Max Lucado Daily: FOR GOD’S PURPOSE
In 1965 Howard Rutledge parachuted into North Vietnam and spent the next several years in a prison in Hanoi, locked in a filthy cell, breathing stale, rotten air, trying to keep his sanity. Few of us will ever face the conditions of a POW camp. Yet, to one degree or another, we all spend time behind bars. After half-a-century of marriage, my friend’s wife began to lose her memory. A young mother just called, diagnosed with lupus. Why would God permit such imprisonment? To what purpose?
Jeremiah 30 in verse 24 promises, “The Lord will not turn back until He has executed and accomplished the intents of His mind.” This season in which you find yourself may puzzle you, but it doesn’t bewilder God. He will use it for His purpose. You will get through this.
Romans 8:1-21
With the arrival of Jesus, the Messiah, that fateful dilemma is resolved. Those who enter into Christ’s being-here-for-us no longer have to live under a continuous, low-lying black cloud. A new power is in operation. The Spirit of life in Christ, like a strong wind, has magnificently cleared the air, freeing you from a fated lifetime of brutal tyranny at the hands of sin and death.
3-4 God went for the jugular when he sent his own Son. He didn’t deal with the problem as something remote and unimportant. In his Son, Jesus, he personally took on the human condition, entered the disordered mess of struggling humanity in order to set it right once and for all. The law code, weakened as it always was by fractured human nature, could never have done that.
The law always ended up being used as a Band-Aid on sin instead of a deep healing of it. And now what the law code asked for but we couldn’t deliver is accomplished as we, instead of redoubling our own efforts, simply embrace what the Spirit is doing in us.
5-8 Those who think they can do it on their own end up obsessed with measuring their own moral muscle but never get around to exercising it in real life. Those who trust God’s action in them find that God’s Spirit is in them—living and breathing God! Obsession with self in these matters is a dead end; attention to God leads us out into the open, into a spacious, free life. Focusing on the self is the opposite of focusing on God. Anyone completely absorbed in self ignores God, ends up thinking more about self than God. That person ignores who God is and what he is doing. And God isn’t pleased at being ignored.
9-11 But if God himself has taken up residence in your life, you can hardly be thinking more of yourself than of him. Anyone, of course, who has not welcomed this invisible but clearly present God, the Spirit of Christ, won’t know what we’re talking about. But for you who welcome him, in whom he dwells—even though you still experience all the limitations of sin—you yourself experience life on God’s terms. It stands to reason, doesn’t it, that if the alive-and-present God who raised Jesus from the dead moves into your life, he’ll do the same thing in you that he did in Jesus, bringing you alive to himself? When God lives and breathes in you (and he does, as surely as he did in Jesus), you are delivered from that dead life. With his Spirit living in you, your body will be as alive as Christ’s!
12-14 So don’t you see that we don’t owe this old do-it-yourself life one red cent. There’s nothing in it for us, nothing at all. The best thing to do is give it a decent burial and get on with your new life. God’s Spirit beckons. There are things to do and places to go!
15-17 This resurrection life you received from God is not a timid, grave-tending life. It’s adventurously expectant, greeting God with a childlike “What’s next, Papa?” God’s Spirit touches our spirits and confirms who we really are. We know who he is, and we know who we are: Father and children. And we know we are going to get what’s coming to us—an unbelievable inheritance! We go through exactly what Christ goes through. If we go through the hard times with him, then we’re certainly going to go through the good times with him!
18-21 That’s why I don’t think there’s any comparison between the present hard times and the coming good times. The created world itself can hardly wait for what’s coming next. Everything in creation is being more or less held back. God reins it in until both creation and all the creatures are ready and can be released at the same moment into the glorious times ahead. Meanwhile, the joyful anticipation deepens.
Our Daily Bread reading and devotion
Thursday, May 21, 2020
Today's Scripture & Insight:
Isaiah 2:1–4
This is what Isaiah son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem:
2 In the last days
the mountain of the Lord’s temple will be established
as the highest of the mountains;
it will be exalted above the hills,
and all nations will stream to it.
3 Many peoples will come and say,
“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
to the temple of the God of Jacob.
He will teach us his ways,
so that we may walk in his paths.”
The law will go out from Zion,
the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
4 He will judge between the nations
and will settle disputes for many peoples.
They will beat their swords into plowshares
and their spears into pruning hooks.
Nation will not take up sword against nation,
nor will they train for war anymore.
Insight
Against the backdrop of gross injustice, moral failure, and spiritual unfaithfulness, Isaiah warned a guilty Judah of God’s judgment (Isaiah 1–12) through the Babylonian exile (39:6–7). Isaiah also prophesied of God’s grace (chs. 40–55) and a future restoration for Judah (chs. 11, 56–66). In Isaiah 12, we’re given a glimpse of Judah’s glorious future. Jerusalem will become the world’s most important city and in the midst of the city will be a magnificent temple. World peace will become a reality. Instead of fighting the Jews, the gentile nations will stream to Jerusalem to seek God. God’s people will be “a light for the Gentiles, that [His] salvation may reach to the ends of the earth” (49:6). Micah, a contemporary of Isaiah (735–725 BC), prophesied a similar vision in Micah 4:1–3.
The Knife Angel
Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore. Isaiah 2:4
When knife crime rose across the United Kingdom, the British Ironwork Centre came up with an idea. Working with local police forces, the Centre built and placed two hundred deposit boxes around the country and ran an amnesty campaign. One hundred thousand knives were anonymously surrendered, some still with blood on their blades. These were then shipped to artist Alfie Bradley, who blunted them, inscribed some with the names of young knife-crime victims, plus messages of regret from ex-offenders. All 100,000 weapons were then welded together to create the Knife Angel—a twenty-seven-foot-high angelic sculpture with shimmering steel wings.
When I stood before the Knife Angel, I wondered how many thousands of wounds had been prevented by its existence. I thought too of Isaiah’s vision of the new heavens and earth (Isaiah 65:17), a place where children won’t die young (v. 20) or grow up in crime-breeding poverty (vv. 22–23), a place where knife crime is no more because all swords have been reshaped and given more creative purposes (2:4).
That new world isn’t yet here, but we are to pray and serve until its arrival (Matthew 6:10). In its own way, the Knife Angel gives us a glimpse of God’s promised future. Swords become plow shares. Weapons become artworks. What other redemptive projects can we conjure up to glimpse that future a little more? By: Sheridan Voysey
Reflect & Pray
What inspires you to combat evil? How can you work for peace in your community?
Jesus, we can’t wait until the world is at peace under Your reign. Move us by Your Spirit to help see Your kingdom come in our communities.
My Utmost for His Highest, by Oswald Chambers
Thursday, May 21, 2020
Having God’s “Unreasonable” Faith
Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you. —Matthew 6:33
When we look at these words of Jesus, we immediately find them to be the most revolutionary that human ears have ever heard. “…seek first the kingdom of God….” Even the most spiritually-minded of us argue the exact opposite, saying, “But I must live; I must make a certain amount of money; I must be clothed; I must be fed.” The great concern of our lives is not the kingdom of God but how we are going to take care of ourselves to live. Jesus reversed the order by telling us to get the right relationship with God first, maintaining it as the primary concern of our lives, and never to place our concern on taking care of the other things of life.
“…do not worry about your life…” (Matthew 6:25). Our Lord pointed out that from His standpoint it is absolutely unreasonable for us to be anxious, worrying about how we will live. Jesus did not say that the person who takes no thought for anything in his life is blessed— no, that person is a fool. But Jesus did teach that His disciple must make his relationship with God the dominating focus of his life, and to be cautiously carefree about everything else in comparison to that. In essence, Jesus was saying, “Don’t make food and drink the controlling factor of your life, but be focused absolutely on God.” Some people are careless about what they eat and drink, and they suffer for it; they are careless about what they wear, having no business looking the way they do; they are careless with their earthly matters, and God holds them responsible. Jesus is saying that the greatest concern of life is to place our relationship with God first, and everything else second.
It is one of the most difficult, yet critical, disciplines of the Christian life to allow the Holy Spirit to bring us into absolute harmony with the teaching of Jesus in these verses.
WISDOM FROM OSWALD CHAMBERS
God engineers circumstances to see what we will do. Will we be the children of our Father in heaven, or will we go back again to the meaner, common-sense attitude? Will we stake all and stand true to Him? “Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life.” The crown of life means I shall see that my Lord has got the victory after all, even in me. The Highest Good—The Pilgrim’s Song Book, 530 L
Bible in a Year: 1 Chronicles 13-15; John 7:1-27
A Word with You, by Ron Hutchcraft
Thursday, May 21, 2020
When it Looks Like You Should Turn Back - #8704
When you drive into Texas, these signs say, "Don't mess with Texas." One reason might be the weather in Texas! And, you know, if you just watch the national weather on any given day from spring into the fall and you're likely to see the color red. That's for severe thunderstorms or possible tornadoes. Our son and daughter-in-law and granddaughter were driving across the Texas panhandle one spring day, and sure enough, they drove into one of those really nasty weather fronts. Amarillo, Texas, was behind them. New Mexico was ahead of them. The sky was featuring that special shade of tornadic green. The rain was torrential and the clouds were growing those little fingers, you know, that sometimes turn into tornadoes. Our son decided it was time to call his brother and see what the Internet was saying about this weather. His question: "Shall I keep going or turn back to Amarillo?" The answer: "Just keep going, man. Twenty more miles and you'll be in bright sunshine!"
I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "When it Looks Like You Should Turn Back."
It could be that your journey right now is taking you through a very dark and stormy time. There's danger, there's apprehension, there's questions about which way to go, and turning back or bailing out looks like it might be the way to go. But your Father in heaven can see the whole road, and today He's saying to you, "Just keep going. Drive a few more miles and you'll start to see the sunshine!"
The danger is that you'll turn back just before the breakthrough; just before the answer to your prayers. There's a vivid, real-life example of what that looks like in our word for today from the Word of God in Matthew 14, beginning with verse 24. Jesus has sent His disciples on ahead of Him. They're crossing the unpredictable Sea of Galilee in a boat when suddenly their boat is being "buffeted by the waves because the wind was against it." "Buffeted by the waves." Does that sound like a fair description of how you feel right now?
The Bible goes on to tell us that "during the fourth watch of the night Jesus went out to them, walking on the lake. When the disciples saw Him walking on the lake, they were terrified ... But Jesus immediately said to them: 'Take courage! It is I. Don't be afraid.' 'Lord, if it's You,' Peter replied, 'tell me to come to You on the water.' 'Come,' He said. Then Peter got down out of the boat, walked on the water and came toward Jesus. But when he saw the wind, he was afraid and, beginning to sink, he cried out, 'Lord, save me!' Immediately Jesus reached out His hand and caught him. 'You of little faith,' He said, 'why did you doubt?'"
You started down the road you're on by faith, counting on Jesus to get you there. And, like Peter, the wind and the rain and the waves are brutal right now. So you've stopped focusing on Jesus and you started focusing on your fears or what you can do, and you're sinking. People criticize Peter for losing faith, but excuse me, he's the only one who even had enough faith to even get out of the boat. But, sadly, it was what I call "halfway there" faith; enough faith to get you halfway there.
It's not the storm that's going to sink you. It's going to be "halfway there" faith. If you decide what you're going to do based on the situation, based on what you can see, based on what you're feeling, you'll almost surely make a bad decision. It was Jesus who got you out of the boat in the first place. It was Jesus who helped you walk on water this far. And it will be Jesus who gets you the rest of the way there. So get your focus back on Him! His word is, "Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up" (Galatians 6:9).
It's dark now, I know. But don't doubt in the darkness what God told you in the light. He knows what you're going through, but He also knows what's ahead. And listen, He's telling you, "Keep going, man! Before long, you'll be in the sunshine!"