Max Lucado Daily: A MODEL OF SERVANTHOOD
In the hallway of my memory hangs a photograph. It’s a picture of two people— a man and a woman in the seventh decade of life. The man lies in a hospital bed in the living room, not in a hospital room. His body, for all practical purposes, is useless. Muscles have been ravaged by ALS. And even though his body is ineffective, his eyes scan the room for his partner, a woman whose age is concealed by her youthful vigor.
She willingly goes about taking care of her husband. With unswerving loyalty she does what she’s done for the past two years: shave him, bathe him, feed him, comb his hair, and brush his teeth.
On the day we buried my father, I thanked my mom for modeling the servant spirit of Christ– quiet servanthood.
Psalm 95
Come, let’s shout praises to God,
raise the roof for the Rock who saved us!
Let’s march into his presence singing praises,
lifting the rafters with our hymns!
3-5 And why? Because God is the best,
High King over all the gods.
In one hand he holds deep caves and caverns,
in the other hand grasps the high mountains.
He made Ocean—he owns it!
His hands sculpted Earth!
6-7 So come, let us worship: bow before him,
on your knees before God, who made us!
Oh yes, he’s our God,
and we’re the people he pastures, the flock he feeds.
7-11 Drop everything and listen, listen as he speaks:
“Don’t turn a deaf ear as in the Bitter Uprising,
As on the day of the Wilderness Test,
when your ancestors turned and put me to the test.
For forty years they watched me at work among them,
as over and over they tried my patience.
And I was provoked—oh, was I provoked!
‘Can’t they keep their minds on God for five minutes?
Do they simply refuse to walk down my road?’
Exasperated, I exploded,
‘They’ll never get where they’re headed,
never be able to sit down and rest.’”
Our Daily Bread reading and devotion
Monday, October 07, 2019
Today's Scripture & Insight:
Genesis 38:16–26
Not realizing that she was his daughter-in-law, he went over to her by the roadside and said, “Come now, let me sleep with you.”
“And what will you give me to sleep with you?” she asked.
17 “I’ll send you a young goat from my flock,” he said.
“Will you give me something as a pledge until you send it?” she asked.
18 He said, “What pledge should I give you?”
“Your seal and its cord, and the staff in your hand,” she answered. So he gave them to her and slept with her, and she became pregnant by him. 19 After she left, she took off her veil and put on her widow’s clothes again.
20 Meanwhile Judah sent the young goat by his friend the Adullamite in order to get his pledge back from the woman, but he did not find her. 21 He asked the men who lived there, “Where is the shrine prostitute who was beside the road at Enaim?”
“There hasn’t been any shrine prostitute here,” they said.
22 So he went back to Judah and said, “I didn’t find her. Besides, the men who lived there said, ‘There hasn’t been any shrine prostitute here.’”
23 Then Judah said, “Let her keep what she has, or we will become a laughingstock. After all, I did send her this young goat, but you didn’t find her.”
24 About three months later Judah was told, “Your daughter-in-law Tamar is guilty of prostitution, and as a result she is now pregnant.”
Judah said, “Bring her out and have her burned to death!”
25 As she was being brought out, she sent a message to her father-in-law. “I am pregnant by the man who owns these,” she said. And she added, “See if you recognize whose seal and cord and staff these are.”
26 Judah recognized them and said, “She is more righteous than I, since I wouldn’t give her to my son Shelah.” And he did not sleep with her again.
Insight
There isn’t a Hebrew word that directly translates hypocrite, but the Greek word hypokrites is used in the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament) to render the word godless. The word hypokrites actually means “play actor.” It was a reference to the fact that Greek actors played their parts behind masks—implying that a hypocrite is one who deceives by masking their true intentions. By: Bill Crowder
God’s Heart for Hypocrites
She is more righteous than I. Genesis 38:26
“I’d be very disappointed if one of our team members did that,” said a cricket player, referring to a South African cricketer who’d cheated in a match in 2016. But only two years later, that same player was caught in a nearly identical scandal.
Few things rankle us more than hypocrisy. But in the story of Judah in Genesis 38, Judah’s hypocritical behavior nearly had deadly consequences. After two of his sons died soon after marrying Tamar, Judah had quietly abandoned his duty to provide for her needs (vv. 8–11). In desperation, Tamar disguised herself by wearing a prostitute’s veil, and Judah slept with her (vv. 15–16).
Yet when Judah learned that his widowed daughter-in-law was pregnant, his reaction was murderous. “Bring her out and have her burned to death!” he demanded (v. 24). But Tamar had proof that Judah was the father (v. 25).
Judah could have denied the truth. Instead he admitted his hypocrisy, and also accepted his responsibility to care for her, saying, “She is more righteous than I” (v. 26).
And God wove even this dark chapter of Judah and Tamar’s story into His story of our redemption. Tamar’s children (vv. 29–30) would become ancestors of Jesus (Matthew 1:2–3).
Why is Genesis 38 in the Bible? One reason is because it’s the story of our hypocritical human hearts—and of God’s heart of love, grace, and mercy. By: Tim Gustafson
Reflect & Pray
How do you react when you become aware of your hypocrisy? What would happen if we all became truly transparent with each other?
Help me to see, Father, that at the heart of the matter, we’re all hypocrites who need Your forgiveness.
My Utmost for His Highest, by Oswald Chambers
Monday, October 07, 2019
The Nature of Reconciliation
He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. —2 Corinthians 5:21
Sin is a fundamental relationship— it is not wrong doing, but wrong being— it is deliberate and determined independence from God. The Christian faith bases everything on the extreme, self-confident nature of sin. Other faiths deal with sins— the Bible alone deals with sin. The first thing Jesus Christ confronted in people was the heredity of sin, and it is because we have ignored this in our presentation of the gospel that the message of the gospel has lost its sting and its explosive power.
The revealed truth of the Bible is not that Jesus Christ took on Himself our fleshly sins, but that He took on Himself the heredity of sin that no man can even touch. God made His own Son “to be sin” that He might make the sinner into a saint. It is revealed throughout the Bible that our Lord took on Himself the sin of the world through identification with us, not through sympathy for us. He deliberately took on His own shoulders, and endured in His own body, the complete, cumulative sin of the human race. “He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us…” and by so doing He placed salvation for the entire human race solely on the basis of redemption. Jesus Christ reconciled the human race, putting it back to where God designed it to be. And now anyone can experience that reconciliation, being brought into oneness with God, on the basis of what our Lord has done on the cross.
A man cannot redeem himself— redemption is the work of God, and is absolutely finished and complete. And its application to individual people is a matter of their own individual action or response to it. A distinction must always be made between the revealed truth of redemption and the actual conscious experience of salvation in a person’s life.
WISDOM FROM OSWALD CHAMBERS
Faith never knows where it is being led, but it loves and knows the One Who is leading. My Utmost for His Highest, March 19, 761 L
A Word with You, by Ron Hutchcraft
Monday, October 07, 2019
One "Unloseable" Hope - #8541
The train left Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka, at 7:30 in the morning, headed for a popular resort area along the Indian Ocean. The train never made it. It was suddenly hit by this massive wall of water. It was a killer tsunami. It had devastated much of South Asia that day. The force of the waves actually tore the wheels off of some cars and leveled the train in this grove of palm trees. In one of those countless heart-wrenching scenes that come out of scenes like a tsunami, one young man at the train site wept in the arms of his friends as the body of his girlfriend was buried. He spoke out to his sweetheart who had died on that train: "We met in university. Is this the fate we hoped for?" Then, as he began to sob even more, he said, "My darling, you were the only hope for me." Tragic picture!
I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "One 'Unloseable' Hope."
It's hard to think of a more devastating feeling than losing what you had put all your hopes in. Maybe that's a feeling you know if you've lost your health, or maybe like me - the love of your life, your job, your retirement. Maybe you've lost an anchor person in your life, or the thing you've invested so much in, the thing - or the person - that's sort of been the glue holding your life together. You know, I have friends who have been told by their marriage partner of decades, "I don't love you anymore." When I asked one of those friends how he's doing, he just said, "I'm crushed."
So many of us either lost, or will lose, someone or something that we've put a lot of our hopes in. Hope is snatched away by death, or divorce, or desertion, disease, disaster. Suddenly, our life is thrown into confusion and anxiety, even despair. What we need is something to put our hope in that's going to be "unloseable" - something that can't be touched by death or disease, or can't be touched by divorce or disaster; something that will never desert us. Actually, someone who will never desert us. Surprisingly, many people have discovered that in losing their source of hope, they finally found the one hope they could never lose. It could happen to you.
That hope is spelled out beautifully in Psalm 62, beginning with verse 1, our word for today from the Word of God. "My soul finds rest in God alone; my salvation comes from him. He alone is my rock and my salvation; he is my fortress; I will never be shaken...Find rest, O my soul, in God alone; my hope comes from him."
The only life-anchor, the only life-hope you can never lose is a personal love relationship with God and God alone. Not a religion, but a relationship. It's possible to have a lot of religion and totally miss the relationship with God that you were made for. Any hope we get from anyone or anything on earth is just an unsatisfying substitute for belonging to God. When you belong to Him and you know you do, your soul can finally, as the psalmist said, "rest." But until you're belonging to God, your soul is rest-less.
That unloseable relationship with God comes one way and only one, because we're away from the God we need so much - away by our choice, certainly not His. We've repeatedly chosen our way instead of His way and that's built this wall between us and God. A wall that God Himself acted to tear down by sending His only Son, Jesus, to pay for all our sins when He died on the cross.
And then He rose from His grave, came back to life so He could come into your life today. He loves you enough to have died for you. That's how much He wants you. But you've got to want Him bad enough to say, "I'm sorry for my sin, God. I don't want it to be this way anymore. I'm putting all my hope and all my trust in Your Son who gave His life so I could belong to You."
You know, our website is set up for just a moment like this where you need this information to know how to totally belong to Him and know that you do. And I hope you'll go to ANewStory.com today.
That hope you've lost and the emptiness you feel could actually lead you today to the hope you'll never lose. Because hope has a name, and His name is Jesus.