Max Lucado Daily: True Confession
In Psalm 32:5, David says,"I confessed my rebellion to the Lord.' And you forgave me. All my guilt is gone."
Confession is not complaining. If I merely recite my problems and tell you how tough my life is, I'm not confessing. Confession is not blaming. Pointing fingers at others may feel good for a while, but it does nothing to remove the conflict within me. Confession is coming clean with God.
David discovered this. As if his affair with Bathsheba wasn't enough. As if the murder of her husband wasn't enough. David danced around the truth. It took a prophet to bring the truth to the surface, but when he did, David did not like what he saw. He confessed. He came clean with God. And the result? He proclaimed, "And you forgave me! All my guilt is gone!" (Ps. 32:5).
Want to get rid of your guilt? Come clean with God!
From Max on Life
Psalm 60
A David Psalm, When He Fought Against Aram-naharaim and Aram-zobah and Joab Killed Twelve Thousand Edomites at the Valley of Salt
60 1-2 God! you walked off and left us,
kicked our defenses to bits
And stalked off angry.
Come back. Oh please, come back!
You shook earth to the foundations,
ripped open huge crevasses.
Heal the breaks! Everything’s
coming apart at the seams.
3-5 You made your people look doom in the face,
then gave us cheap wine to drown our troubles.
Then you planted a flag to rally your people,
an unfurled flag to look to for courage.
Now do something quickly, answer right now,
so the one you love best is saved.
6-8 That’s when God spoke in holy splendor,
“Bursting with joy,
I make a present of Shechem,
I hand out Succoth Valley as a gift.
Gilead’s in my pocket,
to say nothing of Manasseh.
Ephraim’s my hard hat,
Judah my hammer;
Moab’s a scrub bucket,
I mop the floor with Moab,
Spit on Edom,
rain fireworks all over Philistia.”
9-10 Who will take me to the thick of the fight?
Who’ll show me the road to Edom?
You aren’t giving up on us, are you, God?
refusing to go out with our troops?
11-12 Give us help for the hard task;
human help is worthless.
In God we’ll do our very best;
he’ll flatten the opposition for good.
Our Daily Bread reading and devotion
Sunday, January 06, 2019
Read: John 17:1–5, 20–24
Jesus’ Prayer for His Followers
17 1-5 Jesus said these things. Then, raising his eyes in prayer, he said:
Father, it’s time.
Display the bright splendor of your Son
So the Son in turn may show your bright splendor.
You put him in charge of everything human
So he might give real and eternal life to all in his charge.
And this is the real and eternal life:
That they know you,
The one and only true God,
And Jesus Christ, whom you sent.
I glorified you on earth
By completing down to the last detail
What you assigned me to do.
And now, Father, glorify me with your very own splendor,
The very splendor I had in your presence
Before there was a world.
John 17:20-26 The Message (MSG)
20-23 I’m praying not only for them
But also for those who will believe in me
Because of them and their witness about me.
The goal is for all of them to become one heart and mind—
Just as you, Father, are in me and I in you,
So they might be one heart and mind with us.
Then the world might believe that you, in fact, sent me.
The same glory you gave me, I gave them,
So they’ll be as unified and together as we are—
I in them and you in me.
Then they’ll be mature in this oneness,
And give the godless world evidence
That you’ve sent me and loved them
In the same way you’ve loved me.
24-26 Father, I want those you gave me
To be with me, right where I am,
So they can see my glory, the splendor you gave me,
Having loved me
Long before there ever was a world.
Righteous Father, the world has never known you,
But I have known you, and these disciples know
That you sent me on this mission.
I have made your very being known to them—
Who you are and what you do—
And continue to make it known,
So that your love for me
Might be in them
Exactly as I am in them.
INSIGHT
The word glory (or glorify) is very prominent in John’s gospel. In John 17 alone it’s used nine times. It’s derived from the base word doxa, which means “glory,” “honor,” or “praise.” Our word doxology (a short hymn of worship) comes from this term. In John, the word glory surfaces first in chapter 1, verse 14. The second time is in John 2:11 where at Cana we read that Jesus “revealed his glory” by turning water into wine. Through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, God was and is honored or glorified. - Arthur Jackson
The Greater Glory
By Mart DeHaan
In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. Luke 2:1
Caesar Augustus is remembered as the first and greatest of the Roman emperors. By political skill and military power he eliminated his enemies, expanded the empire, and lifted Rome from the clutter of rundown neighborhoods into a city of marble statues and temples. Adoring Roman citizens referred to Augustus as the divine father and savior of the human race. As his forty-year reign came to an end, his official last words were, “I found Rome a city of clay but left it a city of marble.” According to his wife, however, his last words were actually, “Have I played the part well? Then applaud as I exit.”
What Augustus didn’t know is that he’d been given a supporting role in a bigger story. In the shadow of his reign, the son of a carpenter was born to reveal something far greater than any Roman military victory, temple, stadium, or palace (Luke 2:1).
But who could have understood the glory Jesus prayed for on the night His countrymen demanded His crucifixion by Roman executioners? (John 17:4–5). Who could have foreseen the hidden wonder of a sacrifice that would be forever applauded in heaven and earth?
It’s quite a story. Our God found us chasing foolish dreams and fighting among ourselves. He left us singing together about an old rugged cross.
Father in heaven, please help us to see through and beyond the passing glory of everything but Your love.
The glory we need is the glory of the cross.
My Utmost for His Highest, by Oswald Chambers
Sunday, January 06, 2019
Worship
He moved from there to the mountain east of Bethel, and he pitched his tent with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east; there he built an altar to the Lord and called on the name of the Lord. —Genesis 12:8
Worship is giving God the best that He has given you. Be careful what you do with the best you have. Whenever you get a blessing from God, give it back to Him as a love-gift. Take time to meditate before God and offer the blessing back to Him in a deliberate act of worship. If you hoard it for yourself, it will turn into spiritual dry rot, as the manna did when it was hoarded (see Exodus 16:20). God will never allow you to keep a spiritual blessing completely for yourself. It must be given back to Him so that He can make it a blessing to others.
Bethel is the symbol of fellowship with God; Ai is the symbol of the world. Abram “pitched his tent” between the two. The lasting value of our public service for God is measured by the depth of the intimacy of our private times of fellowship and oneness with Him. Rushing in and out of worship is wrong every time— there is always plenty of time to worship God. Days set apart for quiet can be a trap, detracting from the need to have daily quiet time with God. That is why we must “pitch our tents” where we will always have quiet times with Him, however noisy our times with the world may be. There are not three levels of spiritual life— worship, waiting, and work. Yet some of us seem to jump like spiritual frogs from worship to waiting, and from waiting to work. God’s idea is that the three should go together as one. They were always together in the life of our Lord and in perfect harmony. It is a discipline that must be developed; it will not happen overnight.
WISDOM FROM OSWALD CHAMBERS
The emphasis to-day is placed on the furtherance of an organization; the note is, “We must keep this thing going.” If we are in God’s order the thing will go; if we are not in His order, it won’t. Conformed to His Image, 357 R
