MAX LUCADO: A SOUL ABLAZE - October 11, 2022
“I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming…He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire” (Luke 3:16 NRSV).
This is how John the Baptist introduced his cousin to the world. Baptize you with Holy Spirit and fire? Such was the job description of Jesus. Heaven arrives packing heat.
Please note that Jesus is the giver of the Holy Spirit fire. Do you desire the Spirit? Then turn to Christ. Receive him as Savior and Lord. He, then, will “baptize” you in the Spirit. He will plunge, immerse, and submerge you in the very being of the Spirit. Just as Jesus stepped out of the river dripping the Jordan, so we step forth into the world drenched in the Spirit of heaven.
The soul baptized in the Spirit is a soul ablaze.
“I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming…He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire” (Luke 3:16 NRSV).
This is how John the Baptist introduced his cousin to the world. Baptize you with Holy Spirit and fire? Such was the job description of Jesus. Heaven arrives packing heat.
Please note that Jesus is the giver of the Holy Spirit fire. Do you desire the Spirit? Then turn to Christ. Receive him as Savior and Lord. He, then, will “baptize” you in the Spirit. He will plunge, immerse, and submerge you in the very being of the Spirit. Just as Jesus stepped out of the river dripping the Jordan, so we step forth into the world drenched in the Spirit of heaven.
The soul baptized in the Spirit is a soul ablaze.
Psalm 24- God claims Earth and everything in it, God claims World and all who live on it. He built it on Ocean foundations, laid it out on River girders.
3-4
Who can climb Mount God? Who can scale the holy north-face? Only the clean-handed, only the pure-hearted; Men who won’t cheat, women who won’t seduce.
5-6
God is at their side; with God’s help they make it. This, Jacob, is what happens to God-seekers, God-questers.
7
Wake up, you sleepyhead city! Wake up, you sleepyhead people! King-Glory is ready to enter.
8
Who is this King-Glory? God, armed and battle-ready.
9
Wake up, you sleepyhead city! Wake up, you sleepyhead people! King-Glory is ready to enter.
10
Who is this King-Glory? God-of-the-Angel-Armies: he is King-Glory.
Our Daily Bread
Read-Genesis 12:1–9 Abram and Sarai
God told Abram: “Leave your country, your family, and your father’s home for a land that I will show you.
2-3
I’ll make you a great nation and bless you. I’ll make you famous; you’ll be a blessing. I’ll bless those who bless you; those who curse you I’ll curse. All the families of the Earth will be blessed through you.”
4-6 So Abram left just as God said, and Lot left with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he left Haran. Abram took his wife Sarai and his nephew Lot with him, along with all the possessions and people they had gotten in Haran, and set out for the land of Canaan and arrived safe and sound.
Abram passed through the country as far as Shechem and the Oak of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites occupied the land.
7 God appeared to Abram and said, “I will give this land to your children.” Abram built an altar at the place God had appeared to him.
8 He moved on from there to the hill country east of Bethel and pitched his tent between Bethel to the west and Ai to the east. He built an altar there and prayed to God.
9 Abram kept moving, steadily making his way south, to the Negev.
Insight;
The Hebrew phrase translated “go” (Genesis 12:1) is literally “go to yourself.” While difficult to translate, this emphatic command is perhaps captured more closely by the King James translation: “Get thee out.”
The promises given to Abraham—land, abundant children, and blessing (vv. 2–3, 7)—echo the consequences of Adam and Eve’s fall—exile from the garden, difficult childbirth, and difficulty cultivating the land (3:16–24). These parallels hint that God would begin His plan to undo the consequences of the fall through this couple, through whom “all peoples on earth” would “be blessed” (12:3).
Your Part, Gods Part
By Leslie Koh
Go . . . to the land I will show you. . . . So Abram went. Genesis 12:1, 4
When my friend Janice was asked to manage her department at work after just a few years, she felt overwhelmed. Praying over it, she felt God was prompting her to accept the appointment—but still, she feared she couldn’t cope with the responsibility. “How can I lead with so little experience?” she asked God. “Why put me here if I’m going to be a failure?”
Later, Janice was reading about God’s call of Abram in Genesis 12 and noted that his part was to “go . . . to the land [God] will show you. . . . So Abram went” (vv. 1, 4). This was a radical move, because nobody uprooted like this in the ancient world. But God was asking him to trust Him by leaving everything he knew behind, and He would do the rest. Identity? You’ll be a great nation. Provision? I’ll bless you. Reputation? A great name. Purpose? You’ll be a blessing to all peoples on earth. He made some big mistakes along the way, but “by faith Abraham . . . obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going” (Hebrews 11:8).
This realization took a big burden off Janice’s heart. “I don’t have to worry about ‘succeeding’ at my job,” she told me later. “I just have to focus on trusting God to enable me to do the work.” As God provides the faith we need, may we trust Him with all our lives.
Reflect: What worries do you have about your responsibilities? How is God asking you to trust Him in your present circumstances?
Pray-
Dear God, I want to surrender to You my fears and worries about succeeding in my roles and responsibilities. Please help me to do my part as You do Yours.
My Utmost for His Highest
God’s Silence— Then What?
By Oswald Chambers
When He heard that he was sick, He stayed two more days in the place where He was. —John 11:6
Has God trusted you with His silence— a silence that has great meaning? God’s silences are actually His answers. Just think of those days of absolute silence in the home at Bethany! Is there anything comparable to those days in your life? Can God trust you like that, or are you still asking Him for a visible answer? God will give you the very blessings you ask if you refuse to go any further without them, but His silence is the sign that He is bringing you into an even more wonderful understanding of Himself. Are you mourning before God because you have not had an audible response? When you cannot hear God, you will find that He has trusted you in the most intimate way possible— with absolute silence, not a silence of despair, but one of pleasure, because He saw that you could withstand an even bigger revelation. If God has given you a silence, then praise Him— He is bringing you into the mainstream of His purposes. The actual evidence of the answer in time is simply a matter of God’s sovereignty. Time is nothing to God. For a while you may have said, “I asked God to give me bread, but He gave me a stone instead” (see Matthew 7:9). He did not give you a stone, and today you find that He gave you the “bread of life” (John 6:35).
A wonderful thing about God’s silence is that His stillness is contagious— it gets into you, causing you to become perfectly confident so that you can honestly say, “I know that God has heard me.” His silence is the very proof that He has. As long as you have the idea that God will always bless you in answer to prayer, He will do it, but He will never give you the grace of His silence. If Jesus Christ is bringing you into the understanding that prayer is for the glorifying of His Father, then He will give you the first sign of His intimacy— silence.
WISDOM FROM OSWALD CHAMBERS
The truth is we have nothing to fear and nothing to overcome because He is all in all and we are more than conquerors through Him. The recognition of this truth is not flattering to the worker’s sense of heroics, but it is amazingly glorifying to the work of Christ. Approved Unto God, 4 R
Bible in a Year: Isaiah 37-38; Colossians 3
A Word With You by Ron Hutchcraft
Everybody's Got a Story
We met Gal on an Indian reservation. She wasn't very easy to get to know. Gal was a cute black and white dog owned by a missionary couple that our On Eagles' Wings Team was working with on a remote reservation. Most dogs run up to you when you come to the door, even if you're a stranger, and they're usually all over you. Not Gal. She ran the other way and cowered in the corner, no matter how gentle, how friendly you were to her. She didn't want to come out of her corner for anybody. "Strange dog," I thought. Until her owners explained that Gal had been terribly abused by her first owners. When she saw people, she saw pain.
I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "Everybody's Got a Story."
You couldn't understand the way that dog acted until you knew her story. People are like that, too. You watch how they act, how they treat people, you see that attitude they have, and you say, "Forget you, buddy" or you respond with the same garbage they'd just dished out to you. But the "make a difference" people in this world, the healers, are the ones who never forget this critical issue in dealing with people: you can't understand the way they act until you know their story. And everybody's got a story.
I remember discovering how wrong I had been about some people in our class in college after many of them poured out their hearts at our senior retreat. Late into the night, people you thought you knew revealed the pain in their background. And suddenly the lights went on and you said, "So that's what I've been seeing all these years!" And you felt badly that you had been responding to them based on their deeds, and never considering the needs behind those deeds.
That's the kind of radical love God's calling you and me to in our word for today from the Word of God in Ephesians 4, beginning with verse 29. He says, "Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up, according to their needs." In other words, don't say things that will tear a person down, just things that will build a person up. Why? Because you're focusing on their needs, not just their deeds. You may hate their deeds, but God's asking you to develop His compassion to respond to the needs that drive their deeds. Whether that person is your child, your spouse, your parent, your friend, your coworker, someone at church.
If you knew their story, you'd understand that they've been made to feel worthless much of their life. So they make choices based on the fact that they're trash they think. Or maybe they treat other people that same way. Maybe their story includes some awful hurt that has turned them hard so they won't get hurt anymore. Maybe there's some morally dark chapters in their past that can make them critical and legalistic today because they hate what they used to be. Maybe they wound because they've been wounded. Somewhere behind the way they act is a story of a perfectionist parent, of trust lost because of abuse, the absence of a father's love, abandonment, failure, tragedy.
So, the Bible says, "Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger." That's our response to their deeds. "Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other..." That's how we will respond if we operate, trying to understand there are needs beneath those deeds; there's a history behind those hang-ups.
One thing I can tell you from a lot of years of learning what's really inside people - when a person is hardest to love, they need your love the most! And that's when you ask Jesus to release His love through you because your love isn't enough. React to their bad attitude or their bad treatment, and you can just be another person who just wounds an already wounded person more. Respond with the mercy and the grace and the compassion you get from Jesus and you can be part of healing that wounded person. Because everybody's got a story, and you can help write a new chapter.