Max Lucado Daily: GOD IS NOT SOMETIMES SOVEREIGN
This season in which you find yourself may puzzle you, but it does not bewilder God. He can and will use it for His purpose. God is not sometimes sovereign. He is not occasionally victorious. Jeremiah 30:24 reminds us, “The Lord shall not turn back until He has executed and accomplished the thoughts and intents of His mind.”
Case in point. Joseph in prison. From an earthly viewpoint the Egyptian jail was the tragic conclusion of Joseph’s life. The devil had Joseph just where he wanted him. But so did God. What Satan intended for evil, God used for testing. If you see your troubles as nothing more than isolated hassles and hurts, you’ll grow bitter and angry. If you see your troubles as tests used by God for His glory and your maturity—then even the smallest incidents take on significance!
From You’ll Get Through This
Ezra 3
The Building Begun: “The Foundation of the Temple Was Laid”
1-2 When the seventh month came and the Israelites had settled into their towns, the people assembled together in Jerusalem. Jeshua son of Jozadak and his brother priests, along with Zerubbabel, the son of Shealtiel, and his relatives, went to work and built the Altar of the God of Israel to offer Whole-Burnt-Offerings on it as written in The Revelation of Moses the man of God.
3-5 Even though they were afraid of what their non-Israelite neighbors might do, they went ahead anyway and set up the Altar on its foundations and offered Whole-Burnt-Offerings on it morning and evening. They also celebrated the Festival of Booths as prescribed and the daily Whole-Burnt-Offerings set for each day. And they presented the regular Whole-Burnt-Offerings for Sabbaths, New Moons, and God’s Holy Festivals, as well as Freewill-Offerings for God.
6 They began offering Whole-Burnt-Offerings to God from the very first day of the seventh month, even though The Temple of God’s foundation had not yet been laid.
7 They gave money to hire masons and carpenters. They gave food, drink, and oil to the Sidonians and Tyrians in exchange for the cedar lumber they had brought by sea from Lebanon to Joppa, a shipment authorized by Cyrus the king of Persia.
8-9 In the second month of the second year after their arrival at The Temple of God in Jerusalem, Zerubbabel son of Shealtiel, and Jeshua son of Jozadak, in company with their brother priests and Levites and everyone else who had come back to Jerusalem from captivity, got started. They appointed the Levites twenty years of age and older to direct the rebuilding of The Temple of God. Jeshua and his family joined Kadmiel, Binnui, and Hodaviah, along with the extended family of Henadad—all Levites—to direct the work crew on The Temple of God.
10-11 When the workers laid the foundation of The Temple of God, the priests in their robes stood up with trumpets, and the Levites, sons of Asaph, with cymbals, to praise God in the tradition of David king of Israel. They sang antiphonally praise and thanksgiving to God:
Yes! God is good!
Oh yes—he’ll never quit loving Israel!
11-13 All the people boomed out hurrahs, praising God as the foundation of The Temple of God was laid. As many were noisily shouting with joy, many of the older priests, Levites, and family heads who had seen the first Temple, when they saw the foundations of this Temple laid, wept loudly for joy. People couldn’t distinguish the shouting from the weeping. The sound of their voices reverberated for miles around.
Our Daily Bread reading and devotion
Wednesday, June 21, 2017
Read: 2 Corinthians 1:3–11
The Rescue
3-5 All praise to the God and Father of our Master, Jesus the Messiah! Father of all mercy! God of all healing counsel! He comes alongside us when we go through hard times, and before you know it, he brings us alongside someone else who is going through hard times so that we can be there for that person just as God was there for us. We have plenty of hard times that come from following the Messiah, but no more so than the good times of his healing comfort—we get a full measure of that, too.
6-7 When we suffer for Jesus, it works out for your healing and salvation. If we are treated well, given a helping hand and encouraging word, that also works to your benefit, spurring you on, face forward, unflinching. Your hard times are also our hard times. When we see that you’re just as willing to endure the hard times as to enjoy the good times, we know you’re going to make it, no doubt about it.
8-11 We don’t want you in the dark, friends, about how hard it was when all this came down on us in Asia province. It was so bad we didn’t think we were going to make it. We felt like we’d been sent to death row, that it was all over for us. As it turned out, it was the best thing that could have happened. Instead of trusting in our own strength or wits to get out of it, we were forced to trust God totally—not a bad idea since he’s the God who raises the dead! And he did it, rescued us from certain doom. And he’ll do it again, rescuing us as many times as we need rescuing. You and your prayers are part of the rescue operation—I don’t want you in the dark about that either. I can see your faces even now, lifted in praise for God’s deliverance of us, a rescue in which your prayers played such a crucial part.
INSIGHT:
The Greek word for comfort (paraklesis) means “to come alongside and help.” Jesus is called our parakletos (advocate) in 1 John 2:1. The Holy Spirit is another advocate or comforter (John 14:16). Paul asserts that God is “the God of all comfort” (2 Cor. 1:3). The triune Godhead—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—is there with us in our pain. By saying God is the "Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (vv. 2–3), Paul thereby reminds us that coming alongside to help each other is a family duty and privilege (v. 4).
To whom can you be a parakletos—a comforter—this coming week?
Sharing a Cup of Comfort
By Xochitl Dixon
Our hope for you is firm, because we know that just as you share in our sufferings, so also you share in our comfort. 2 Corinthians 1:7
A friend mailed me some of her homemade pottery. Upon opening the box, I discovered the precious items had been damaged during their journey. One of the cups had shattered into a few large pieces, a jumble of shards, and clumps of clay dust. After my husband glued the broken mess back together, I displayed the beautifully blemished cup on a shelf.
Like that pieced-together pottery, I have scars that prove I can still stand strong after the difficult times God’s brought me through. That cup of comfort reminds me that sharing how the Lord has worked in and through my life can help others during their times of suffering.
We can be comforted in knowing that the Lord redeems our trials for His glory.
The apostle Paul praises God because He is the “Father of compassion and the God of all comfort” (2 Cor. 1:3). The Lord uses our trials and sufferings to make us more like Him. His comfort in our troubles equips us to encourage others as we share what He did for us during our time of need (v. 4).
As we reflect on Christ’s suffering, we can be inspired to persevere in the midst of our own pain, trusting that God uses our experiences to strengthen us and others toward patient endurance (vv. 5–7). Like Paul, we can be comforted in knowing that the Lord redeems our trials for His glory. We can share His cups of comfort and bring reassuring hope to the hurting.
Lord, thank You for using us to provide comfort, encouragement, and hope to others who are suffering. We praise You for all You’ve done, are doing, and will continue to do to comfort us through our own afflictions.
God comforts others as we share how He comforted us.
My Utmost for His Highest, by Oswald Chambers
Wednesday, June 21, 2017
The Ministry of the Inner Life
You are…a royal priesthood… —1 Peter 2:9
By what right have we become “a royal priesthood”? It is by the right of the atonement by the Cross of Christ that this has been accomplished. Are we prepared to purposely disregard ourselves and to launch out into the priestly work of prayer? The continual inner-searching we do in an effort to see if we are what we ought to be generates a self-centered, sickly type of Christianity, not the vigorous and simple life of a child of God. Until we get into this right and proper relationship with God, it is simply a case of our “hanging on by the skin of our teeth,” although we say, “What a wonderful victory I have!” Yet there is nothing at all in that which indicates the miracle of redemption. Launch out in reckless, unrestrained belief that the redemption is complete. Then don’t worry anymore about yourself, but begin to do as Jesus Christ has said, in essence, “Pray for the friend who comes to you at midnight, pray for the saints of God, and pray for all men.” Pray with the realization that you are perfect only in Christ Jesus, not on the basis of this argument: “Oh, Lord, I have done my best; please hear me now.”
How long is it going to take God to free us from the unhealthy habit of thinking only about ourselves? We must get to the point of being sick to death of ourselves, until there is no longer any surprise at anything God might tell us about ourselves. We cannot reach and understand the depths of our own meagerness. There is only one place where we are right with God, and that is in Christ Jesus. Once we are there, we have to pour out our lives for all we are worth in this ministry of the inner life.
WISDOM FROM OSWALD CHAMBERS
Defenders of the faith are inclined to be bitter until they learn to walk in the light of the Lord. When you have learned to walk in the light of the Lord, bitterness and contention are impossible. Biblical Psychology, 199 R
A Word with You, by Ron Hutchcraft
Wednesday, June 21, 2017
Being There For the Garbage - #7943
Hundreds of thousands of Kurdish people had fled Saddam Hussein's Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War, and they were spread over miles of mountainside on the Turkish border. Christian agencies were flooding in with food, medical help and the Gospel of Jesus Christ. But most of the Christian workers connected with the people there only from trucks and distribution points, where they handed out food and blankets. But the missionaries from one particular mission organization really broke through the barrier that others were encountering when they tried to talk about Jesus. They had a unique way of getting close to the people and winning their respect and their trust. You ready to hear their radical outreach strategy? These missionaries picked up the garbage. See, it was everywhere on those mountainsides, and it was getting pretty gross. Nobody wanted to do the garbage, but those who were willing to were the ones those people listened to.
I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "Being There For the Garbage."
What opened doors and hearts among those needy people on that Iraqi mountainside is the same thing that will open doors and hearts where you are-a willingness to win the right to be heard by being there for people's garbage.
It's what Jesus did. In Philippians 2:5-7, our word for today from the Word of God, He tells us: "Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: who, being in the very nature of God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made Himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness, He humbled Himself and became obedient to death-even death on a cross."
This is the Jesus who touched the lepers that no one else would touch, who stopped for people that everyone else walked by, who washed the dirty feet of His followers, who defined His day by the needs of people who came to Him for help, and who allowed men He had made to beat Him and crucify Him. The King of heaven came to us as a servant and He stole our hearts away.
You have neighbors who really need your Jesus, coworkers, friends and family members. How are you ever going to get them interested in the Jesus who is their only hope? By serving them; by being there to help them with the garbage of their lives. In Jesus' name, be there when their health levels them, when their marriage is struggling or over, when they lose a loved one. Be there when all the funeral folks have gone home. Be there when they're struggling financially, when they don't have enough help, when their business is in trouble, when their kids are in trouble, or when they've lost their reputation and nobody wants to be around them any more.
Their moment of loss is your moment of loving opportunity to show them Jesus' love in action. When others walk out, you walk in. Then you will be ultimately in a position to explain to them where this love comes from. You're just loving them like you've been loved. By a Jesus who had poured everything out for you, because He died of a cross to clean up all the garbage of your life and the garbage of theirs.
First, you show them Jesus by serving them in the midst of their garbage. You win the right to be heard by being there to help pick up the pieces and pick up the garbage. Initially, they may not be interested in your message, but who can be against someone who picks up their heavy burden and helps them carry it; who is there when nobody else is? You can't be against that. It's that kind of love that will open their heart to the greatest love of all!
