Max Lucado Daily: LOVE IS PATIENT - May 4, 2018
Has anyone told you about God’s patience? His patience and willingness to put up with you! “The LORD is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love” (Psalm 103:8).
Paul presents patience as the premiere expression of love. Positioned at the head of the apostle’s Love Armada—a boat-length or two in front of kindness, courtesy, and forgiveness—is the flagship known as patience. 1 Corinthians 13:4 states, “Love is patient!” Patience waits. It listens. It’s slow to boil. This is how God treats us. And according to Jesus, this is how we should treat others. How infiltrated are you with God’s patience? You’ve heard about it. Read about it. But have you received it? The proof is in your patience. Patience deeply received results in patience freely offered!
Read more A Love Worth Giving
Leviticus 27
Vows, Dedications, and Redemptions
1-8 God spoke to Moses: He said, “Speak to the People of Israel. Tell them, If anyone wants to vow the value of a person to the service of God, set the value of a man between the ages of twenty and sixty at fifty shekels of silver, according to the Sanctuary shekel. For a woman the valuation is thirty shekels. If the person is between the ages of five and twenty, set the value at twenty shekels for a male and ten shekels for a female. If the person is between one month and five years, set the value at five shekels of silver for a boy and three shekels of silver for a girl. If the person is over sixty, set the value at fifteen shekels for a man and ten shekels for a woman. If anyone is too poor to pay the stated amount, he is to present the person to the priest, who will then set the value for him according to what the person making the vow can afford.
9-13 “If he vowed an animal that is acceptable as an offering to God, the animal is given to God and becomes the property of the Sanctuary. He must not exchange or substitute a good one for a bad one, or a bad one for a good one; if he should dishonestly substitute one animal for another, both the original and the substitute become property of the Sanctuary. If what he vowed is a ritually unclean animal, one that is not acceptable as an offering to God, the animal must be shown to the priest, who will set its value, either high or low. Whatever the priest sets will be its value. If the owner changes his mind and wants to redeem it, he must add twenty percent to its value.
14-15 “If a man dedicates his house to God, into the possession of the Sanctuary, the priest assesses its value, setting it either high or low. Whatever value the priest sets, that’s what it is. If the man wants to buy it back, he must add twenty percent to its price and then it’s his again.
16-21 “If a man dedicates to God part of his family land, its value is to be set according to the amount of seed that is needed for it at the rate of fifty shekels of silver to six bushels of barley seed. If he dedicates his field during the year of Jubilee, the set value stays. But if he dedicates it after the Jubilee, the priest will compute the value according to the years left until the next Jubilee, reducing the value proportionately. If the one dedicating it wants to buy it back, he must add twenty percent to its valuation, and then it’s his again. But if he doesn’t redeem it or sells the field to someone else, it can never be bought back. When the field is released in the Jubilee, it becomes holy to God, the possession of the Sanctuary, God’s field. It goes into the hands of the priests.
22-25 “If a man dedicates to God a field he has bought, a field which is not part of the family land, the priest will compute its proportionate value in relation to the next year of Jubilee. The man must pay its value on the spot as something that is now holy to God, belonging to the Sanctuary. In the year of Jubilee it goes back to its original owner, the man from whom he bought it. The valuations will be reckoned by the Sanctuary shekel, at twenty gerahs to the shekel.
26-27 “No one is allowed to dedicate the firstborn of an animal; the firstborn, as firstborn, already belongs to God. No matter if it’s cattle or sheep, it already belongs to God. If it’s one of the ritually unclean animals, he can buy it back at its assessed value by adding twenty percent to it. If he doesn’t redeem it, it is to be sold at its assessed value.
28 “But nothing that a man irrevocably devotes to God from what belongs to him, whether human or animal or family land, may be either sold or bought back. Everything devoted is holy to the highest degree; it’s God’s inalienable property.
29 “No human who has been devoted to destruction can be redeemed. He must be put to death.
30-33 “A tenth of the land’s produce, whether grain from the ground or fruit from the trees, is God’s. It is holy to God. If a man buys back any of the tenth he has given, he must add twenty percent to it. A tenth of the entire herd and flock, every tenth animal that passes under the shepherd’s rod, is holy to God. He is not permitted to pick out the good from the bad or make a substitution. If he dishonestly makes a substitution, both animals, the original and the substitute, become the possession of the Sanctuary and cannot be redeemed.”
34 These are the commandments that God gave to Moses on Mount Sinai for the People of Israel.
Our Daily Bread reading and devotion
Friday, May 04, 2018
Read: Matthew 3:13–17
13-14 Jesus then appeared, arriving at the Jordan River from Galilee. He wanted John to baptize him. John objected, “I’m the one who needs to be baptized, not you!”
15 But Jesus insisted. “Do it. God’s work, putting things right all these centuries, is coming together right now in this baptism.” So John did it.
16-17 The moment Jesus came up out of the baptismal waters, the skies opened up and he saw God’s Spirit—it looked like a dove—descending and landing on him. And along with the Spirit, a voice: “This is my Son, chosen and marked by my love, delight of my life.”
INSIGHT
Love has always defined God; it is at the core of everything He does, now and in eternity. But today’s text urges us to think about an aspect of God’s love we might not typically consider.
The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit spend eternity in a perfect relationship—giving and receiving love. It’s important to remember that genuine love not only gives love but also receives it. It wouldn’t be loving of the Father not to accept the love of the Son and the Spirit. It’s easy to say we love someone and to show it with what we do for them, but part of loving them is receiving their expressions of love too. That takes humility and trust.
Do you need to receive the love of someone else today? Or do you need to receive the love of God again and remember the reason we love Him is because He first loved us. - J.R. Hudberg
Before the Beginning
By Amy Peterson
You loved me before the creation of the world. John 17:24
“But if God has no beginning and no end, and has always existed, what was He doing before He created us? How did He spend His time?” Some precocious Sunday school student always asks this question when we talk about God’s eternal nature. I used to respond that this was a bit of a mystery. But recently I learned that the Bible gives us an answer to this question.
When Jesus prays to His Father in John 17, He says “Father, . . . you loved me before the creation of the world” (v. 24). This is God as revealed to us by Jesus: Before the world was ever created, God was a trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit)—all loving each other and being loved. When Jesus was baptized, God sent His Spirit in the form of a dove and said, “This is my Son, whom I love” (Matthew 3:17). The most foundational aspect of God’s identity is this outgoing, life-giving love.
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What a lovely and encouraging truth this is about our God! The mutual, outgoing love expressed by each member of the Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—is key to understanding the nature of God. What was God doing before the beginning of time? What He always does: He was loving because He is love (1 John 4:8).
God, thank You for Your overflowing, self-giving love.
We are created in the image of a God who is loving and relational.
My Utmost for His Highest, by Oswald Chambers
Friday, May 04, 2018
Vicarious Intercession
…having boldness to enter the Holiest by the blood of Jesus… —Hebrews 10:19
Beware of thinking that intercession means bringing our own personal sympathies and concerns into the presence of God, and then demanding that He do whatever we ask. Our ability to approach God is due entirely to the vicarious, or substitutionary, identification of our Lord with sin. We have “boldness to enter the Holiest by the blood of Jesus.”
Spiritual stubbornness is the most effective hindrance to intercession, because it is based on a sympathetic “understanding” of things we see in ourselves and others that we think needs no atonement. We have the idea that there are certain good and virtuous things in each of us that do not need to be based on the atonement by the Cross of Christ. Just the sluggishness and lack of interest produced by this kind of thinking makes us unable to intercede. We do not identify ourselves with God’s interests and concerns for others, and we get irritated with Him. Yet we are always ready with our own ideas, and our intercession becomes only the glorification of our own natural sympathies. We have to realize that the identification of Jesus with sin means a radical change of all of our sympathies and interests. Vicarious intercession means that we deliberately substitute God’s interests in others for our natural sympathy with them.
Am I stubborn or substituted? Am I spoiled or complete in my relationship to God? Am I irritable or spiritual? Am I determined to have my own way or determined to be identified with Him?
WISDOM FROM OSWALD CHAMBERS
We never enter into the Kingdom of God by having our head questions answered, but only by commitment. The Highest Good—Thy Great Redemption, 565 R
A Word with You, by Ron Hutchcraft
Friday, May 04, 2018
What the Master Craftsman Sees in You - #8170
Linda, one of the members of our ministry team, married a guy with an eye. I mean, an eye for artistic possibilities. Ted works on home improvement projects, and he actually helped to improve our home a little bit not long ago. For example, he created this beautiful shelf in our living room. It's made from wood that he scouted and found in the nearby forest. My wife said, "Hey, we're the only ones with a shelf just like that." Ted does originals. Recently, he took Linda out into the woods to see a tree that he thought had tremendous artistic possibilities. So, he envisioned out loud what he wanted to make of it. Linda's comment on this little field trip was slightly amusing: "Ted saw this beautiful work of art. All I saw was a tree."
I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "What the Master Craftsman Sees in You."
I wonder what folks have seen when they looked at you over the years. Maybe "all they saw was a tree." They haven't seen your potential. They haven't seen your beauty as a person, your value, or your possibilities. Maybe you've gotten the feeling from people that, when they look at you, all they can see is someone who's a problem, or a failure, or ugly, or not worth much, or worse yet, virtually invisible. There may have been people who saw you as an easy target; people who saw you as someone to use or abuse, someone to walk on, or walk by, or walk over.
None of those people begin to understand who you really are and what you're really worth. But the Master Craftsman does, and He wants you to start to see yourself through His eyes. In our word for today from the Word of God in John 1:42, Jesus meets Simon the fisherman for the first time; the same Simon who would one day become the leader of Jesus' disciples, the great Simon Peter. But not this day. The Bible says, "Jesus looked at him and said, 'You are Simon, son of John. You will be called Cephas,'" which, when translated, is "Peter."
Now, everybody looks at Simon and all they see is John's son. Jesus looks at him and sees Peter, which means "rock." Now Simon was more of a flake than a rock at this point. For the next three years as Jesus' disciple, Simon demonstrated his volatility, his unpredictability, his up-and-downness. But like my friend, Ted, looking at that tree and seeing so much more, Jesus looks at Simon and sees, not just the roller coaster man he is, but the rock he's going to become if he follows Jesus.
So, what does Jesus see when He looks at you? Not just who or what you are, but what He can make of you if you put your life in His hands, the makeover miracle described this way in 2 Corinthians 5:17 - "If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!" And when Jesus looks at you, He sees what you yourself may have never seen: He sees His handmade creation, designed to make a unique difference on this planet. In the words of Ephesians 2:10, "We are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do." And, most important, Jesus sees in you someone He thought was worth dying for. To pay for all the junk you've ever done against Him so you could be forgiven and so you could be allowed into His heaven. In a sense, when Jesus looks at you, He does see a tree - the cross where He poured out His life for someone He didn't want to lose.
But you'll never experience this great love He has for you; you'll never become the man or woman He made you to be, until you give your life to this Man who gave His life for you by saying, "Jesus, I have lived so long beneath what You made me for. I've sinned. I need a Savior, and I'm Yours."
Listen, I would love to help you begin this love relationship with Jesus today. And the way I can do that is if you'll come to our website ANewStory.com. There I think we can help you be sure you belong to Jesus.
Let this be the first day of a lifetime where you live like you were created to live by the One who made you - the One who, by the way, only makes masterpieces.
