Max Lucado Daily: DO WHAT YOU CAN - May 22, 2025
You can’t control the weather. You aren’t in charge of the economy. You can’t un-wreck the car. But you can do this: you can map out a strategy. Remember, God is in this crisis. Ask him to give you a plan—two or three steps you can take today. Seek counsel from someone who’s faced a similar challenge. Ask friends to pray. Look for resources. Reach out to a support group. Make a plan.
You’d prefer a miracle? You’d rather see the bread multiplied or the stormy sea turned to glassy calm in a finger snap? God may do this. Then again, he may tell you, “I’m with you. I can use this for good. Now, let’s make a plan.”
You see, God’s sovereignty doesn’t negate our responsibility. Just the opposite – it empowers it. So trust God to do what you can’t. Obey God and do what you can. You’ll get through this.
You'll Get Through This: Hope and Help for Turbulent Times
Matthew 22:23-46
Marriage and Resurrection
23–28 That same day, Sadducees approached him. This is the party that denies any possibility of resurrection. They asked, “Teacher, Moses said that if a man dies childless, his brother is obligated to marry his widow and get her with child. Here’s a case where there were seven brothers. The first brother married and died, leaving no child, and his wife passed to his brother. The second brother also left her childless, then the third—and on and on, all seven. Eventually the wife died. Now here’s our question: At the resurrection, whose wife is she? She was a wife to each of them.”
29–33 Jesus answered, “You’re off base on two counts: You don’t know your Bibles, and you don’t know how God works. At the resurrection we’re beyond marriage. As with the angels, all our ecstasies and intimacies then will be with God. And regarding your speculation on whether the dead are raised or not, don’t you read your Bibles? The grammar is clear: God says, ‘I am—not was—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.’ The living God defines himself not as the God of dead men, but of the living.” Hearing this exchange the crowd was much impressed.
The Most Important Command
34–36 When the Pharisees heard how he had bested the Sadducees, they gathered their forces for an assault. One of their religion scholars spoke for them, posing a question they hoped would show him up: “Teacher, which command in God’s Law is the most important?”
37–40 Jesus said, “ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your passion and prayer and intelligence.’ This is the most important, the first on any list. But there is a second to set alongside it: ‘Love others as well as you love yourself.’ These two commands are pegs; everything in God’s Law and the Prophets hangs from them.”
David’s Son and Master
41–42 As the Pharisees were regrouping, Jesus caught them off balance with his own test question: “What do you think about the Christ? Whose son is he?” They said, “David’s son.”
43–45 Jesus replied, “Well, if the Christ is David’s son, how do you explain that David, under inspiration, named Christ his ‘Master’?
God said to my Master,
“Sit here at my right hand
until I make your enemies your footstool.”
“Now if David calls him ‘Master,’ how can he at the same time be his son?”
46 That stumped them, literalists that they were. Unwilling to risk losing face again in one of these public verbal exchanges, they quit asking questions for good.
Our Daily Bread reading and devotion
Thursday, May 22, 2025
by Winn Collier
TODAY'S SCRIPTURE
Matthew 16:21-28
You’re Not in the Driver’s Seat
21–22 Then Jesus made it clear to his disciples that it was now necessary for him to go to Jerusalem, submit to an ordeal of suffering at the hands of the religious leaders, be killed, and then on the third day be raised up alive. Peter took him in hand, protesting, “Impossible, Master! That can never be!”
23 But Jesus didn’t swerve. “Peter, get out of my way. Satan, get lost. You have no idea how God works.”
24–26 Then Jesus went to work on his disciples. “Anyone who intends to come with me has to let me lead. You’re not in the driver’s seat; I am. Don’t run from suffering; embrace it. Follow me and I’ll show you how. Self-help is no help at all. Self-sacrifice is the way, my way, to finding yourself, your true self. What kind of deal is it to get everything you want but lose yourself? What could you ever trade your soul for?
27–28 “Don’t be in such a hurry to go into business for yourself. Before you know it the Son of Man will arrive with all the splendor of his Father, accompanied by an army of angels. You’ll get everything you have coming to you, a personal gift. This isn’t pie in the sky by and by. Some of you standing here are going to see it take place, see the Son of Man in kingdom glory.”
Today's Insights
After Peter’s confession that Jesus is “the Messiah, the Son of the living God” (Matthew 16:16), Christ speaks plainly about His imminent suffering, death, burial, and resurrection (v. 21; 17:22-23; 20:17-19; 26:2). Peter rejected a Messiah who would suffer and die, but he was severely rebuked by Jesus (16:22-23). In the wilderness temptations at the start of Christ’s ministry, Satan offered to make Him king without the suffering (4:8-10). Peter’s idea of the kingly Messiah was the same as Satan’s—the crown without the cross. But going to the cross to die for sinful humanity was the primary reason Jesus came. To prevent His crucifixion is what Satan wanted. Jesus recognized that the same satanic source was behind Peter’s rejection of the cross (16:23).
Love Worthy of Our Life
Whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it. Matthew 16:25
William Temple, a twentieth-century English bishop, once concluded a sermon to Oxford students with the words of the hymn “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross.” But he cautioned against taking the song lightly. “If you mean [the words] with all your hearts, sing them as loud as you can,” Temple said. “If you don’t mean them at all, keep silent. If you mean them even a little, and want to mean them more, sing them very softly.” The crowd went quiet as everyone eyed the lyrics. Slowly, thousands of voices began to sing in a whisper, mouthing the final lines with gravity: “Love so amazing, so divine / Demands my soul, my life, my all.”
Those Oxford students understood the reality that believing in and following Jesus is a serious choice, because it means saying yes to a radical love that demands everything from us. Following Christ requires our entire life, our whole being. He plainly told His disciples, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:24). No one should make this choice flippantly.
Yet following Jesus is also the way to our deepest joy. Life with Him, we’ll discover, is the life we truly desire. It appears to be a great paradox. However, if we respond to God’s love, believe in Christ, and relinquish our selfish, shortsighted demands, we’ll find the life our soul craves (v. 25).
Reflect & Pray
What will believing in and following Jesus cost you? What will you gain?
Dear God, following You isn’t easy, but I want to give You my life and my all.
For further study, read Keeping the Faith—The Cost of Following Christ
My Utmost for His Highest, by Oswald Chambers
Thursday, May 22, 2025
Now This Explains It
. . . that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us.— John 17:21
If you are walking a lonely path just now, read John 17. It explains exactly why you are where you are: Jesus has prayed that you may be one with him, as he is one with the Father. Jesus isn’t leaving you all alone; he is getting you alone with him, so that his prayer for oneness might be answered. Are you helping God to answer Jesus’s prayer? Or do you have some other goal for your life? Since you became a disciple, you cannot be as independent as you used to be.
Some of us think God’s entire purpose is to answer our prayers. But there is only one prayer that God must answer, and that is the prayer of Jesus: “. . . that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you.” Are you this intimate with Jesus?
God isn’t concerned about our plans. He doesn’t say, “Do you want to go through this trial? Do you want to suffer this loss?” He allows things to happen to us for his own purposes. Either the things we go through make us sweeter, better, and nobler, or they make us more critical and fault-finding, more insistent on having our own way. Either trials and difficulties make us fiends, or they make us saints; it depends entirely on our relationship with God. If our relationship to him is one in which we always say, “Your will be done,” then we will have the consolation of John 17. We will know that our Father is working according to his wisdom and toward his ends, and this will prevent us from becoming mean and cynical.
Jesus has prayed for nothing less than absolute oneness with him. Some of us are far from this state of oneness, but we can be sure that, because Jesus has prayed that it may be so, God won’t leave us alone until it is.
1 Chronicles 16-18; John 7:28-53
WISDOM FROM OSWALD
Beware of isolation; beware of the idea that you have to develop a holy life alone. It is impossible to develop a holy life alone; you will develop into an oddity and a peculiarism, into something utterly unlike what God wants you to be. The only way to develop spiritually is to go into the society of God’s own children, and you will soon find how God alters your set. God does not contradict our social instincts; He alters them.
Biblical Psychology, 189 L
A Word with You, by Ron Hutchcraft
Thursday, May 22, 2025
Escaping the Stalker of Your Soul - #10009
Sometimes when we travel to Indian reservations in North America, we end up on roads that go where not many go. Our Director at the time, our Ojibwe brother, Craig Smith, was on one of those roads. His destination was a remote reserve in Northern Canada. At one point in his 140-mile journey, he noticed a van coming from the other direction, proceeding very slowly. Craig decided to slow down, too. That's when he saw what the van driver had already seen - a beautiful deer by the side of the road. Sadly, one of his rear legs was broken and just kind of dangling limply when he moved. At that point, he saw the rest of the picture that had caused the van to stop in front of the deer. On the other side of the road was a wolf, stalking the wounded deer. It was obvious all the van could do was postpone the inevitable. There was no happy ending for that deer.
I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "Escaping the Stalker of Your Soul."
If we could put on God-glasses for even a day and look at our life, we'd see a scene much like my friend saw that day in the Northwood's of Canada. And it would unnerve us. Because we'd see the one who is stalking us, waiting for the chance to have us. He's the one the Bible calls the devil, and he wants your soul. The Bible describes him, not as a wolf, but as a lion who "prowls around...looking for someone to devour" (1 Peter 5:8). To ignore or laugh off that warning is to play right into the predator's hands.
However smart or strong we may think we are, that vulnerable deer is an all-too-accurate picture of us. Again, the Bible describes us as being "like sheep" (Isaiah 53:6), one of the most vulnerable animals of all. The devil's goal for you can be summed up in one horrible little word - hell. The Bible says that the people who are on that road are "many" and the people who are headed for heaven are "few" (Matthew 7:13-14). That should be unsettling for all of us.
Our word for today from the Word of God reveals the life-taker who is counting on having his way with us. But it also reveals the life-giver, who is our hope. In John 10:10 Jesus says, "The thief (that's the devil) comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life and have it to the full." The devil seems to offer you life, but he gives you only death. His plan to steal and kill and destroy you is to keep you away from the only One who can save you. That's Jesus. Because Jesus was torn apart for your sin so you don't ever have to be.
The only hope that wounded deer had that day was a rescuer. That's your only hope of ever being free from your sins, of being with God in heaven someday. The Bible says that Jesus "was pierced for our transgressions" and "crushed for our iniquities" (Isaiah 53:5). Like the van that temporarily stood between the killer and the deer, all our religion and spirituality can do is postpone the inevitable. There are a lot of nice things that can't save us. Sin is too expensive for religion to pay for. The Rescuer is our only hope. And the Bible says of Him, "By His wounds we are healed" (Isaiah 53:5).
The devil's plan is simple: keep you busy with anything but Jesus. He doesn't care if it's pleasure, or religion, or work, or education, or family, or people-pleasing. All he needs to do is to keep you from trusting Jesus. All he wants to do is keep you from Jesus until you breathe your last breath.
Today, the life-taker and the life-giver are fighting for your soul. That's the tug-of-war you feel in your heart. Please, would you let this be the day you give yourself to the only One who can save you; the Rescuer who refused to save Himself so you could be saved. Would you tell Him, "Jesus, I'm Yours."
There's information at our website that will help you be sure you belong to Him. Would you go there today? It's ANewStory.com.
I love the way the Bible describes what will happen to you the moment you give your life to Jesus. You're going to love this. It says you will literally "cross over from death to life" (John 5:24).
