Max Lucado Daily: AN UNLIKELY KING
In Bethlehem, the human being who best understood who God was and what He was doing, was a teenage girl in a smelly stable. As Mary looked into the face of the baby, her son, her Lord. His majesty—she couldn’t take her eyes off Him. Somehow Mary knew she was holding God. So this is He.
And she remembered the words of the angel when he said, “His kingdom will never end!” He looked like anything but a King. His cry, though strong and healthy, was still the helpless and piercing cry of a baby. Majesty in the midst of the mundane. Holiness in the filth of sheep manure and sweat. Divinity entering the world on the floor of a stable, through the womb of a teenager and in the presence of a carpenter. God came near! And Luke 1:33 says, “His kingdom will never end!” May you be a part of it.
Read more God Came Near
Matthew 18:1-20
Whoever Becomes Simple Again
At about the same time, the disciples came to Jesus asking, “Who gets the highest rank in God’s kingdom?”
2-5 For an answer Jesus called over a child, whom he stood in the middle of the room, and said, “I’m telling you, once and for all, that unless you return to square one and start over like children, you’re not even going to get a look at the kingdom, let alone get in. Whoever becomes simple and elemental again, like this child, will rank high in God’s kingdom. What’s more, when you receive the childlike on my account, it’s the same as receiving me.
6-7 “But if you give them a hard time, bullying or taking advantage of their simple trust, you’ll soon wish you hadn’t. You’d be better off dropped in the middle of the lake with a millstone around your neck. Doom to the world for giving these God-believing children a hard time! Hard times are inevitable, but you don’t have to make it worse—and it’s doomsday to you if you do.
8-9 “If your hand or your foot gets in the way of God, chop it off and throw it away. You’re better off maimed or lame and alive than the proud owners of two hands and two feet, godless in a furnace of eternal fire. And if your eye distracts you from God, pull it out and throw it away. You’re better off one-eyed and alive than exercising your twenty-twenty vision from inside the fire of hell.
10 “Watch that you don’t treat a single one of these childlike believers arrogantly. You realize, don’t you, that their personal angels are constantly in touch with my Father in heaven?
Work It Out Between You
12-14 “Look at it this way. If someone has a hundred sheep and one of them wanders off, doesn’t he leave the ninety-nine and go after the one? And if he finds it, doesn’t he make far more over it than over the ninety-nine who stay put? Your Father in heaven feels the same way. He doesn’t want to lose even one of these simple believers.
15-17 “If a fellow believer hurts you, go and tell him—work it out between the two of you. If he listens, you’ve made a friend. If he won’t listen, take one or two others along so that the presence of witnesses will keep things honest, and try again. If he still won’t listen, tell the church. If he won’t listen to the church, you’ll have to start over from scratch, confront him with the need for repentance, and offer again God’s forgiving love.
18-20 “Take this most seriously: A yes on earth is yes in heaven; a no on earth is no in heaven. What you say to one another is eternal. I mean this. When two of you get together on anything at all on earth and make a prayer of it, my Father in heaven goes into action. And when two or three of you are together because of me, you can be sure that I’ll be there.”
Our Daily Bread reading and devotion
Friday, December 22, 2017
Read: 2 Corinthians 5:14–21
For Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. 15 And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again.
16 So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. 17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come:[a] The old has gone, the new is here! 18 All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: 19 that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. 20 We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. 21 God made him who had no sin to be sin[b] for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
Footnotes:
2 Corinthians 5:17 Or Christ, that person is a new creation.
2 Corinthians 5:21 Or be a sin offering
INSIGHT
At the heart of the concept of becoming one with Christ is His work of reconciliation in us. In today’s passage, Paul weaves several themes together—life, love, new creation, and the ministry of reconciliation—all framed by a call to act with urgency. It is because of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection that we can be reconciled to God. Those who accept Christ’s gift of reconciliation must “no longer live for themselves” (2 Cor. 5:15). Instead, we are compelled to view everyone differently (v. 16), as people in dire need of Christ’s reconciliation. And what is this reconciliation? God will no longer “[count] people’s sins against them” (v. 19). With urgency, Paul tells us that we are now Christ’s ambassadors of reconciliation and says, “We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God” (v. 20, emphasis added).
With whom can you share this offer of reconciliation today? - Tim Gustaftson
Silent Night of the Soul
By David C. McCasland
If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone; the new is here! 2 Corinthians 5:17
Long before Joseph Mohr and Franz Gruber created the familiar carol “Silent Night,” Angelus Silesius had written:
Lo! in the silent night a child to God is born,
And all is brought again that ere was lost or lorn.
Could but thy soul, O man, become a silent night
God would be born in thee and set all things aright.
Jesus, thank You for being born into this dark world so that we might be born again into Your life & light.
Silesius, a Polish monk, published the poem in 1657 in The Cherubic Pilgrim. During our church’s annual Christmas Eve service, the choir sang a beautiful rendition of the song titled “Could but Thy Soul Become a Silent Night.”
The twofold mystery of Christmas is that God became one of us so that we might become one with Him. Jesus suffered everything that was wrong so that we could be made right. That’s why the apostle Paul could write, “If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone; the new is here! All this is from God who reconciled us to himself through Christ” (2 Cor. 5:17–18).
Whether our Christmas is filled with family and friends or empty of all we long for, we know that Jesus came to be born in us.
Ah, would thy heart but be a manger for the birth,
God would once more become a child on earth.
Lord Jesus, thank You for being born into this dark world so that we might be born again into Your life and light.
God became one of us so that we might become one with Him.
My Utmost for His Highest, by Oswald Chambers
Friday, December 22, 2017
The Drawing of the Father
No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him… —John 6:44
When God begins to draw me to Himself, the problem of my will comes in immediately. Will I react positively to the truth that God has revealed? Will I come to Him? To discuss or deliberate over spiritual matters when God calls is inappropriate and disrespectful to Him. When God speaks, never discuss it with anyone as if to decide what your response may be (see Galatians 1:15-16). Belief is not the result of an intellectual act, but the result of an act of my will whereby I deliberately commit myself. But will I commit, placing myself completely and absolutely on God, and be willing to act solely on what He says? If I will, I will find that I am grounded on reality as certain as God’s throne.
In preaching the gospel, always focus on the matter of the will. Belief must come from the will to believe. There must be a surrender of the will, not a surrender to a persuasive or powerful argument. I must deliberately step out, placing my faith in God and in His truth. And I must place no confidence in my own works, but only in God. Trusting in my own mental understanding becomes a hindrance to complete trust in God. I must be willing to ignore and leave my feelings behind. I must will to believe. But this can never be accomplished without my forceful, determined effort to separate myself from my old ways of looking at things. I must surrender myself completely to God.
Everyone has been created with the ability to reach out beyond his own grasp. But it is God who draws me, and my relationship to Him in the first place is an inner, personal one, not an intellectual one. I come into the relationship through the miracle of God and through my own will to believe. Then I begin to get an intelligent appreciation and understanding of the wonder of the transformation in my life.
WISDOM FROM OSWALD CHAMBERS
If there is only one strand of faith amongst all the corruption within us, God will take hold of that one strand. Not Knowing Whither, 888 L
A Word with You, by Ron Hutchcraft
Friday, December 22, 2017
The Most Important List This Christmas - #8075
It's been used by many a parent to intimidate their children into being good for at least one month of the year. It's that list, you know, the one immortalized in the song, "Santa Claus is Coming to Town." You know the line: "He's making a list, checking it twice. Gonna find out who's naughty and nice." I never wanted to be on that naughty list. (Warning: Cover your child's ears at this point.) Then I found out there's no such list.
I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "The Most Important List This Christmas."
There is a list that it would be very wise to think about this Christmas. And it's very real. It's a list God has. And no one's on it because they've been "nice." In fact, the Bible says no one is good enough to be on this list - not you, not me, not the most religious person you know. Because no one even comes close to living up to a holy God's standard of perfection. Using that as His standard, God says in the Bible, "There is none righteous, no not one" (Romans 3:10).
The list God has is one it's critical to be on - eternally critical. Jesus called it the "Book of Life" - that's eternal life. God has the names of every person who's going to heaven in that book. And your name is either in that book or it isn't. Jesus told some people who had put their trust in Him to "rejoice that your names are written in heaven" (Luke 10:20). And in our word for today from the Word of God in Revelation 20:15, there's a sobering picture of that book being opened on Judgment Day, and a compelling reason why we really need to be sure our name is there. The Bible says: "If anyone's name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire."
That's not what God wants. The Bible says that "He is not wanting that anyone should perish" (2 Peter 3:9). So, in the most incredible act of love in human history, God sent His one and only Son that first Christmas, for the express purpose of ultimately paying the price for our sin in our place. On that first Christmas, the angels told those shepherds, "A Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord" (Luke 2:11). That's "Savior" as in rescuer - someone who saves you from a deadly situation you can't possibly save yourself from. That's us! We're the rebels of the universe.
The angels do what God tells them, the heavens do what God tells them, and even demons must obey His commands. We're the only ones who dare to say to God, "You run the universe. I'll run me, thank you." We may never say it that way, but we've all turned our back many times on what God wants haven't we? We've lived our life our way. That's spiritual hijacking, punishable by eternal death.
But there's this Book of Life. People who will never have to pay that death penalty they deserve. Why? The Bible says, "He that has the Son (that's Jesus, the Son of God) has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life" (1 John 5:12). For you to be rescued by the One who came to save you, you have to grab Him like He's your only hope. The moment you do, every wrong thing you've ever done is erased from God's book and your name is entered in God's Book of Life in indelible ink. God made His move at the cross. Now it's your move.
Do you sense that tug in your heart? Well that's Jesus saying, "Open up to Me." Listen to that. That's God drawing you, and you can't come without it. This is way too important to postpone. It's way too important to ignore. Let this be the day when you turn from running your own life and you give yourself to the Man who died so you can live.
Do you want that? Go visit our website. You'll see there laid out in very clear and simple terms from God's Word how to be sure you have a relationship with God beginning this very day. That website is ANewStory.com.
I don't know when your last chance will be to have your name entered in God's Book of Life, because no one does. But the risk of missing heaven is not worth delaying. This could be the day you literally cross over from spiritual death to eternal life. Right now He is waiting to enter your name.