Max Lucado Daily: Your Story Indwells God’s Story
Everything changes when you know the rest of your story! In 2 Samuel 22:25 David says, “God rewrote the text of my life when I opened the book of my heart to his eyes.”
But what is the text of our lives? Self-help gurus and magazine headlines urge you to find your narrative. “Look inside yourself,” they say. But the promise of self-discovery falls short.
Your story indwells God’s. “It is in Christ that we find out who we are and what we are living for. Long before we first heard of Christ and got our hopes up, he had his eyes on us for glorious living, part of the overall purpose he is working out in everything and everyone” (Ephesians 1:11-12).
In His story, you’ll find there’s more to your story!
From More to Your Story
Psalm 147
Praise the Lord!
How good to sing praises to our God!
How delightful and how fitting!
2 The Lord is rebuilding Jerusalem
and bringing the exiles back to Israel.
3 He heals the brokenhearted
and bandages their wounds.
4 He counts the stars
and calls them all by name.
5 How great is our Lord! His power is absolute!
His understanding is beyond comprehension!
6 The Lord supports the humble,
but he brings the wicked down into the dust.
7 Sing out your thanks to the Lord;
sing praises to our God with a harp.
8 He covers the heavens with clouds,
provides rain for the earth,
and makes the grass grow in mountain pastures.
9 He gives food to the wild animals
and feeds the young ravens when they cry.
10He takes no pleasure in the strength of a horse
or in human might.
11No, the Lord’s delight is in those who fear him,
those who put their hope in his unfailing love.
12Glorify the Lord, O Jerusalem!
Praise your God, O Zion!
13For he has strengthened the bars of your gates
and blessed your children within your walls.
14He sends peace across your nation
and satisfies your hunger with the finest wheat.
15He sends his orders to the world—
how swiftly his word flies!
16He sends the snow like white wool;
he scatters frost upon the ground like ashes.
17He hurls the hail like stones.[a]
Who can stand against his freezing cold?
18 Then, at his command, it all melts.
He sends his winds, and the ice thaws.
19 He has revealed his words to Jacob,
his decrees and regulations to Israel.
20 He has not done this for any other nation;
they do not know his regulations.
Praise the Lord!
Footnotes: 147:17 Hebrew like bread crumbs.
Our Daily Bread reading and devotion
Tuesday, May 03, 2016
Read: 2 Corinthians 1:3-7
God Offers Comfort to All
3 All praise to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is our merciful Father and the source of all comfort. 4 He comforts us in all our troubles so that we can comfort others. When they are troubled, we will be able to give them the same comfort God has given us. 5 For the more we suffer for Christ, the more God will shower us with his comfort through Christ. 6 Even when we are weighed down with troubles, it is for your comfort and salvation! For when we ourselves are comforted, we will certainly comfort you. Then you can patiently endure the same things we suffer. 7 We are confident that as you share in our sufferings, you will also share in the comfort God gives us.
INSIGHT:
Today’s reading gives special attention to how believers are to serve one another in humility. During our Lord’s time on earth He provided the ultimate example of ministering to others. Now the Holy Spirit indwells believers and gives us the power to show that kind of self-sacrifice to the body of Christ.
Just What I Need
By Dave Branon
We can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God. 2 Corinthians 1:4
As I stood in the back of the room at a senior citizens’ center in Palmer, Alaska, listening to my daughter’s high school choir sing “It Is Well with My Soul,” I wondered why she, the choir director, had chosen that song. It had been played at her sister Melissa’s funeral, and Lisa knew it was always tough for me to hear it without having an emotional response.
My musings were interrupted when a man sidled up next to me and said, “This is just what I need to hear.” I introduced myself and then asked why he needed this song. “I lost my son Cameron last week in a motorcycle accident,” he said.
Lord, help me to see where help is needed.
Wow! I was so focused on myself that I never considered the needs of others, and God was busy using that song exactly where He wanted it to be used. I took my new friend Mac, who worked at the center, aside, and we talked about God’s care in this toughest time in his life.
All around us are people in need, and sometimes we have to set aside our own feelings and agendas to help them. One way we can do that is to remember how God has comforted us in our trials and troubles “so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God” (2 Cor. 1:4). How easy it is to be engrossed in our own concerns and forget that someone right next to us might need a prayer, a word of comfort, a hug, or gift of mercy in Jesus’ name.
Lord, help me to see where help is needed, and help me to provide that help. Thank You for the comfort You give; help me to share it.
Comfort received should be comfort shared.
My Utmost for His Highest, by Oswald Chambers
Tuesday, May 03, 2016
Vital Intercession
…praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit… —Ephesians 6:18
As we continue on in our intercession for others, we may find that our obedience to God in interceding is going to cost those for whom we intercede more than we ever thought. The danger in this is that we begin to intercede in sympathy with those whom God was gradually lifting up to a totally different level in direct answer to our prayers. Whenever we step back from our close identification with God’s interest and concern for others and step into having emotional sympathy with them, the vital connection with God is gone. We have then put our sympathy and concern for them in the way, and this is a deliberate rebuke to God.
It is impossible for us to have living and vital intercession unless we are perfectly and completely sure of God. And the greatest destroyer of that confident relationship to God, so necessary for intercession, is our own personal sympathy and preconceived bias. Identification with God is the key to intercession, and whenever we stop being identified with Him it is because of our sympathy with others, not because of sin. It is not likely that sin will interfere with our intercessory relationship with God, but sympathy will. It is sympathy with ourselves or with others that makes us say, “I will not allow that thing to happen.” And instantly we are out of that vital connection with God.
Vital intercession leaves you with neither the time nor the inclination to pray for your own “sad and pitiful self.” You do not have to struggle to keep thoughts of yourself out, because they are not even there to be kept out of your thinking. You are completely and entirely identified with God’s interests and concerns in other lives. God gives us discernment in the lives of others to call us to intercession for them, never so that we may find fault with them.
Wisdom From Oswald Chambers
It is not what a man does that is of final importance, but what he is in what he does. The atmosphere produced by a man, much more than his activities, has the lasting influence. Baffled to Fight Better, 51 L
A Word with You, by Ron Hutchcraft
Tuesday, May 03, 2016
The Killer Tide - #7647
You remember that massive tsunami that hit South Asia right after Christmas in 2004? I immediately flashed back when I heard about that to a real life lesson I had about tsunamis prior to that. I was in Kodiak, Alaska, with our On Eagles' Wings team of young Native Americans. They had just finished a string of grueling days of outreach, so we took them to a special spot on the ocean for a few hours off. Many of us were fascinated with these beautiful formations we saw just under the water near the shore. That's when our host told me about what happened after a major quake in Anchorage some years earlier. Folks who were at this same shore area watched the ocean suddenly recede dramatically, and that left all those beautiful underwater formations and shells totally exposed. They're like, "Whoa! Look at this!" So they seized this unusual opportunity to go in and collect all these treasures of the sea – not realizing that the sudden disappearance of the water was the first sign of an impending tsunami. Moments later, that monster wave suddenly enveloped everything in sight, including the people who literally had run right into its path.
I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "The Killer Tide."
Many people lost their lives that day because they ran to what they should have been running from. That's the kind of moral mistake that has cost so many so much. It may well be that someone listening right now is checking out something that looks good, looks inviting, and looks exciting – not knowing or just ignoring the fact that there is a tide coming that will carry you where you never wanted to go and take from you what you don't want to lose.
Because God doesn't want that to happen to any of us, He has issued this tsunami warning for our lives in James 1:14-15, our word for today from the Word of God. "Each one is tempted, it says, when by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death."
First, you see something that's wrong but it looks good. You really want it. A little excitement in a movie, or a Website, or a magazine with some sexually explicit stuff. The relief that getting drunk or getting high might give you for a little while. The thrill, the release, or even the love you might find in a physical relationship with someone who is not your marriage partner. Sin looks good. Satan isn't stupid.
So the desire conceives and it moves from wanting it to doing it. It says, "it gives birth to sin." You've plunged into the thing that looks so inviting. And just like those folks who were enjoying what they experienced in that oceanless sea bed. Sin may feel good and it may even feel right for a little while – until the tsunami hits, which it always does. Because "when sin is full-grown, it gives birth to death." Sin always kills. Get that! Sin always kills! The tsunami tide of sin's consequences can sweep away a marriage, the trust people had in you, your position, your reputation, your self-respect, your closeness to God. When you plunge into that attractive opportunity, you have no idea of the shame, and guilt, and the hurt that's going to follow.
God says, "Flee the evil desires..." (2 Timothy 2:22). Then He says, "Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness" (Ephesians 5:11). And, by the way, when the Bible says that sin always ends in death, it underscores that by saying, "The wages of sin is death." And the ultimate killer tide is the judgment that we all deserved for that sin that we've done against a God who put us here in the first place.
The good news about that is that the Bible says, "But the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord." Let me just end with some great news today, that Jesus stood and took the killer tide of the judgment for our sin when He died on the cross. And He's alive, because He walked out of His grave. He's ready to walk into your life today so you never have to face that judgment.
I hope you'll tell Him, "Jesus, I'm yours" today. Go to our website and let me show you there how to begin a relationship with Him. That's ANewStory.com. Remember, sin is a killer tide. Run from it. Make sure that you have taken for yourself the gift of forgiveness that Jesus alone died to give you.