swim trunks and diving in. What I didn't expect was who was in the pool with him – our one-year-old grandson. He looked so small in that big pool. But he was loving the water and floating along fearlessly. Not because he could swim, of course. Look, he was advanced – of course, our grandson, but not that advanced. No, his daddy had him sitting in his own personal inner tube, so he had no trouble staying afloat.
I'm Ron Hutchcraft, and I want to have A Word With You today about "Staying Afloat."
Our grandson was able to stay afloat because he was riding something buoyant – something that couldn't sink. Of course, without that, the pool would have been a very fearful and very dangerous place.
The fact is, we all need something buoyant to hang onto don't we? Especially on those days when our load seems heavy enough to swamp us or even sink us. I know I have a lot of days when the load of responsibility seems so overwhelming. I'm like my little grandson. I need something buoyant to hold me up. And God has given it to us in a gift described in five words. They're in our word for today in Nehemiah 8:10. "Do not grieve", God says, "for the joy of the Lord is your strength."
Where do you find the strength to go on when your strength is gone? From the joy of the Lord. Now that joy is not rooted in your circumstances, how things are going, how people are treating you, how you're feeling, whether you're winning or losing, whether you're married or single, or whether you're surrounded by people or whether you're all by yourself. The roots of this joy are not in your situation. They're in your Savior. That's why the Apostle Paul can write a letter to the Philippians from a musty old prison cell and make joy his central theme. The Lord was in that prison cell with His joy as much as he was with Paul in his good times.
But for many of us, our load robs us of our joy. We become stressed, edgy, selfish, even mean-spirited when the pressure is on. There goes the joy! There goes the very strength we need to float through these waters. Now what is it about our Lord that can pump joy into our spirit, no matter what's happening? To experience that joy we need to focus on several important perspectives on our Lord.
First, the battle is the Lord's. That phrase, which is repeated several times in Scripture, allows us to relax in the confidence that the outcome, the victory is out of my hands and totally in God's hands. Man, does that lighten the load! He's the lord of the outcomes.
Secondly, God will come through this time as He always has before. On those overwhelming days, we really need to focus on praising God for the countless times He's come through in the past – and I need to affirm this time is not going to be any different. Great is His faithfulness! Lord, your mercies are new every morning.
Thirdly, everything I do is for my wonderful Lord. If you're doing it for anyone else, you will inevitably lose the joy because other people are going to let you down. One other joy-giving perspective – Jesus is the Lord of the undone. Boy, I'll tell you, so many days I've reached the end with a long list of things that didn't get done. You can sink if you think about them – or you can do what He taught me finally. You can release them to your Lord, knowing you've done your best and He'll do the rest. He is Lord of the undone.
When the load is heavy, you need strength more than ever – and "the joy of the Lord is your strength." You're buoyant because you're hanging onto something unsinkable. Which means you can carry a heavy load with a light heart!
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