Max Lucado Daily: WHAT MATTERS TO YOU MATTERS TO GOD
The first miracle of Jesus was at a wedding—no small event. For several days, there was gift-giving, speechmaking, food-eating, and wine-drinking. Hospitality was a sacred duty The absence of wine was a social embarrassment. Mary asks her son to help, and he tells her that his “time has not yet come.” But he changed his plan to meet the needs of his friends.
This miracle tells us that what matters to you matters to God. You are his child. So go ahead. Tell God what hurts. He won’t turn you away or think it’s silly. Hebrews 4:15-16 says, “For our high priest is able to understand our weaknesses…Let us, then, feel very sure that we can come before God’s throne where there is grace.” Does God care about the little things in our lives? You better believe it.
Read more He Still Moves Stones
Psalm 40
A David Psalm
40 1-3 I waited and waited and waited for God.
At last he looked; finally he listened.
He lifted me out of the ditch,
pulled me from deep mud.
He stood me up on a solid rock
to make sure I wouldn’t slip.
He taught me how to sing the latest God-song,
a praise-song to our God.
More and more people are seeing this:
they enter the mystery,
abandoning themselves to God.
4-5 Blessed are you who give yourselves over to God,
turn your backs on the world’s “sure thing,”
ignore what the world worships;
The world’s a huge stockpile
of God-wonders and God-thoughts.
Nothing and no one
comes close to you!
I start talking about you, telling what I know,
and quickly run out of words.
Neither numbers nor words
account for you.
6 Doing something for you, bringing something to you—
that’s not what you’re after.
Being religious, acting pious—
that’s not what you’re asking for.
You’ve opened my ears
so I can listen.
7-8 So I answered, “I’m coming.
I read in your letter what you wrote about me,
And I’m coming to the party
you’re throwing for me.”
That’s when God’s Word entered my life,
became part of my very being.
9-10 I’ve preached you to the whole congregation,
I’ve kept back nothing, God—you know that.
I didn’t keep the news of your ways
a secret, didn’t keep it to myself.
I told it all, how dependable you are, how thorough.
I didn’t hold back pieces of love and truth
For myself alone. I told it all,
let the congregation know the whole story.
11-12 Now God, don’t hold out on me,
don’t hold back your passion.
Your love and truth
are all that keeps me together.
When troubles ganged up on me,
a mob of sins past counting,
I was so swamped by guilt
I couldn’t see my way clear.
More guilt in my heart than hair on my head,
so heavy the guilt that my heart gave out.
13-15 Soften up, God, and intervene;
hurry and get me some help,
So those who are trying to kidnap my soul
will be embarrassed and lose face,
So anyone who gets a kick out of making me miserable
will be heckled and disgraced,
So those who pray for my ruin
will be booed and jeered without mercy.
16-17 But all who are hunting for you—
oh, let them sing and be happy.
Let those who know what you’re all about
tell the world you’re great and not quitting.
And me? I’m a mess. I’m nothing and have nothing:
make something of me.
You can do it; you’ve got what it takes—
but God, don’t put it off.
Our Daily Bread reading and devotion
Thursday, March 21, 2019
Today's Scripture & Insight: Ephesians 2:4-10
It wasn’t so long ago that you were mired in that old stagnant life of sin. You let the world, which doesn’t know the first thing about living, tell you how to live. You filled your lungs with polluted unbelief, and then exhaled disobedience. We all did it, all of us doing what we felt like doing, when we felt like doing it, all of us in the same boat. It’s a wonder God didn’t lose his temper and do away with the whole lot of us. Instead, immense in mercy and with an incredible love, he embraced us. He took our sin-dead lives and made us alive in Christ. He did all this on his own, with no help from us! Then he picked us up and set us down in highest heaven in company with Jesus, our Messiah.
7-10 Now God has us where he wants us, with all the time in this world and the next to shower grace and kindness upon us in Christ Jesus. Saving is all his idea, and all his work. All we do is trust him enough to let him do it. It’s God’s gift from start to finish! We don’t play the major role. If we did, we’d probably go around bragging that we’d done the whole thing! No, we neither make nor save ourselves. God does both the making and saving. He creates each of us by Christ Jesus to join him in the work he does, the good work he has gotten ready for us to do, work we had better be doing.
Insight
When Paul reminded his readers they were examples of God’s work in process (Ephesians 2:8–10), he was writing out of his own story. Trained in the law as a Pharisee, Paul described the kind of person he was before Jesus surprised him on the road to Damascus (Acts 22:1–5; 1 Timothy 1:12–15). Paul knew it was the work of God that transformed him from a violent advocate of Mosaic morality into someone who never got over the kindness of Jesus. He credited the grace and Spirit of Christ with replacing his moralistic passions (Ephesians 2:3) with a heart that reflected the mercy of the Savior who died for us (vv. 4–5; 5:1). By: Mart DeHaan
Hand Made for You
We are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. Ephesians 2:10
My grandmother was a talented seamstress who won contests in her native Texas. Throughout my life, she celebrated hallmark occasions with a hand-sewn gift. A burgundy mohair sweater for my high school graduation. A turquoise quilt for my marriage. I’d fold over a corner of each custom-crafted item to discover her signature tag reading, “Hand made for you by Munna.” With every embroidered word, I sensed my grandmother’s love for me and received a powerful statement of her faith in my future.
Paul wrote to the Ephesians of their purpose in this world, describing them as “God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works” (2:10). Here “handiwork” denotes a work of art or a masterpiece. Paul goes on to describe that God’s handiwork in creating us would result in our handiwork of creating good works—or expressions of our restored relationship with Jesus—for His glory in our world. We can never be saved by our own good works, but when God hand makes us for His purposes, He can use us to bring others toward His great love.
With her head bowed over her needle, my Munna hand made items to communicate her love for me and her passion that I discover my purpose on this planet. And with His fingers shaping the details of our days, God stitches His love and purposes in our hearts that we might experience Him for ourselves and demonstrate His handiwork to others. By Elisa Morgan
Today's Reflection
What has God created you to do? Who can you show His love to today?
My Utmost for His Highest, by Oswald Chambers
Thursday, March 21, 2019
Identified or Simply Interested?
I have been crucified with Christ… —Galatians 2:20
The inescapable spiritual need each of us has is the need to sign the death certificate of our sin nature. I must take my emotional opinions and intellectual beliefs and be willing to turn them into a moral verdict against the nature of sin; that is, against any claim I have to my right to myself. Paul said, “I have been crucified with Christ….” He did not say, “I have made a determination to imitate Jesus Christ,” or, “I will really make an effort to follow Him” —but— “I have been identified with Him in His death.” Once I reach this moral decision and act on it, all that Christ accomplished for me on the Cross is accomplished in me. My unrestrained commitment of myself to God gives the Holy Spirit the opportunity to grant to me the holiness of Jesus Christ.
“…it is no longer I who live….” My individuality remains, but my primary motivation for living and the nature that rules me are radically changed. I have the same human body, but the old satanic right to myself has been destroyed.
“…and the life which I now live in the flesh,” not the life which I long to live or even pray that I live, but the life I now live in my mortal flesh— the life which others can see, “I live by faith in the Son of God….” This faith was not Paul’s own faith in Jesus Christ, but the faith the Son of God had given to him (see Ephesians 2:8). It is no longer a faith in faith, but a faith that transcends all imaginable limits— a faith that comes only from the Son of God.
WISDOM FROM OSWALD CHAMBERS
We are only what we are in the dark; all the rest is reputation. What God looks at is what we are in the dark—the imaginations of our minds; the thoughts of our heart; the habits of our bodies; these are the things that mark us in God’s sight. The Love of God—The Ministry of the Unnoticed, 669 L
A Word with You, by Ron Hutchcraft
Thursday, March 21, 2019
Getting Hammered - #8399
I was around a lot of construction people when we were building our Ministry Headquarters, and there's nothing that means more to a tradesman than his tools. The good old hammer is your basic, fundamental tool. And the capabilities of a hammer literally run the gamut. I've seen men make things with a hammer. But, then again, I've seen men break things with a hammer, too!
I'm Ron Hutchcraft, and I want to have A Word With You today about "Getting Hammered."
Hammers have the same effects on people that they do on things. Not the kind of hammer that builders use; I'm talking about the difficulties of life that hammer us. Just as an object cannot remain the same when it gets a hammer applied to it, you can't remain the same when you're being hit by one of life's hammers.
If it is one of those times when you're feeling pretty pounded, pretty beaten on, well our word for today from the Word of God may help you at least see it from God's perspective. 1 Peter 1:6 addresses the reality that "you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials." Then verse 7 reveals one big reason why God sends or allows those trials. It says, "These have come so that your faith - of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire - may be proved genuine, and may result in praise, and glory, and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed."
The incredibly hot temperature of the gold refiner's fire isn't to melt the gold or destroy the gold. It's to burn away the junk, and that increases the value of the gold. Now if the trying time you're going through is actually one of God's hammers, you need to know this isn't to break you down. It's to make you more pure, more valuable, and more usable than ever before. God's hammer is to build you into something better, not to tear you apart.
But whether or not God's hammer makes you or breaks you isn't really up to God. That part's up to you and how you respond when you're being hammered. Remember, no one can get hit with one of life's hammers and remain the same. It will change you. How it changes you is up to you. Getting hammered will make you either harder than you were before or softer than ever. 1 Corinthians 1:4 says that God "comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God."
If you surrender the hammering and the hurt to God, He will recycle it into a sensitivity and a compassion in you that will make you one of His great wounded healers. You can be an agent of healing in a hurting world because you know what the hurt feels like. But if you hang onto the hurt, that hammering will destroy you as bitterness and resentment start to poison and harden your heart.
This hammering will either leave you closer to God than ever before or farther from God. You choose. Because Job chose to hang onto God's hand even when what God was doing seemed to make no sense, he could say that as a result of his trials, "My ears had heard of You but now my eyes have seen You" (Job 42:5).
If you turn to God in the hard time rather than from God, you will experience His love and His power as never before and see Him bigger than you ever saw Him.
You have one other choice when you're getting hammered - will it make you more about yourself or more about others? The natural tendency is to go into survival mode and be "all about me." But that will sink you emotionally as you turn inward on yourself. But if you make yourself reach out to others in need when you're struggling yourself, it's going to have a wonderful healing effect.
If you're being hammered, make the choice that will make you better, not bitter; a softer heart, not a harder one; getting closer to God, not farther away; focusing on others, not on yourself. Many beautiful things were built with a hammer. Would you let your life be one of them?
