Max Lucado Daily: Revamped Expectations
How do you respond when you hear something like this: I'm sorry-you didn't get the job. We just felt our other candidate was more qualified!
It's not easy when God doesn't do what we want, is it? Never has been. Never will be. But faith is the conviction that God knows more than we do about this life and He will get us through it. Remember, disappointment is cured by revamped expectations!
I like the story about the fellow who went to the pet store for a singing parakeet. He was a bachelor and his house was too quiet. The store owner had just the bird for him, so the man bought it. The next day the bachelor came home to a house full of music. He went to the cage to feed the bird and noticed for the first time that the parakeet had only one leg. He felt cheated. So he called and complained. "What do you want," the store owner responded, "a bird who can sing or a bird who can dance?" Good question for times of disappointment!
From Grace for the Moment
Hosea 9
Starved for God
9 1-6 Don’t waste your life in wild orgies, Israel.
Don’t party away your life with the heathen.
You walk away from your God at the drop of a hat
and like a whore sell yourself promiscuously
at every sex-and-religion party on the street.
All that party food won’t fill you up.
You’ll end up hungrier than ever.
At this rate you’ll not last long in God’s land:
Some of you are going to end up bankrupt in Egypt.
Some of you will be disillusioned in Assyria.
As refugees in Egypt and Assyria,
you won’t have much chance to worship God—
Sentenced to rations of bread and water,
and your souls polluted by the spirit-dirty air.
You’ll be starved for God,
exiled from God’s own country.
Will you be homesick for the old Holy Days?
Will you miss festival worship of God?
Be warned! When you escape from the frying pan of disaster,
you’ll fall into the fire of Egypt.
Egypt will give you a fine funeral!
What use will all your god-inspired silver be then
as you eke out a living in a field of weeds?
7-9 Time’s up. Doom’s at the doorstep.
It’s payday!
Did Israel bluster, “The prophet is crazy!
The ‘man of the Spirit’ is nuts!”?
Think again. Because of your great guilt,
you’re in big trouble.
The prophet is looking out for Ephraim,
working under God’s orders.
But everyone is trying to trip him up.
He’s hated right in God’s house, of all places.
The people are going from bad to worse,
rivaling that ancient and unspeakable crime at Gibeah.
God’s keeping track of their guilt.
He’ll make them pay for their sins.
They Took to Sin Like a Pig to Filth
10-13 “Long ago when I came upon Israel,
it was like finding grapes out in the desert.
When I found your ancestors, it was like finding
a fig tree bearing fruit for the first time.
But when they arrived at Baal-peor, that pagan shrine,
they took to sin like a pig to filth,
wallowing in the mud with their newfound friends.
Ephraim is fickle and scattered, like a flock of blackbirds,
their beauty dissipated in confusion and clamor,
Frenetic and noisy, frigid and barren,
and nothing to show for it—neither conception nor childbirth.
Even if they did give birth, I’d declare them
unfit parents and take away their children!
Yes indeed—a black day for them
when I turn my back and walk off!
I see Ephraim letting his children run wild.
He might just as well take them and kill them outright!”
14 Give it to them, God! But what?
Give them a dried-up womb and shriveled breasts.
15-16 “All their evil came out into the open
at the pagan shrine at Gilgal. Oh, how I hated them there!
Because of their evil practices,
I’ll kick them off my land.
I’m wasting no more love on them.
Their leaders are a bunch of rebellious adolescents.
Ephraim is hit hard—
roots withered, no more fruit.
Even if by some miracle they had children,
the dear babies wouldn’t live—I’d make sure of that!”
17 My God has washed his hands of them.
They wouldn’t listen.
They’re doomed to be wanderers,
vagabonds among the godless nations.
Our Daily Bread reading and devotion
Saturday, December 03, 2016
Read: James 1:22–27
Don’t fool yourself into thinking that you are a listener when you are anything but, letting the Word go in one ear and out the other. Act on what you hear! Those who hear and don’t act are like those who glance in the mirror, walk away, and two minutes later have no idea who they are, what they look like.
25 But whoever catches a glimpse of the revealed counsel of God—the free life!—even out of the corner of his eye, and sticks with it, is no distracted scatterbrain but a man or woman of action. That person will find delight and affirmation in the action.
26-27 Anyone who sets himself up as “religious” by talking a good game is self-deceived. This kind of religion is hot air and only hot air. Real religion, the kind that passes muster before God the Father, is this: Reach out to the homeless and loveless in their plight, and guard against corruption from the godless world.
INSIGHT:
The Bible consistently portrays God as the defender of the weak, the poor, the outcast, and the marginalized. Solomon says, “Whoever oppresses the poor shows contempt for their Maker, but whoever is kind to the needy honors God. Whoever is kind to the poor lends to the Lord, and he will reward them for what they have done” (Prov. 14:31; 19:17). In today’s reading, James encourages believers to care for those in need and to “look after orphans and widows in their distress” (James 1:27). How would the church be different if all believers tried to provide for each other’s needs?
Listeners and Doers
By Amy Boucher Pye
Look after orphans and widows in their distress. James 1:27
The phone rang in the night for my husband, a minister. One of the prayer warriors in our church, a woman in her seventies who lived alone, was being taken to the hospital. She was so ill that she was no longer eating or drinking, nor could she see or walk. Not knowing if she would live or die, we asked God for His help and mercy, feeling particularly concerned for her welfare. The church sprang into action with a round-the-clock schedule of visitors who not only ministered to her but showed Christian love to the other patients, visitors, and medical staff.
James’s letter to the early Jewish Christians encouraged the church to care for the needy. James wanted the believers to go beyond just listening to the Word of God and to put their beliefs into action (1:22–25). By citing the need to care for orphans and widows (v. 27), he named a vulnerable group, for in the ancient world the family would have been responsible for their care.
Help us to love Your people as You love them, for we are made in Your image.
How do we respond to those who are at risk in our church and community? Do we see caring for the widows and orphans as a vital part of the exercise of our faith? May God open our eyes to the opportunities to serve people in need everywhere.
Father God, Your heart beats for the vulnerable and for those who are alone. Help us to love Your people as You love them, for we are made in Your image.
True faith demands not only our words, but our actions.
My Utmost for His Highest, by Oswald Chambers
Saturday, December 03, 2016
“Not by Might nor by Power”
My speech and my preaching were not with persuasive words of human wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power… —1 Corinthians 2:4
If in preaching the gospel you substitute your knowledge of the way of salvation for confidence in the power of the gospel, you hinder people from getting to reality. Take care to see while you proclaim your knowledge of the way of salvation, that you yourself are rooted and grounded by faith in God. Never rely on the clearness of your presentation, but as you give your explanation make sure that you are relying on the Holy Spirit. Rely on the certainty of God’s redemptive power, and He will create His own life in people.
Once you are rooted in reality, nothing can shake you. If your faith is in experiences, anything that happens is likely to upset that faith. But nothing can ever change God or the reality of redemption. Base your faith on that, and you are as eternally secure as God Himself. Once you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, you will never be moved again. That is the meaning of sanctification. God disapproves of our human efforts to cling to the concept that sanctification is merely an experience, while forgetting that even our sanctification must also be sanctified (see John 17:19). I must deliberately give my sanctified life to God for His service, so that He can use me as His hands and His feet.
WISDOM FROM OSWALD CHAMBERS
If a man cannot prove his religion in the valley, it is not worth anything. Shade of His Hand, 1200 L