Max Lucado Daily: SIMPLIFIED FAITH - August 23, 2023
How do you simplify your faith? How do you get rid of the clutter? How do you discover a joy worth waking up to? Simple: get rid of the middleman.
There are some who suggest the only way to God is through them. There’s the great teacher who has the final word on Bible teaching. There’s the father who must bless your acts. There’s the spiritual master who’ll tell you what God wants you to do. Jesus’ message for complicated religion is to remove these middlemen.
He’s not saying you don’t need teachers, elders, or counselors. He is saying, however, that we are all brothers and sisters with equal access to the Father. Seek God for yourself. No elaborate channels of command or levels of access. You have a Bible? You can study. You have a heart? You can pray. You have a mind? You can think.
1 Corinthians 12
Spiritual Gifts
1–3 12 What I want to talk about now is the various ways God’s Spirit gets worked into our lives. This is complex and often misunderstood, but I want you to be informed and knowledgeable. Remember how you were when you didn’t know God, led from one phony god to another, never knowing what you were doing, just doing it because everybody else did it? It’s different in this life. God wants us to use our intelligence, to seek to understand as well as we can. For instance, by using your heads, you know perfectly well that the Spirit of God would never prompt anyone to say “Jesus be damned!” Nor would anyone be inclined to say “Jesus is Master!” without the insight of the Holy Spirit.
4–11 God’s various gifts are handed out everywhere; but they all originate in God’s Spirit. God’s various ministries are carried out everywhere; but they all originate in God’s Spirit. God’s various expressions of power are in action everywhere; but God himself is behind it all. Each person is given something to do that shows who God is: Everyone gets in on it, everyone benefits. All kinds of things are handed out by the Spirit, and to all kinds of people! The variety is wonderful:
wise counsel
clear understanding
simple trust
healing the sick
miraculous acts
proclamation
distinguishing between spirits
tongues
interpretation of tongues.
All these gifts have a common origin, but are handed out one by one by the one Spirit of God. He decides who gets what, and when.
12–13 You can easily enough see how this kind of thing works by looking no further than your own body. Your body has many parts—limbs, organs, cells—but no matter how many parts you can name, you’re still one body. It’s exactly the same with Christ. By means of his one Spirit, we all said good-bye to our partial and piecemeal lives. We each used to independently call our own shots, but then we entered into a large and integrated life in which he has the final say in everything. (This is what we proclaimed in word and action when we were baptized.) Each of us is now a part of his resurrection body, refreshed and sustained at one fountain—his Spirit—where we all come to drink. The old labels we once used to identify ourselves—labels like Jew or Greek, slave or free—are no longer useful. We need something larger, more comprehensive.
14–18 I want you to think about how all this makes you more significant, not less. A body isn’t just a single part blown up into something huge. It’s all the different-but-similar parts arranged and functioning together. If Foot said, “I’m not elegant like Hand, embellished with rings; I guess I don’t belong to this body,” would that make it so? If Ear said, “I’m not beautiful like Eye, limpid and expressive; I don’t deserve a place on the head,” would you want to remove it from the body? If the body was all eye, how could it hear? If all ear, how could it smell? As it is, we see that God has carefully placed each part of the body right where he wanted it.
19–24 But I also want you to think about how this keeps your significance from getting blown up into self-importance. For no matter how significant you are, it is only because of what you are a part of. An enormous eye or a gigantic hand wouldn’t be a body, but a monster. What we have is one body with many parts, each its proper size and in its proper place. No part is important on its own. Can you imagine Eye telling Hand, “Get lost; I don’t need you”? Or, Head telling Foot, “You’re fired; your job has been phased out”? As a matter of fact, in practice it works the other way—the “lower” the part, the more basic, and therefore necessary. You can live without an eye, for instance, but not without a stomach. When it’s a part of your own body you are concerned with, it makes no difference whether the part is visible or clothed, higher or lower. You give it dignity and honor just as it is, without comparisons. If anything, you have more concern for the lower parts than the higher. If you had to choose, wouldn’t you prefer good digestion to full-bodied hair?
25–26 The way God designed our bodies is a model for understanding our lives together as a church: every part dependent on every other part, the parts we mention and the parts we don’t, the parts we see and the parts we don’t. If one part hurts, every other part is involved in the hurt, and in the healing. If one part flourishes, every other part enters into the exuberance.
27–31 You are Christ’s body—that’s who you are! You must never forget this. Only as you accept your part of that body does your “part” mean anything. You’re familiar with some of the parts that God has formed in his church, which is his “body”:
apostles
prophets
teachers
miracle workers
healers
helpers
organizers
those who pray in tongues.
But it’s obvious by now, isn’t it, that Christ’s church is a complete Body and not a gigantic, unidimensional Part? It’s not all Apostle, not all Prophet, not all Miracle Worker, not all Healer, not all Prayer in Tongues, not all Interpreter of Tongues. And yet some of you keep competing for so-called “important” parts.
But now I want to lay out a far better way for you.
Our Daily Bread reading and devotion
Wednesday, August 23, 2023
Today's Scripture
Genesis 4:2–11
Then she had another baby, Abel. Abel was a herdsman and Cain a farmer.
3–5 Time passed. Cain brought an offering to God from the produce of his farm. Abel also brought an offering, but from the firstborn animals of his herd, choice cuts of meat. God liked Abel and his offering, but Cain and his offering didn’t get his approval. Cain lost his temper and went into a sulk.
6–7 God spoke to Cain: “Why this tantrum? Why the sulking? If you do well, won’t you be accepted? And if you don’t do well, sin is lying in wait for you, ready to pounce; it’s out to get you, you’ve got to master it.”
8 Cain had words with his brother. They were out in the field; Cain came at Abel his brother and killed him.
9 God said to Cain, “Where is Abel your brother?”
He said, “How should I know? Am I his babysitter?”
10–12 God said, “What have you done! The voice of your brother’s blood is calling to me from the ground. From now on you’ll get nothing but curses from this ground; you’ll be driven from this ground that has opened its arms to receive the blood of your murdered brother.
Insight
Genesis, which means “beginning,” is a book of origins. Genesis 1 tells how God created the universe and the first man and woman. Genesis 2 gives us the first wedding. Genesis 3 tells how perfect humanity became the sinful human race. Genesis 4 tells of the first family—the first parents, Adam and Eve; and the first sons, Cain and Abel. Adam and Eve were created by God, but Cain was the first human being conceived and carried in the womb of a woman. We also see the children in worship. Cain and Abel didn’t come empty-handed but brought offerings to worship God, so they must have been taught about Him and how to worship Him (vv. 3–4). By: K. T. Sim
Witnesses
Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground. Genesis 4:10
In his poem “The Witnesses,” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) described a sunken slave ship. As he wrote of “skeletons in chains,” Longfellow mourned slavery’s countless nameless victims. The concluding stanza reads, “These are the woes of Slaves, / They glare from the abyss; / They cry from unknown graves, / We are the Witnesses!”
But who do these witnesses speak to? Isn’t such silent testimony futile?
There is a Witness who sees it all. When Cain murdered Abel, he pretended nothing had happened. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” he said dismissively to God. But God said, “Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground. Now you are under a curse and driven from the ground, which opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand” (Genesis 4:9–11).
Cain’s name lives on as a warning. “Do not be like Cain, who belonged to the evil one and murdered his brother,” John the disciple cautioned (1 John 3:12). Abel’s name lives on too, but in a dramatically different way. “By faith Abel brought God a better offering than Cain did,” said the writer of Hebrews. “By faith Abel still speaks” (Hebrews 11:4).
Abel still speaks! So do the bones of those long-forgotten slaves. We do well to remember all such victims, and to oppose oppression wherever we see it. God sees it all. His justice will triumph. By: Tim Gustafson
Reflect & Pray
What situations of injustice and oppression do you know about? What might God be calling you to do today?
Dear Father, You’re the God who sees. Help me to see oppression when it happens and show me what I can do to counter it.
My Utmost for His Highest, by Oswald Chambers
Wednesday, August 23, 2023
Prayer—Battle in “The Secret Place”
When you pray, go into your room, and when you have shut your door, pray to your Father who is in the secret place; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you openly. —Matthew 6:6
Jesus did not say, “Dream about your Father who is in the secret place,” but He said, “…pray to your Father who is in the secret place….” Prayer is an effort of the will. After we have entered our secret place and shut the door, the most difficult thing to do is to pray. We cannot seem to get our minds into good working order, and the first thing we have to fight is wandering thoughts. The great battle in private prayer is overcoming this problem of our idle and wandering thinking. We have to learn to discipline our minds and concentrate on willful, deliberate prayer.
We must have a specially selected place for prayer, but once we get there this plague of wandering thoughts begins, as we begin to think to ourselves, “This needs to be done, and I have to do that today.” Jesus says to “shut your door.” Having a secret stillness before God means deliberately shutting the door on our emotions and remembering Him. God is in secret, and He sees us from “the secret place”— He does not see us as other people do, or as we see ourselves. When we truly live in “the secret place,” it becomes impossible for us to doubt God. We become more sure of Him than of anyone or anything else. Enter into “the secret place,” and you will find that God was right in the middle of your everyday circumstances all the time. Get into the habit of dealing with God about everything. Unless you learn to open the door of your life completely and let God in from your first waking moment of each new day, you will be working on the wrong level throughout the day. But if you will swing the door of your life fully open and “pray to your Father who is in the secret place,” every public thing in your life will be marked with the lasting imprint of the presence of God.
WISDOM FROM OSWALD CHAMBERS
There is no allowance whatever in the New Testament for the man who says he is saved by grace but who does not produce the graceful goods. Jesus Christ by His Redemption can make our actual life in keeping with our religious profession. Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, 1465 R
Bible in a Year: Psalms 113-115; 1 Corinthians 6
A Word with You, by Ron Hutchcraft
Wednesday, August 23, 2023
The Legacy of Your Life - #9553
The Kentucky Derby always has its share of drama. I remember the 2006 Kentucky Derby. That was a blowout! A horse named Barbaro took the lead in America's most famous race and left every other horse in the dust. Barbaro won the Kentucky Derby by an astounding 6 & 1/2 lengths! Many thought that horse could go on to be one of the few who has ever won the Triple Crown. Well, sadly, an injury ended that dream. But it didn't take away the glory of Barbaro's dramatic Kentucky Derby victory.
The horse was only part of the story that day. In some ways, the bigger story was about Barbaro's trainer, Michael Matz. Eighteen years earlier, Michael Matz had been a passenger on an airplane flight that crashed in an Iowa cornfield. During the flight, he had struck up conversations with three young children who were traveling that day without their parents. Then came the crash. Many died that day as the plane caught fire. Survivors were struggling to find a way out of that burning wreckage, but all Michael Matz could do was think about those three children. He risked his life to find all of them and bring them out alive. And on that day, when the horse Michael trained crossed the finish line, there was jubilant celebration in the box where he was watching. Michael Matz, his wife, and the three (now grownup) children whose lives he had saved eighteen years before. Wow!
I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "The Legacy of Your Life."
In our word for today from the Word of God, Paul's thinking ahead to the day when his race will be over; when he'll be in heaven celebrating the lasting legacy of his life. In 1 Thessalonians 2:19-20, speaking to people he had introduced to Jesus Christ, Paul says: "What is our hope, our joy, or the crown in which we will glory in the presence of our Lord Jesus when He comes? Is it not you? Indeed, you are our glory and joy."
So, crossing the finish line to heaven - celebrating being there. First with Jesus, whose death and resurrection got you there, and then, with all those who are there (at least in part) because you helped to rescue them. You did what your Bible said to do: "Snatch others from the fire and save them" (Jude 23). You weren't content to just get you out of that burning wreckage of sin. No, you had to help those around you make it, too. That's going to make heaven even sweeter. Or is it?
As you look at the legacy of your life so far, do you see many people you've pointed to Jesus? Can you see some folks who will be in heaven because you were part of helping them go there? How many people understand what Jesus did on the cross for them because you explained it to them? Have you been to some funerals, and looked into the casket and asked yourself, "Why didn't I tell them about Jesus while there was still time?"
You can't have any of those days back. But you do have whatever days God still has ahead for you. And you can decide what kind of difference you want to make with the rest of your life. I hope it's to help as many people be in heaven with you as possible; to give as many people a chance at being rescued by Jesus as you can. Much of what we do and accomplish here won't mean anything, even one moment after our last breath. But there's one thing you can do that will last forever, and that's to help someone else live forever by showing them Jesus.
The prophet Daniel described that day when "multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake: some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt." Every person you know is headed for one of those two destinations.
Then he describes ultimate legacy: "Those who lead many to righteousness will shine like the stars forever and ever" (Daniel 12:2-3). Why? Because they'll be celebrating forever with people whose lives they've rescued.