Max Lucado Daily: YOU HAVE A SPIRITUAL INHERITANCE
Let’s talk about your inheritance! As a child of God, you have one, you know. You aren’t merely a slave, servant, or saint of God. No, you have legal right to the family business and fortune of heaven. The will has been executed. The courts have been satisfied. Your spiritual account has been funded. He “has blessed you with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 1:3).
Need more patience? It’s yours. Need more joy? Request it. Running low on wisdom? God has plenty. You will never exhaust his resources. At no time does he wave away your prayer with I’m tired, or weary, or depleted. God is wealthy in love and hope, overflowing in wisdom.
“No one has seen, no ear has heard, and no mind has imagined what God has prepared for those who love him!” (1 Corinthians 2:9). Because God’s promises are unbreakable our hope is unshakable!
2 Chronicles 16
But in the thirty-sixth year of Asa’s reign, Baasha king of Israel attacked. He started it by building a fort at Ramah and closing the border between Israel and Judah to keep Asa king of Judah from leaving or entering.
2-3 Asa took silver and gold from the treasuries of The Temple of God and the royal palace and sent it to Ben-Hadad, king of Aram who lived in Damascus, with this message: “Let’s make a treaty like the one between our fathers. I’m showing my good faith with this gift of silver and gold. Break your deal with Baasha king of Israel so he’ll quit fighting against me.”
4-5 Ben-Hadad went along with King Asa and sent his troops against the towns of Israel. They sacked Ijon, Dan, Abel Maim, and all the store-cities of Naphtali. When Baasha got the report, he quit fortifying Ramah.
6 Then King Asa issued orders to his people in Judah to haul away the logs and stones Baasha had used in the fortification of Ramah and used them himself to fortify Geba and Mizpah.
7-9 Just after that, Hanani the seer came to Asa king of Judah and said, “Because you went for help to the king of Aram and didn’t ask God for help, you’ve lost a victory over the army of the king of Aram. Didn’t the Ethiopians and Libyans come against you with superior forces, completely outclassing you with their chariots and cavalry? But you asked God for help and he gave you the victory. God is always on the alert, constantly on the lookout for people who are totally committed to him. You were foolish to go for human help when you could have had God’s help. Now you’re in trouble—one round of war after another.”
10 At that, Asa lost his temper. Angry, he put Hanani in the stocks. At the same time Asa started abusing some of the people.
11-14 A full account of Asa is written in The Chronicles of the Kings of Judah. In the thirty-ninth year of his reign Asa came down with a severe case of foot infection. He didn’t ask God for help, but went instead to the doctors. Then Asa died; he died in the forty-first year of his reign. They buried him in a mausoleum that he had built for himself in the City of David. They laid him in a crypt full of aromatic oils and spices. Then they had a huge bonfire in his memory.
Our Daily Bread reading and devotion
Tuesday, February 18, 2020
Today's Scripture & Insight:
Psalm 23
A psalm of David.
1 The Lord is my shepherd,t I lack nothing.u
2 He makes me lie down in green pastures,
he leads me beside quiet waters,v
3 he refreshes my soul.w
He guides mex along the right pathsy
for his name’s sake.z
4 Even though I walk
through the darkest valley,a a
I will fear no evil,b
for you are with me;c
your rod and your staff,
they comfort me.
5 You prepare a tabled before me
in the presence of my enemies.
You anoint my head with oil;e
my cupf overflows.
6 Surely your goodness and loveg will follow me
all the days of my life,
and I will dwell in the house of the Lord
forever.
Insight
David isn’t the first to use the shepherd-sheep metaphor. Hundreds of years before, Jacob referred to God as his shepherd (Genesis 48:15). Later, the prophets too used this metaphor (Isaiah 40:11; Ezekiel 34:12, 31).
Psalm 23 is undeniably the best-known psalm. We traditionally view it with the assuring and comforting picture of the Lord as the Shepherd-Pastor. But in the ancient Near East, the shepherd metaphor is also used to denote the Shepherd–King who provides for (vv. 1–3) and protects His people (vv. 4–6). Other psalms also speak of God as a shepherd leading His people (28:9; 78:52–53; 79:13; 80:1; 95:7; 100:3).
In the New Testament, Jesus is called our Good Shepherd (John 10:11), the Great Shepherd (Hebrews 13:20), and the Chief Shepherd (1 Peter 5:4).
Unimaginable
Though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil, for you are with me. Psalm 23:4
art Millard penned a megahit in 2001 when he wrote, “I Can Only Imagine.” The song pictures how amazing it will be to be in Christ’s presence. Millard’s lyrics offered comfort to our family that next year when our seventeen-year-old daughter, Melissa, died in a car accident and we imagined what it was like for her to be in God’s presence.
But imagine spoke to me in a different way in the days following Mell’s death. As fathers of Melissa’s friends approached me, full of concern and pain, they said, “I can’t imagine what you’re going through.”
Their expressions were helpful, showing that they were grappling with our loss in an empathetic way—finding it unimaginable.
David pinpointed the depth of great loss when he described walking through “the darkest valley” (Psalm 23:4). The death of a loved one certainly is that, and we sometimes have no idea how we’re going to navigate the darkness. We can’t imagine ever being able to come out on the other side.
But as God promised to be with us in our darkest valley now, He also provides great hope for the future by assuring us that beyond the valley we’ll be in His presence. For the believer, to be “away from the body” means being present with Him (2 Corinthians 5:8). That can help us navigate the unimaginable as we imagine our future reunion with Him and others. By: Dave Branon
Reflect & Pray
What’s the best thing you can say to friends who’ve suffered the loss of someone they loved? How can you prepare for those times?
Thank You, God, for being with us even in the darkest valley as we imagine the glories of heaven.
For hope, read Life After Loss at discoveryseries.org/cb131.
My Utmost for His Highest, by Oswald Chambers
Tuesday, February 18, 2020
Taking the Initiative Against Despair
Rise, let us be going. —Matthew 26:46
In the Garden of Gethsemane, the disciples went to sleep when they should have stayed awake, and once they realized what they had done it produced despair. The sense of having done something irreversible tends to make us despair. We say, “Well, it’s all over and ruined now; what’s the point in trying anymore.” If we think this kind of despair is an exception, we are mistaken. It is a very ordinary human experience. Whenever we realize we have not taken advantage of a magnificent opportunity, we are apt to sink into despair. But Jesus comes and lovingly says to us, in essence, “Sleep on now. That opportunity is lost forever and you can’t change that. But get up, and let’s go on to the next thing.” In other words, let the past sleep, but let it sleep in the sweet embrace of Christ, and let us go on into the invincible future with Him.
There will be experiences like this in each of our lives. We will have times of despair caused by real events in our lives, and we will be unable to lift ourselves out of them. The disciples, in this instance, had done a downright unthinkable thing— they had gone to sleep instead of watching with Jesus. But our Lord came to them taking the spiritual initiative against their despair and said, in effect, “Get up, and do the next thing.” If we are inspired by God, what is the next thing? It is to trust Him absolutely and to pray on the basis of His redemption.
Never let the sense of past failure defeat your next step.
WISDOM FROM OSWALD CHAMBERS
The great thing about faith in God is that it keeps a man undisturbed in the midst of disturbance. Notes on Isaiah, 1376 R
A Word with You, by Ron Hutchcraft
Tuesday, February 18, 2020
The Verdict and the Penalty Are Already In - #8637
Americans kind of are trial junkies. I mean, there's like whole TV channels, you know, devoted to watching trials. Many of us are fascinated with high-profile trials that will sometimes headline our news. Legal proceedings seem to grind on for months, if not years, and then there are weeks of hotly contested testimony. Then suddenly it's in the hands of the jury. I've certainly checked the news to see if the verdict was in on some prominent trials. Then, after all those months, it's suddenly over. In a moment, the verdict is in. When the verdict is guilty, there is one more decision to be announced - the penalty. In some terrible cases, the penalty has been death.
I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "The Verdict and the Penalty Are Already In."
There's one verdict, and one sentence we don't have to wait for - yours and mine. The verdict and the penalty are already in. Not from a jury, but from the Judge. The Judge we all face - God Himself. Deep down inside, I think we know that on the other side of our last heartbeat, which God decides by the way, we'll face our Creator. The Bible gives us a sobering warning about that. It says, "Prepare to meet your God" (Amos 4:12). And the Bible tells you how to do that.
But first you have to understand the verdict and the sentence we all face; church folks and unchurched folks, nice folks and nasty folks, rich and poor, folks from every religion. In God's own words, "we all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23). In other words, no one is good enough to measure up to God's holiness. No one's good enough to go to heaven. So the verdict is in - guilty; guilty of breaking the laws of God, guilty of defying God by running a life that He was supposed to run.
The penalty is in, too. God wastes no words. He leaves no loopholes when He announces in Romans 6:23, "The wages of sin is death." Spiritually speaking, every one of us deserves to be on Death Row. The death the Bible talks about is not something about your body. It's about your soul. It's about being separated from God throughout your life on earth and then horribly separated from Him forever, because He's a holy God and I'm anything but holy.
You already know what living away from Him on earth is like. You're missing the love that you were made for, you've got a soul that's always restless and never satisfied, a life that may be full but it's not fulfilling, and there's incurable emptiness deep down inside. But eternity without Him, well that's so much worse. It is, in fact, hell.
But John 3:16-18, our word for today from the Word of God, reveal the greatest news you could ever hear. You ready? "God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life." Why? Because Jesus did all the dying for all the sinning you and I have ever done! Then the Bible says that you and I are in one of two groups: "Whoever believes in Jesus," the Bible says, "is not condemned, but whoever does not believe in Him stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God's one and only Son."
There it is: condemned or pardoned, guilty or forgiven, heaven or hell. You choose by whether or not you pin all your hopes on Jesus as the only One who can save you, because He's the only One who died to save you from God's death penalty.
If you've never given yourself to Him, please, would you do it today. Don't wait to accept God's pardon. Some people have waited too long. Every day you put this off, you risk going into eternity unforgiven and lost. Let this be the day you tell Jesus, "I'm pinning all my hopes on what You did when You died for my sins and walked out of your grave under your own power."
And if you'll get to our website, you will have there right in front of you the steps to beginning this relationship with God. It's ANewStory.com. This could be the day your hell is cancelled and your heaven is guaranteed.