Max Lucado Daily: CHOOSE TO PRAISE - July 31, 2024
“Along about midnight, Paul and Silas were at prayer and singing a robust hymn to God…Then, without warning, a huge earthquake! The jailhouse tottered, every door flew open, all the prisoners were loose” (Acts 16:25-26 MSG).
Authorities beat Paul and Silas with rods. Soldiers then imprisoned them in the deepest part of the prison where it was damp and cold and rat-infested. Their feet were put in stocks. There they lay all afternoon and into the night, with no local advocates, their backs open to infection, surrounded by darkness, and shivering from the cold. Oh, to have heard that midnight song.
Paul and Silas were not sure of their deliverance, but they were sure of their Deliverer. You can be too. Rather than panic, you can choose to praise.
Ezekiel 9
A Mark on the Forehead
1 9 Then I heard him call out loudly, “Executioners, come! And bring your deadly weapons with you.”
2 Six men came down the road from the upper gate that faces north, each carrying his lethal weapon. With them was a man dressed in linen with a writing case slung from his shoulder. They entered and stood by the bronze altar.
3–4 The Glory of the God of Israel ascended from his usual place above the cherubim-angels, moved to the threshold of the Temple, and called to the man with the writing case who was dressed in linen: “Go through the streets of Jerusalem and put a mark on the forehead of everyone who is in anguish over the outrageous obscenities being done in the city.”
5–6 I listened as he went on to address the executioners: “Follow him through the city and kill. Feel sorry for no one. Show no compassion. Kill old men and women, young men and women, mothers and children. But don’t lay a hand on anyone with the mark. Start at my Temple.”
They started with the leaders in front of the Temple.
7–8 He told the executioners, “Desecrate the Temple. Fill it with corpses. Then go out and continue the killing.” So they went out and struck the city.
While the massacre went forward, I was left alone. I fell on my face in prayer: “Oh, oh, God, my Master! Are you going to kill everyone left in Israel in this pouring out of your anger on Jerusalem?”
9–10 He said, “The guilt of Israel and Judah is enormous. The land is swollen with murder. The city is bloated with injustice. They all say, ‘God has forsaken the country. He doesn’t see anything we do.’ Well, I do see, and I’m not feeling sorry for any of them. They’re going to pay for what they’ve done.”
11 Just then, the man dressed in linen and carrying the writing case came back and reported, “I’ve done what you told me.”
Our Daily Bread reading and devotion
Wednesday, July 31, 2024
Today's Scripture
Isaiah 53:1-6
Who believes what we’ve heard and seen?
Who would have thought God’s saving power would look like this?
2–6 The servant grew up before God—a scrawny seedling,
a scrubby plant in a parched field.
There was nothing attractive about him,
nothing to cause us to take a second look.
He was looked down on and passed over,
a man who suffered, who knew pain firsthand.
One look at him and people turned away.
We looked down on him, thought he was scum.
But the fact is, it was our pains he carried—
our disfigurements, all the things wrong with us.
We thought he brought it on himself,
that God was punishing him for his own failures.
But it was our sins that did that to him,
that ripped and tore and crushed him—our sins!
He took the punishment, and that made us whole.
Through his bruises we get healed.
We’re all like sheep who’ve wandered off and gotten lost.
We’ve all done our own thing, gone our own way.
And God has piled all our sins, everything we’ve done wrong,
on him, on him.
Insight
Isaiah 53 gives us a clear description of the sacrifice of Christ in the Old Testament, describing His rejection (vv. 1-3), His suffering in our place (vv. 4-6), His sacrificial death and burial (vv. 7-9), and His reconciling atonement and resurrection (vv. 10-12). The chapter is the last of four messianic prophecies in the book of Isaiah (42:1-9; 49:1-13; 50:4-11; 52:13-53:12) known as the “Servant Songs” because they prophetically refer to Jesus the Messiah as Servant (42:1; 49:3; 50:10; 52:13), although Jewish scholars tend to identify the Servant as Israel itself.
In the New Testament, Isaiah is quoted or alluded to numerous times. New Testament writers unequivocally apply quotes from Isaiah 53 to Christ (Matthew 8:17; Mark 15:28; Luke 22:37; John 12:38-41; Acts 8:32-35; Romans 10:16; 1 Peter 2:24). By: K. T. Sim
The Beautiful One
He had no beauty or majesty . . . . By his wounds we are healed. Isaiah 53:2, 5
For more than 130 years, the Eiffel Tower has stood majestically over the city of Paris, a symbol of architectural brilliance and beauty. The city proudly promotes the tower as a key element of its magnificence.
As it was being built, however, many people thought little of it. Famous French writer Guy de Maupassant, for example, said it had “a ridiculous thin shape like a factory chimney.” He couldn’t see its beauty.
Those of us who love Jesus and have entrusted our hearts to Him as our Savior count Him as beautiful for who He is and what He’s done for us. Yet the prophet Isaiah penned these words: “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him” (53:2).
But the towering majesty of what He did for us is the truest, purest form of beauty that humans will ever know and experience. He “took up our pain and bore our suffering” (v. 4). He was “pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed” (v. 5).
We’ll never know anyone as beautiful—as majestic—as the one who suffered for us on the cross, taking the unspeakable punishment of our sins upon Himself.
That’s Jesus. The Beautiful One. Let’s look to Him and live. By: Dave Branon
Reflect & Pray
How has Jesus revealed His beauty to you? What does it mean for you to find your only hope in Him?
Dear Beautiful One, thank You for Your selfless sacrifice for me.
Learn more here: ODB.org/personal-relationship-with-god.
My Utmost for His Highest, by Oswald Chambers
Wednesday, July 31, 2024
Till You Are Entirely His
Let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing. —James 1:4
Many of us are all right for the most part, but we’re still lazy about certain things. It isn’t sin that makes us this way; it’s the remnants of our old carnal life, the life we led before we were born again in the Spirit. Carelessness and laziness are an insult to the Holy Spirit. There should be nothing careless about us, whether it’s in the way we eat and drink or the way we worship God.
Not only must our relationship to God be right; the way we express that relationship must be right, too. Ultimately God will let nothing about us escape his attention. He keeps every detail of our lives under his scrutiny. In numberless ways, God will bring us back to the same issue over and over again until we learn our lesson. The issue may be our impulsiveness or our independent individuality or our tendency to let our thoughts run away with us. No matter what it is, God will bring us back to it again and again until he has made us fully aware of the thing that isn’t right. He’ll never tire, and he won’t stop—not until he has achieved the finished work.
Thanks to God’s wonderful work in you, you know that you are all right in what matters most: your relationship to him. Now “let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.” Watch out when you start letting things slide, or when you hear yourself saying, “Oh, that will have to do for now.” Whatever the issue, God will point it out with persistent patience until you are entirely his. Psalms 54-56; Romans 3
WISDOM FROM OSWALD
God created man to be master of the life in the earth and sea and sky, and the reason he is not is because he took the law into his own hands, and became master of himself, but of nothing else.
The Shadow of an Agony, 1163 L
A Word with You, by Ron Hutchcraft
Wednesday, July 31, 2024
Leadership - Setting the Temperature - #9798
I was in a meeting in a hotel. It was in the 90s outside, but I was ready to put gloves on so I could write my notes without shaking. Maybe you've been in those rooms. It was hot outside but the air conditioner was on one notch past high - I think the setting was like on "arctic'? And all of us in the room became concerned about that setting, and one by one we wandered over to the box on the wall. You know we're all "fix it" guys - we'll make it better.
Well, when we got over to the box we discovered that the controls were all locked up; we couldn't get to them. So we called the front desk, and finally the maintenance man came and turned down the ice machine. No longer a meat locker. Summer or winter that guy's the person; he's the one who decides what the temperature is. By the way, so are you.
I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "Leadership - Setting the Temperature."
Our word for today from the Word of God comes from the book of Nehemiah. Now, here's one of the greatest models of leadership in all the Bible; that's this man named Nehemiah. You may remember he led a monumental effort to rebuild the wall of Jerusalem in 52 days. Not bad for a couple of month's work, huh? Well, now as we reach this point in the book of Nehemiah, he is the Governor of the province. The wall is done, but these people are a poor group of people trying to establish life in their re-built city.
What is needed in order to establish a community there is a climate of unselfishness, sharing, and cooperation. Well, listen to what the leader does. Nehemiah says, "For twelve years neither I nor my brothers ate the food that was allotted to the governor. Now the earlier governors - those preceding me - placed a heavy burden on the people and took forty shekels of silver from them in addition to the food and wine. Their assistants also lorded it over the people."
But out of reverence for God, I did not act like that. Instead, I devoted myself to work on this wall. All my men were assembled there for the work. We did not acquire any land."
Later he says, "I never demanded the food allotted to the governor because the demands were heavy on these people."
Friends, this is leadership! Nehemiah was the man who set the pace; he led the way. He set a temperature in Jerusalem. A temperature of sharing and giving, putting other people first, and the people followed. See, the greatest responsibility of a leader is never written in their job description. It's establishing a climate. Parents do it in their home, teachers do it in a classroom, leaders do it in a church, and supervisors do it in an office or a factory. In a sense, we are all leaders to the extent that we are setting a climate wherever we are.
Now, if you are in a position of influencing others, have you considered how the temperature feels where you are? What kind of climate is there around you? It's not even something you're doing consciously - it's your persona, your style, your values, your priorities, your pace. Those are the things that do it. You establish it not so much by what you say, but with how you live. Is it tense around you? Is that the temperature you set? Or are people around you seeing a model of caring, unselfishness, or like Nehemiah - pitching in on the job that needs to be done instead of just giving orders?
I wonder if in your world you set a climate of respect for other people by the way you talk about them and the way you talk to them? Or do they know there's a climate of prayer around you and they catch that? Is there a climate of worry, or is there a climate of trusting God?
You're a leader. You control the climate whether you realize it or not. So, make your room, so to speak, feel like it would if Jesus were there, because if you're a Christian, He is - in you.