Max Lucado Daily: Content
What if God’s only gift to you were his grace to save you. Would you be content? Content! That’s the word. A state of heart in which you would be at peace if God gave you nothing more than he already has. You beg him to save the life of your child. You implore him to remove the cancer from your body. You plead with him to keep your business afloat. What if his answer is, “My grace is enough.” Would you be content?
You see, from heaven’s perspective, grace IS enough. If God did nothing more than save us from hell, could anyone complain? Having been given eternal life, dare we grumble at an aching body? Let me be quick to add. God has not left you with “just” salvation. He has already given you grace upon grace. The vast majority of us have been saved and then blessed even more!
From In the Grip of Grace
2 Chronicles 15
Then Azariah son of Obed, moved by the Spirit of God, went out to meet Asa. He said, “Listen carefully, Asa, and listen Judah and Ben-jamin: God will stick with you as long as you stick with him. If you look for him he will let himself be found; but if you leave him he’ll leave you. For a long time Israel didn’t have the real God, nor did they have the help of priest or teacher or book. But when they were in trouble and got serious, and decided to seek God, the God of Israel, God let himself be found. At that time it was a dog-eat-dog world; life was constantly up for grabs—no one, regardless of country, knew what the next day might bring. Nation battered nation, city pummeled city. God let loose every kind of trouble among them.
7 “But it’s different with you: Be strong. Take heart. Payday is coming!”
8–9 Asa heard the prophecy of Azariah son of Obed, took a deep breath, then rolled up his sleeves, and went to work: He cleaned out the obscene and polluting sacred shrines from the whole country of Judah and Ben-jamin and from the towns he had taken in the hill country of Ephraim. He spruced up the Altar of God that was in front of The Temple porch. Then he called an assembly for all Judah and Ben-jamin, including those from Ephraim, Manasseh, and Simeon who were living there at the time (for many from Israel had left their homes and joined forces with Asa when they saw that God was on his side).
10–15 They all arrived in Jerusalem in the third month of the fifteenth year of Asa’s reign for a great assembly of worship. From their earlier plunder they offered sacrifices of seven hundred oxen and seven thousand sheep for the worship. Then they bound themselves in a covenant to seek God, the God of their fathers, wholeheartedly, holding nothing back. And they agreed that anyone who refused to seek God, the God of Israel, should be killed, no matter who it was, young or old, man or woman. They shouted out their promise to God, a joyful sound accompanied with blasts from trumpets and rams’ horns. The whole country felt good about the covenant promise—they had given their promise joyfully from the heart. Anticipating the best, they had sought God—and he showed up, ready to be found. God gave them peace within and without—a most peaceable kingdom!
16–19 In his cleanup of the country, Asa went so far as to remove his mother, Queen Maacah, from her throne because she had built a shockingly obscene image of the sex goddess Asherah. Asa tore it down, smashed it, and burned it up in the Kidron Valley. Unfortunately he didn’t get rid of the local sex-and-religion shrines. But he was well-intentioned—his heart was in the right place, loyal to God. All the gold and silver vessels and artifacts that he and his father had consecrated for holy use he installed in The Temple of God. There wasn’t a trace of war up to the thirty-fifth year of Asa’s reign.
Our Daily Bread reading and devotion
Saturday, September 30, 2023
Today's Scripture
Joshua 2:1–4, 9–14
Rahab
1 2 Joshua son of Nun secretly sent out from Shittim two men as spies: “Go. Look over the land. Check out Jericho.” They left and arrived at the house of a harlot named Rahab and stayed there.
2 The king of Jericho was told, “We’ve just learned that men arrived tonight to spy out the land. They’re from the People of Israel.”
3 The king of Jericho sent word to Rahab: “Bring out the men who came to you to stay the night in your house. They’re spies; they’ve come to spy out the whole country.”
4–7 The woman had taken the two men and hidden them. She said, “Yes, two men did come to me, but I didn’t know where they’d come from.
and said to them, “I know that the Lord has given you this land and that a great fearj of you has fallen on us, so that all who live in this country are melting in fear because of you. 10 We have heard how the Lord dried upk the water of the Red Seaa for you when you came out of Egypt,l and what you did to Sihon and Og,m the two kings of the Amoritesn east of the Jordan,o whom you completely destroyed.b p 11 When we heard of it, our hearts melted in fearq and everyone’s courage failedr because of you,s for the Lord your Godt is God in heaven above and on the earthu below.
12 “Now then, please swear to mev by the Lord that you will show kindnessw to my family, because I have shown kindness to you. Give me a sure signx 13 that you will spare the lives of my father and mother, my brothers and sisters, and all who belong to themy—and that you will save us from death.”
14 “Our lives for your lives!”z the men assured her. “If you don’t tell what we are doing, we will treat you kindly and faithfullya when the Lord gives us the land.”
Insight
Rahab was a Canaanite prostitute who’d put her faith in Yahweh even before she met the two Israelite spies (Joshua 2:9–10). The New Testament commends her for her faith in God (Hebrews 11:31; James 2:25). Rahab wasn’t only delivered from death (Joshua 6:17, 22–23) but was raised to a position of honor. She married Salmon, an Israelite, and was blessed to be an ancestor of King David as well as the Messiah (Ruth 4:21–22; Matthew 1:5). Rahab was one of four non-Israelites (also Tamar, probably a Canaanite; Ruth, a Moabite; Uriah’s wife [Bathsheba], probably a Hittite) and one of five women listed in Jesus’ genealogy (Matthew 1:1–17). By: K. T. Sim
Least Likely
For the Lord your God is God in heaven above and on the earth below. Joshua 2:11
Hollywood gives us larger-than-life spies who are dashing drivers of flashy Aston-Martins and other luxury sports cars. But Jonna Mendez, a former CIA chief, paints an opposite picture of the real thing. An agent must be “the little gray man,” she says, someone nondescript, not flashy. “You want them to be forgettable.” The best agents are those least likely to appear like agents.
When two of Israel’s spies slipped into Jericho, it was Rahab who hid them from the king’s soldiers (Joshua 2:4). She was seemingly the least likely person for God to employ as an espionage agent, for she had three strikes against her: she was a Canaanite, a woman, and a prostitute. Yet Rahab had started to believe in the God of the Israelites: “Your God is God in heaven” (v. 11). She hid God’s spies under flax on the roof, assisting in their daring escape. God rewarded her faith: “Joshua spared Rahab the prostitute, with her family” (6:25).
Sometimes we might feel we’re the least likely to be used by God. Perhaps we have physical limitations, don’t feel “flashy” enough to lead, or have a tarnished past. But history is filled with “nondescript” believers redeemed by God, people like Rahab who were given a special mission for His kingdom. Be assured: He has divine purposes for even the least likely of us. By: Kenneth Petersen
Reflect & Pray
In what ways do you feel “in the background”? What do you think might be the mission God has for you?
Dear God, please help me be ready for Your calling, for the mission You might have for me.
My Utmost for His Highest, by Oswald Chambers
Saturday, September 30, 2023
The Assigning of the Call
I now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up in my flesh what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ, for the sake of His body, which is the church… —Colossians 1:24
We take our own spiritual consecration and try to make it into a call of God, but when we get right with Him He brushes all this aside. Then He gives us a tremendous, riveting pain to fasten our attention on something that we never even dreamed could be His call for us. And for one radiant, flashing moment we see His purpose, and we say, “Here am I! Send me” (Isaiah 6:8).
This call has nothing to do with personal sanctification, but with being made broken bread and poured-out wine. Yet God can never make us into wine if we object to the fingers He chooses to use to crush us. We say, “If God would only use His own fingers, and make me broken bread and poured-out wine in a special way, then I wouldn’t object!” But when He uses someone we dislike, or some set of circumstances to which we said we would never submit, to crush us, then we object. Yet we must never try to choose the place of our own martyrdom. If we are ever going to be made into wine, we will have to be crushed—you cannot drink grapes. Grapes become wine only when they have been squeezed.
I wonder what finger and thumb God has been using to squeeze you? Have you been as hard as a marble and escaped? If you are not ripe yet, and if God had squeezed you anyway, the wine produced would have been remarkably bitter. To be a holy person means that the elements of our natural life experience the very presence of God as they are providentially broken in His service. We have to be placed into God and brought into agreement with Him before we can be broken bread in His hands. Stay right with God and let Him do as He likes, and you will find that He is producing the kind of bread and wine that will benefit His other children.
WISDOM FROM OSWALD CHAMBERS
The Christian Church should not be a secret society of specialists, but a public manifestation of believers in Jesus. Facing Reality, 34 R
Bible in a Year: Isaiah 9-10; Ephesians 3