Max Lucado Daily: REIGNING WITH CHRIST - September 5, 2024
God’s storyline concludes with you, me, all his children living, ruling, dining, and serving with him in a perfect world. In the Bible’s final book, these words are said to Jesus: “You were slain, and with your blood you purchased for God persons from every tribe and language and people and nation. You have made them to be a kingdom and priests to serve our God, and they will reign on the earth” (Revelation 5:9-10 NIV).
That’s you, my friend. The final stop in your heavenly itinerary involves not just Eden, but a position of authority in God’s garden. Pause and let that promise sink in: you will reign with Christ. God’s purpose and plan for you may begin in this life, but it won’t be fully realized until the life to come.
What Happens Next
Ezekiel 26
As the Waves of the Sea, Surging Against the Shore
1–2 26 In the eleventh year, on the first day of the month, God’s Message came to me: “Son of man, Tyre cheered when they got the news of Jerusalem, exclaiming,
“ ‘Good! The gateway city is smashed!
Now all her business comes my way.
She’s in ruins
and I’m in clover.’
3–6 “Therefore, God, the Master, has this to say:
“ ‘I’m against you, Tyre,
and I’ll bring many nations surging against you,
as the waves of the sea surging against the shore.
They’ll smash the city walls of Tyre
and break down her towers.
I’ll wash away the soil
and leave nothing but bare rock.
She’ll be an island of bare rock in the ocean,
good for nothing but drying fishnets.
Yes, I’ve said so.’ Decree of God, the Master.
‘She’ll be loot, free pickings for the nations!
Her surrounding villages will be butchered.
Then they’ll realize that I am God.’
7–14 “God, the Master, says: Look! Out of the north I’m bringing Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, a king’s king, down on Tyre. He’ll come with chariots and horses and riders—a huge army. He’ll massacre your surrounding villages and lay siege to you. He’ll build siege ramps against your walls. A forest of shields will advance against you! He’ll pummel your walls with his battering rams and shatter your towers with his iron weapons. You’ll be covered with dust from his horde of horses—a thundering herd of war horses pouring through the breaches, pulling chariots. Oh, it will be an earthquake of an army and a city in shock! Horses will stampede through the streets. Your people will be slaughtered and your huge pillars strewn like matchsticks. The invaders will steal and loot—all that wealth, all that stuff! They’ll knock down your fine houses and dump the stone and timber rubble into the sea. And your parties, your famous good-time parties, will be no more. No more songs, no more lutes. I’ll reduce you to an island of bare rock, good for nothing but drying fishnets. You’ll never be rebuilt. I, God, have said so. Decree of God, the Master.
Introduced to the Terrors of Death
15 “This is the Message of God, the Master, to Tyre: Won’t the ocean islands shake at the crash of your collapse, at the groans of your wounded, at your mayhem and massacre?
16–18 “All up and down the coast, the princes will come down from their thrones, take off their royal robes and fancy clothes, and wrap themselves in sheer terror. They’ll sit on the ground, shaken to the core, horrified at you. Then they’ll begin chanting a funeral song over you:
“ ‘Sunk! Sunk to the bottom of the sea,
famous city on the sea!
Power of the seas,
you and your people,
Intimidating everyone
who lived in your shadows.
But now the islands are shaking
at the sound of your crash,
Ocean islands in tremors
from the impact of your fall.’
19–21 “The Message of God, the Master: ‘When I turn you into a wasted city, a city empty of people, a ghost town, and when I bring up the great ocean deeps and cover you, then I’ll push you down among those who go to the grave, the long, long dead. I’ll make you live there, in the grave in old ruins, with the buried dead. You’ll never see the land of the living again. I’ll introduce you to the terrors of death and that’ll be the end of you. They’ll send out search parties for you, but you’ll never be found. Decree of God, the Master.’ ”
Our Daily Bread reading and devotion
Thursday, September 05, 2024
Today's Scripture
1 Corinthians 13:4-13
Love never gives up.
Love cares more for others than for self.
Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have.
Love doesn’t strut,
Doesn’t have a swelled head,
Doesn’t force itself on others,
Isn’t always “me first,”
Doesn’t fly off the handle,
Doesn’t keep score of the sins of others,
Doesn’t revel when others grovel,
Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth,
Puts up with anything,
Trusts God always,
Always looks for the best,
Never looks back,
But keeps going to the end.
8–10 Love never dies. Inspired speech will be over some day; praying in tongues will end; understanding will reach its limit. We know only a portion of the truth, and what we say about God is always incomplete. But when the Complete arrives, our incompletes will be canceled.
11 When I was an infant at my mother’s breast, I gurgled and cooed like any infant. When I grew up, I left those infant ways for good.
12 We don’t yet see things clearly. We’re squinting in a fog, peering through a mist. But it won’t be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright! We’ll see it all then, see it all as clearly as God sees us, knowing him directly just as he knows us!
13 But for right now, until that completeness, we have three things to do to lead us toward that consummation: Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly. And the best of the three is love.
Insight
Writing to a divided church in conflict and deficient in love, Paul instructed the believers at Corinth how to love one another and described what true love looks like (1 Corinthians 13:4-13). Jesus taught that love is a requirement for those who believe in Him. Loving God and our neighbor are the most important commandments for “the entire law and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commandments” (Matthew 22:40 nlt). Building on the original standard of “love your neighbor as yourself” (v. 39), Christ sets a higher standard, patterned now after His sacrificial love. He wants us to “love one another [as] I have loved you” (John 13:34). Calling it a new commandment, Jesus said love was the distinguishing mark of those who believe in Him (v. 35). Loving others is proof that we’re God’s children who’ve experienced His love (1 John 4:7-12, 19-21).
Learn more wisdom from Paul's letters to the church in Corinth By: K. T. Sim
Grace Now
[Love] is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered. 1 Corinthians 13:5
We hurried to a fast-food restaurant to have lunch together on my friend Jerrie’s short work break. Arriving at the door about the same time, six young men got inside just in front of us. Knowing we didn’t have much time to spare, we grumbled inwardly. They stood as a group at both registers to be sure each of them could order first. Then I heard Jerrie whisper to herself, “Show grace now.” Wow! Sure, letting us go first would have been nice, but what a great reminder to think of others’ needs and desires and not only my own.
The Bible teaches that love is patient, kind, and unselfish; it’s “not easily angered” (1 Corinthians 13:5). “It often . . . prefers [others’] welfare, and satisfaction, and advantage, to its own,” wrote commentator Matthew Henry of this love. God’s kind of love thinks of others first.
In a world where many of us are easily irritated, we frequently have occasion to ask God for help and the grace to choose to be patient with others and to be kind (v. 4). Proverbs 19:11 adds, “A person’s wisdom yields patience; it is to one’s glory to overlook an offense.”
That’s the kind of loving action that brings honor to God, and He might even use it to bring thoughts of His love to others.
With God's strength, let’s take every opportunity to show grace now.
By: Anne Cetas
Reflect & Pray
In what ways might you need to not act out of frustration? How could turning to God help you?
I’m in need of Your help, God. I face many levels of irritation but want to instead be filled and overflowing with Your kind of love.
My Utmost for His Highest, by Oswald Chambers
Thursday, September 05, 2024
Keeping Watch
Watch with Me. — Matthew 26:38
When Jesus says, “Watch with me,” he is telling us to watch with no private point of view at all. In the early stages of our life with him, we do not watch with Jesus; we watch for him and expect him to watch with us. It takes us time to begin to view everything that happens in the way our Lord views it—through the revelation of the Bible.
Jesus asked his disciples to watch with him in the garden of Gethsemane, when peril was close at hand. In the same way, he comes to us, in some present-day Gethsemane where his honor is at stake, and says, “Watch with me.” He does this to teach us to identify ourselves with him and to see things from his perspective. But we will not. We say, “No, Lord. I can’t see the meaning of this. It’s too awful.”
If we don’t understand our Lord, if we don’t even know what his suffering is for, how can we ever watch with him? The disciples loved Jesus to the limits of their natural capacity, but they didn’t understand what he was after; they couldn’t grasp why his goal was to go to his death. In the garden of Gethsemane, they allowed themselves to be consumed by their own sorrow, and they fell asleep instead of keeping watch. At the end of three years of the closest intimacy with their Lord, “all the disciples deserted him and fled” (Matthew 26:56).
And yet, the disciples did eventually learn to watch with Jesus. How? After Gethsemane, a series of wonderful things happened. Our Lord died, was resurrected, and ascended into heaven; he sent the Holy Spirit, telling his disciples, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you” (Acts 1:8). This is how the disciples were changed. On the day of Pentecost, “all of them were filled with the Holy Spirit” (2:4), and they learned to watch with Jesus for the rest of their lives.
Psalms 146-147; 1 Corinthians 15:1-28
WISDOM FROM OSWALD
The attitude of a Christian towards the providential order in which he is placed is to recognize that God is behind it for purposes of His own.
Biblical Ethics, 99 R
A Word with You, by Ron Hutchcraft
Thursday, September 05, 2024
Getting Used to the Stink of Sin - #9824
Years ago I had some friends who lived near a heavy industrial area where the mills filled the air with a shall we say very distinctive aroma; well, actually, smell would be a better word for it. It was sort of a sulfur-like, rotten eggs type of odor. When you first went there, you would sniff and you'd go, "What is that?" And the people who lived there would say, "What's what?" See, they'd lived around the stink so long, it didn't even register any more. Well, you know, there are some smells you should never get used to.
I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "Getting Used to the Stink of Sin."
Our word for today from the Word of God comes from the prophet Ezekiel. He is receiving his instructions from the Lord in the form of a vision, and here's what it says in chapter 9, verse 2. "With the six men, I saw one clothed in linen who had a writing kit at his side. They came in and stood beside the bronze altar. Now the glory of the God of Israel went up from above the cherubim, where it had been, and moved to the threshold of the temple. Then the Lord called to the man clothed in linen who had the writing kit at his side, and said to him, 'Go throughout the city of Jerusalem and put a mark on the foreheads of those who grieve and lament over all the detestable things that are done in it.'"
Okay, God is saying here, "I'm looking for some people who don't gloss over the sin around them; people who grieve over sin." Well, they were hard to find then; they're hard to find now. Those kinds of people were special then, and they're special now. People who don't get so used to being in the middle of sin that they don't notice the smell any more.
Chances are that you come in daily contact with a lot of sinful garbage; lying that's considered just to be smart business, an acceptance of adultery, a flippant attitude toward sexual purity. That's being casual about something God calls sacred. You can tell by the phrases and the words people use about sexual intimacy. It's a flippant "who cares" approach to a sacred act of love, created by God for a lifetime bond. Well, how does it make you feel when you hear that?
See, we're around it so much sometimes it doesn't break our heart any more, but it breaks God's heart all the time, and He's looking for people whose hearts it can break. We hear people treat God's name, Jesus' name, like dirt. Jesus, the name at which every knee will bow. There are attitudes that amount to nothing less than idol worship, and we're no longer bothered by it: living for money, living for a guy or a girl, living for your music, living for the next party, living for your children. It's time we prayed, "God, give me back my sense of spiritual smell when there is something more important than You to people."
Unless we get with God daily and see what He sees, feel what He feels, we will be worn down, we're going to be eroded until, honestly, sin really doesn't look that bad. Imagine telling a drunk driving joke to a man who kept saying, "Please, I don't think it's funny." You say, "What is your problem?" "Because a drunk driver killed my son."
See, that's how God feels about the sin that we take so lightly. It killed His Son. You want to see what sin looks like? It's God's Son hanging by nails from a tree. Ask God to make you wise about what is good, and innocent about what is evil rather than being intrigued by it.
We don't sit in judgment of people. No, the Bible says to tell them about our hope with gentleness and respect. But by the same token, sin should stink to us. It's the rotting odor of death, no matter how glamorously it is perfumed. So, don't get used to the smell.