Max Lucado Daily: Your Role Is to Trust - March 17, 2022
Some of us have written our own Bible verse from Popular Opinion, chapter one, verse one: “God helps those who help themselves.” We’ll fix ourselves, thank you. We’ll make up for our mistakes with contributions, our guilt with busyness. We’ll overcome our failures with hard work. We’ll find salvation the old-fashioned way: we’ll earn it!
Christ, in contrast, says to us, “Your role is to trust. Trust me to do what you can’t.”
By the way, you take similar steps of trust daily. You believe the chair will support you, so you set your weight on it. You trust the work of the light switch, so you flip it. You daily trust power you cannot see to do a work you cannot accomplish. Jesus invites you to do the same with him. But just him. Not another leader, not even yourself. Just Christ. Look to Jesus and believe.
Deuteronomy 25
When men have a legal dispute, let them go to court; the judges will decide between them, declaring one innocent and the other guilty. If the guilty one deserves punishment, the judge will have him lay himself down before him and lashed as many times as his crime deserves, but not more than forty. If you hit him more than forty times, you will degrade him to something less than human.
4 Don’t muzzle an ox while it is threshing.
5-6 When brothers are living together and one of them dies without having had a son, the widow of the dead brother shall not marry a stranger from outside the family; her husband’s brother is to come to her and marry her and do the brother-in-law’s duty by her. The first son that she bears shall be named after her dead husband so his name won’t die out in Israel.
7-10 But if the brother doesn’t want to marry his sister-in-law, she is to go to the leaders at the city gate and say, “My brother-in-law refuses to keep his brother’s name alive in Israel; he won’t agree to do the brother-in-law’s duty by me.” Then the leaders will call for the brother and confront him. If he stands there defiant and says, “I don’t want her,” his sister-in-law is to pull his sandal off his foot, spit in his face, and say, “This is what happens to the man who refuses to build up the family of his brother—his name in Israel will be Family-No-Sandal.”
11-12 When two men are in a fight and the wife of the one man, trying to rescue her husband, grabs the genitals of the man hitting him, you are to cut off her hand. Show no pity.
13-16 Don’t carry around with you two weights, one heavy and the other light, and don’t keep two measures at hand, one large and the other small. Use only one weight, a true and honest weight, and one measure, a true and honest measure, so that you will live a long time on the land that God, your God, is giving you. Dishonest weights and measures are an abomination to God, your God—all this corruption in business deals!
17-19 Don’t forget what Amalek did to you on the road after you left Egypt, how he attacked you when you were tired, barely able to put one foot in front of another, mercilessly cut off your stragglers, and had no regard for God. When God, your God, gives you rest from all the enemies that surround you in the inheritance-land God, your God, is giving you to possess, you are to wipe the name of Amalek from off the Earth. Don’t forget!
Our Daily Bread reading and devotion
Thursday, March 17, 2022
Jesus the Way to the Father
14 “Do not be worried and upset,” Jesus told them. “Believec in God and believe also in me. 2There are many rooms in my Father’s house, and I am going to prepare a place for you. I would not tell you this if it were not so.d 3And after I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to myself, so that you will be where I am. 4You know the way that leads to the place where I am going.”
Insight
John 13–17 is known as the Upper Room Discourse, so named because Jesus taught it on the very night of His arrest in the “large room upstairs” where he held the Passover meal with His disciples (Mark 14:12–15). Christ said He would soon leave them—those who would abandon, betray, and disown Him (Matthew 26:31; John 13:21, 38). Yet He comforted His disciples with the assurance of heaven and the promise of His return (14:1–3), the privilege and power of prayer (vv. 12–14), the indwelling and guiding presence of the Holy Spirit (vv. 16–17; 16:5–15), and His peace and ultimate victory (16:33). Jesus tenderly spoke of heaven as “my Father’s house” (14:2). Earlier, He spoke of it as the place where God reigns (Matthew 5:34). Just before He died, He spoke of it as “paradise” (Luke 23:43), meaning “an Eden—a place of blessedness.” By: K. T. Sim
Preparing a Place for Us
If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.
John 14:3
Our family was planning to get a puppy, so my eleven-year-old daughter researched for months. She knew what the dog should eat and how to introduce it to our new home—among myriad other details.
Turns out puppies do best, she told me, if they’re introduced to one room at a time. So we carefully prepared a spare bedroom. I’m sure there will still be surprises as we raise our new puppy, but my daughter’s delight-infused preparation couldn’t have been more thorough.
The way my daughter channeled her eager anticipation for a puppy into loving preparation reminded me of Christ’s longing to share life with His people and His promise to prepare a home for them. Nearing the end of His earthly ministry, Jesus urged His disciples to trust Him, saying, “You believe in God; believe also in me” (John 14:1). Then He promised to “prepare a place for [them] . . . that [they] also may be where [He is]” (v. 3).
The disciples would soon face trouble. But Jesus wanted them to know that He was at work to bring them home to Him.
I can’t help but delight in the careful, deliberate intent with which my daughter had prepared for our new puppy. But I can only imagine how much more our Savior is delighting in His own detailed preparation for each of His people to share eternal life with Him (v. 2). By: Adam Holz
Reflect & Pray
How do you feel knowing that Jesus is preparing a place for you in His Father’s house? How might hanging on to that hope give you strength or courage in difficult seasons?
Jesus, thank You for going to prepare a place for me. Help me to put my hope in You fully and not to be troubled by the struggles in this life that might tempt me to take my eyes off You.
My Utmost for His Highest, by Oswald Chambers
Thursday, March 17, 2022
The Servant’s Primary Goal
We make it our aim…to be well pleasing to Him. —2 Corinthians 5:9
“We make it our aim….” It requires a conscious decision and effort to keep our primary goal constantly in front of us. It means holding ourselves to the highest priority year in and year out; not making our first priority to win souls, or to establish churches, or to have revivals, but seeking only “to be well pleasing to Him.” It is not a lack of spiritual experience that leads to failure, but a lack of working to keep our eyes focused and on the right goal. At least once a week examine yourself before God to see if your life is measuring up to the standard He has for you. Paul was like a musician who gives no thought to audience approval, if he can only catch a look of approval from his Conductor.
Any goal we have that diverts us even to the slightest degree from the central goal of being “approved to God” (2 Timothy 2:15) may result in our rejection from further service for Him. When you discern where the goal leads, you will understand why it is so necessary to keep “looking unto Jesus” (Hebrews 12:2). Paul spoke of the importance of controlling his own body so that it would not take him in the wrong direction. He said, “I discipline my body and bring it into subjection, lest…I myself should become disqualified” (1 Corinthians 9:27).
I must learn to relate everything to the primary goal, maintaining it without interruption. My worth to God publicly is measured by what I really am in my private life. Is my primary goal in life to please Him and to be acceptable to Him, or is it something less, no matter how lofty it may sound?
Wisdom From Oswald Chambers
The Bible does not thrill; the Bible nourishes. Give time to the reading of the Bible and the recreating effect is as real as that of fresh air physically. Disciples Indeed, 387 R
Bible in a Year: Deuteronomy 30-31; Mark 15:1-25
A Word with You, by Ron Hutchcraft
Thursday, March 17, 2022
Family Flu - #9179
At our house, we call it clean juice. I think the official name is "hand sanitizer." Whatever it's called, I use it big-time for flu germs! Actually there was a flu outbreak that took place, and our hospital was overwhelmed. The next closest hospital was overwhelmed, too, by people from our town. And, boy, what did the pandemic do? Lots of clean juice.
That especially nasty flu season I'm thinking about was all over the country. In fact, in one major city, some hospitals had issued "bypass" warnings - bypass bringing any patients in here unless it's life-or-death. In another area, the hospital set up triage tents in the parking lot because their ER was so overrun with flu victims. Sounds familiar pandemic fans, huh?
Did I mention that flu was especially nasty? If someone in your family caught it, well, you could almost count on being next. Of course, that's the case with colds and lots of other contagious grungy too. Families are for sharing, right, including germs.
I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "Family Flu."
And it's not just flu germs that are for sharing. There are family germs that actually get passed from generation to generation. Moral viruses, character infections that somehow get transmitted from parent to child.
Sadly, the things that drove us crazy about our mom and dad - that maybe hurt us deeply - start popping up in us. Even though we said, "I will never be like that!" we are. And the sad part about family germs is that the infection that scars one generation passes down and scars another one.
A teenage guy complained to me one time about how he could do nine things right and one thing wrong, and his mother would just talk about the one, and she would criticize it. I asked him how his grandmother treated his mom. He had this dawning in his eyes. He said, "Wow! Like my mother treats me." Then he thought for a moment and he said, "Man, I think I'm starting to be the same way."
And so it goes. Control freaks beget control freaks. Negative produces negative, an angry parent - an angry child, who becomes an angry parent. Addictive behaviors, self-centeredness, a weakness for the opposite sex, self-pity, a wounding tongue - we hate it, and we do it.
That's not new. Even one of the writers of the Bible said: "I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do" (Romans 7:15). Who doesn't know that feeling? So much of the darkness is those family germs; actually, family sins. They're some of the toughest sins for us to see, and even tougher to change. In fact, if we could have changed, we would have changed by now.
That conflicted Bible writer concluded there was only one hope of a cure. He said, "Who will rescue me?" He couldn't save himself from himself. He knew it would take a rescuer. And he found it. He found Him. He said, "Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!" (Romans 7:24)
So many of us trapped in the chains of our dark side have found a powerful game-changer from the Bible. It's our word for today from the Word of God in 1 Peter 1:18-19, "...you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your forefathers." Wow! The chain of sin and hurt can be broken by supernatural intervention. It goes on to say, "You were redeemed...with the precious blood of Christ."
The moral diseases handed down through generations can be cured. But only one way - a blood cure. But not our blood - Jesus' blood. Freely given when He died on the cross to pay for every sin of our life and to rob it of its power to poison our lives any longer or the lives of the people we love. Talk about hope! When you've got Jesus, you can face that infectious darkness and say, "It stops here!" And replace a legacy of hurt with hope.
When you belong to Jesus, things no longer have to be like they've always been. He's a Life-Changer. You want a relationship with Him that can do this? How He can change your life? Visit our website. It's ANewStory.com. Because when you get to Jesus' cross, there's hope there.