Max Lucado Daily: Atonement for Sins
Christ lived the life we could not live, and took the punishment we could not take, to offer the hope we cannot resist. Why? Jesus was angry enough to purge the temple, distraught enough to weep in public, winsome enough to attract kids, poor enough to sleep on dirt, responsible enough to care for his mother, tempted enough to know the smell of Satan. Why? Why would heaven's finest son endure earth's toughest pain? So you would know that he is able. . .able to to run to the cry of those who are being tempted, tested and tried.
Whatever you're facing, he knows how you feel. When you turn to him for help, he runs to you to help. Why? Because he has been there. He's not ashamed of you. Your actions don't bewilder him. Your tilted halo doesn't trouble him. So go to him!
From On Calvary's Hill
Psalm 36
A David Psalm
36 1-4 The God-rebel tunes in to sedition—
all ears, eager to sin.
He has no regard for God,
he stands insolent before him.
He has smooth-talked himself
into believing
That his evil
will never be noticed.
Words gutter from his mouth,
dishwater dirty.
Can’t remember when he
did anything decent.
Every time he goes to bed,
he fathers another evil plot.
When he’s loose on the streets,
nobody’s safe.
He plays with fire
and doesn’t care who gets burned.
5-6 God’s love is meteoric,
his loyalty astronomic,
His purpose titanic,
his verdicts oceanic.
Yet in his largeness
nothing gets lost;
Not a man, not a mouse,
slips through the cracks.
7-9 How exquisite your love, O God!
How eager we are to run under your wings,
To eat our fill at the banquet you spread
as you fill our tankards with Eden spring water.
You’re a fountain of cascading light,
and you open our eyes to light.
10-12 Keep on loving your friends;
do your work in welcoming hearts.
Don’t let the bullies kick me around,
the moral midgets slap me down.
Send the upstarts sprawling
flat on their faces in the mud.
Our Daily Bread reading and devotion
Saturday, March 16, 2019
Today's Scripture: 2 Samuel 23:13–17 (NIV)
One day during harvest, the Three parted from the Thirty and joined David at the Cave of Adullam. A squad of Philistines had set up camp in the Valley of Rephaim. While David was holed up in the Cave, the Philistines had their base camp in Bethlehem. David had a sudden craving and said, “Would I ever like a drink of water from the well at the gate of Bethlehem!” So the Three penetrated the Philistine lines, drew water from the well at the gate of Bethlehem, and brought it back to David. But David wouldn’t drink it; he poured it out as an offering to God, saying, “There is no way, God, that I’ll drink this! This isn’t mere water, it’s their life-blood—they risked their very lives to bring it!” So David refused to drink it.
This is the sort of thing that the Three did.
Insight
David had a group of elite soldiers collectively known as “the Thirty” (2 Samuel 23:13, 23–24) comprised of some thirty-seven “chief warriors” who led his army (v. 39). Totally loyal to David, they were credited as men God used to fulfill His purpose of making David king of the entire land of Israel (1 Chronicles 11:10–47). In 2 Samuel 23:13–17, David honored the devotion of three men (known as “the Three,” vv. 8, 13–19, 23) by not drinking the water they had risked their lives to obtain. “Instead, [David] poured it out before the Lord” (v. 16). David was not being callous. Rather, in deepest humility and gratefulness, he deemed this water as symbolically representing the blood of his three men (v. 17). Mindful that “the blood is the life,” David poured out the water as an offering to God (Deuteronomy 12:23–24), acknowledging that He—not David—was the one for whom the men should sacrifice their lives. By: K. T. Sim
More than a Symbol
In humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others. Philippians 2:3–4
On the verge of making team history, University of Iowa basketball star Jordan Bohannon intentionally missed the free throw that would have broken a twenty-five-year-old school record. Why? In 1993, days after Iowa’s Chris Street had made thirty-four free throws in a row, he lost his life in a car crash. Bohannon chose to honor Street’s memory by not breaking his record.
Bohannon showed a keen awareness of things more important than his own advancement. We see similar values in the life of the young warrior David. Hiding in a cave with his ragtag army, David longed for a drink from the well in his hometown of Bethlehem, but the dreaded Philistines occupied the area (2 Samuel 23:14–15).
In a stunning act of bravery, three of David’s warriors “broke through the Philistine lines,” got the water, and brought it to David. But David couldn’t bring himself to drink it. Instead, he “poured it out before the Lord,” saying, “Is it not the blood of men who went at the risk of their lives?” (vv. 16–17).
In a world that often rewards those who seize whatever they can grasp, how powerful acts of love and sacrifice can be! Such deeds are much more than mere symbols. By Tim Gustafson
Today's Reflection
Instead of advancing your own agenda, how can you celebrate someone else and their efforts? How do our acts of love reflect God’s own?
My Utmost for His Highest, by Oswald Chambers
Saturday, March 16, 2019
The Master Will Judge
We must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ… —2 Corinthians 5:10
Paul says that we must all, preachers and other people alike, “appear before the judgment seat of Christ.” But if you will learn here and now to live under the scrutiny of Christ’s pure light, your final judgment will bring you only delight in seeing the work God has done in you. Live constantly reminding yourself of the judgment seat of Christ, and walk in the knowledge of the holiness He has given you. Tolerating a wrong attitude toward another person causes you to follow the spirit of the devil, no matter how saintly you are. One carnal judgment of another person only serves the purposes of hell in you. Bring it immediately into the light and confess, “Oh, Lord, I have been guilty there.” If you don’t, your heart will become hardened through and through. One of the penalties of sin is our acceptance of it. It is not only God who punishes for sin, but sin establishes itself in the sinner and takes its toll. No struggling or praying will enable you to stop doing certain things, and the penalty of sin is that you gradually get used to it, until you finally come to the place where you no longer even realize that it is sin. No power, except the power that comes from being filled with the Holy Spirit, can change or prevent the inherent consequences of sin.
“If we walk in the light as He is in the light…” (1 John 1:7). For many of us, walking in the light means walking according to the standard we have set up for another person. The deadliest attitude of the Pharisees that we exhibit today is not hypocrisy but that which comes from unconsciously living a lie.
WISDOM FROM OSWALD CHAMBERS
Civilization is based on principles which imply that the passing moment is permanent. The only permanent thing is God, and if I put anything else as permanent, I become atheistic. I must build only on God (John 14:6). The Highest Good—Thy Great Redemption, 565 L
A Word with You, by Ron Hutchcraft
Putting Clean On Over Dirty - #8392
Tuesday, March 12, 2019
It was a simple order, "Get dressed." When Mom said it, our five-year-old grandson did what she asked. Moments later, he emerged from his room dressed for the day. That's good. It wasn't until he was undressing that night that Mom noticed a slight anomaly in how he had gotten dressed. He had two pairs of underwear on! When Mom asked him about it, he answered with a bemused look on his face: "Oh, I just put clean underwear on over the dirty underwear." Not good.
I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "Putting Clean On Over Dirty."
Unfortunately, that is an all too common practice among God's children that is. Instead of taking off some things in our life that are dirty, we keep those and just put some clean stuff over the dirty. It may make you feel better about the dirty stuff, it may be covered up from most people, but the dirty is still there. And you've got trouble with God.
There's a game all too many of us church folks play. It's described in Isaiah 29:13-15. It's our word for today from the Word of God where "The Lord says: 'These people come near to Me with their mouth and honor Me with their lips, but their hearts are far from Me ... Woe to those who go to great depths to hide their plans from the Lord, who do their work in darkness and think, 'Who sees us? Who will know?'" Of course, God knows. He's not impressed with all those Christian words we say and Christian meetings we go to and the Christian causes we support. He's interested in what's really going on in your heart, in the real you.
There are a lot of nice people who have some very not-nice things going on beneath the nice. Nice Christians who are poisoning their soul with pornography, seemingly unaware that Jesus is standing there all the time. Nice Christians who still have a serious problem with their temper, whose rage is so hurtful, but known only to a few. There are nice Christians who are hiding a pattern of abuse, or a heart full of bitterness, a life of lying, a relationship that our culture calls an affair but God calls adultery, a secret but sinful addiction. Maybe they're covering up an agenda of revenge, or sex outside of God's fence of marriage; so many secrets Christians cover with a layer of clean.
Maybe the lie we want to believe is that the good we put on over the bad somehow excuses or makes up for the bad. Not with a holy God. That's a lie that may stave off the judgment of your own conscience but it will only compound the judgment of God. And about it being a secret, Romans 2:16 describes the day "when God will judge men's secrets through Jesus Christ." If you're covering up sin with spiritual stuff, you are sponsoring an unholy coexistence that is an insult to a Savior who gave His life on the cross (it says) "so that we might die to sins", (1 Peter 2:24) not hide our sins.
In Ephesians 4, God commands us to "put off your old self" and "to be made new," to "put on the new self." It goes on to tell us to put off lying and put on truth, put off trash talk and put on uplifting talk, put off anger and bitterness and put on forgiveness and compassion, put off any kind of sexual immorality and put on purity.
So you are at a crossroads. God brought us together today to tell you that covering up your dirty with a layer of clean isn't going to cut it. It's self-deception. It's living a lie. It's defying God, and it's building up judgment. Don't you think it's time to come clean even if it hurts? It will hurt a whole lot more not to come clean. You know you're sick of that battle inside you. It's tearing you apart-the guilt, the fear of getting caught, the shame. And you know God is sick of this charade, too.
While God is speaking to you, while your heart is open to the truth, right now run to that cross where everything you're hiding was paid for with the blood of Jesus. If you've never been there to get the sins of your life forgiven, you could be clean today. Don't miss what He died for. Today tell Him, "Jesus, I'm yours. You're my only hope of forgiveness."
Go to our website. It's called ANewStory.com because it's where your new story could begin. The information is there that will help you belong to Jesus and know you do.
Leave that dirty stuff, once and for all, at the foot of His old rugged cross.
