Category Archives: Wednesday

“Listening”

“Just because I have listened carefully and intently to one thing from God does not mean that I will listen to everything He says.” From Devotion of Hearing by Oswald Chambers

These last few days I’ve spent some time thinking about what my goals are when I read the Bible. Sometimes I am unsure about what to read. I really am trying to “hear” what I read but nothing “speaks” to me. It seems presumptuous to look at God’s Word and say, “nope, not that” but I do that at times. Here’s the bottom line of even that very selective reading plan…I’m there and so is God.

It’s times like that when the devotional “words” of personal heroes of the faith like Oswald Chambers can be a welcome catalyst of direction. His title and simple confession I quoted above reminded me that even my written words can become a “devotion of hearing.” The secret is learning to be a better “listener” as I read what God has to say for himself…and write myself a note so I’ll remember.

Jeremiah 33:3 (ESV) Call to me and I will answer you, and will tell you great and hidden things that you have not known.

Romans 10:17 (ESV) So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.

Luke 11:28 (ESV) But he said, “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it!”

Hebrews 2:1 (ESV) Therefore we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it.

‘Nuff Said

Excerpts from Hebrews 6 [NIV& TLB]
1 Therefore let us move beyond the elementary teachings about Christ and be taken forward to maturity,

10 God is not unjust; he will not forget your work and the love you have shown him

12 Then, knowing what lies ahead for you, you won’t become bored with being a Christian nor become spiritually dull and indifferent, but you will be anxious to follow the example of those who receive all that God has promised them because of their strong faith and patience.

19 We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure.

Amen.

Entitlement

Exodus 14:11-12 They said to Moses, “Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you brought us to the desert to die? What have you done to us by bringing us out of Egypt? 12 Didn’t we say to you in Egypt, ‘Leave us alone; let us serve the Egyptians’? It would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the desert!”

Quote from Ray Cortese, Pastor at Seven Rivers Presbyterian Church in Lecanto, Florida. “It’s easier to take people out of Egypt than it is to take Egypt out of people.”

That statement hit home for me in a very personal way. “Egypt” is my metaphor for entitlement – “the belief that one is inherently deserving of privileges or special treatment.” See if my story sounds familiar to you.

I am like those Israelites. It seems to be built into me to feel I am entitled to more from my faith…from God…from circumstances…and from people too. There was that thrilling moment of freedom when I accepted God’s promise that he would give me more than I deserved. That’s when the amazing journey began. I could clearly see I was being led to a new place and was eager to get there. It’s that timeline between being led and getting there that is the problem.

I guarantee you won’t forget being saved. Just as surely I can testify that your sense of entitlement will become an issue. That realization hit me hard on Sunday. Like the Israelites I know what I have escaped. I have my own forty years walking with Jesus. Shouldn’t wisdom and faith be like second nature that just oozes out of me by now? Why do I have to spend so much time reading, studying, writing and rewriting to end up with a few paragraphs of belief only to discover I still have so far to go? Don’t I deserve some kind of powerful response to my will to keep walking?

Ah, there’s the tell…”my will.”  That’s my “Egypt.” This is what brought me to tears: you don’t get credit hours or special privileges for time spent walking through Egypt with God. Your time is the only thing that can make the one entitlement you actually have been given a reality…to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. Deuteronomy 6:5

Expect God

Hosea 12:6 Oh, come back to God. Live by the principles of love and justice, and always be expecting much from him, your God.

Hosea 13:4 “I alone am God, your Lord, and have been ever since I brought you out from Egypt. You have no God but me, for there is no other Savior. 5 I took care of you in the wilderness, in that dry and thirsty land.

Hosea 14:9 Whoever is wise, let him understand these things. Whoever is intelligent, let him listen. For the paths of the Lord are true and right, and good men walk along them. But sinners trying them will fail.

Here’s the very abbreviated version of the last three chapters of Hosea.

Come back to a place where you independently depend on God to do for you to what he has done for others. Expect that he will be at work in your life. Be wise so you understand what it is God is trying to teach you. Be smart and listen carefully. The path of the Lord is easier than the tangle of the woods and the company’s better.

The Bottom Line

Hosea 9:8 “I appointed the prophets to guard my people, but the people have blocked them at every turn and publicly declared their hatred, even in the Temple of the Lord.

10 “O Israel, how well I remember those first delightful days when I led you through the wilderness! How refreshing was your love! How satisfying, like the early figs of summer in their first season!,…

This is the bottom line: a faithful prophet and an unfaithful wife have become an object lesson for us. God is determined.  He will be our guard.  He will not let us self-destruct without a fight.

Priority

Hosea 4:1 Hear the word of the Lord, you Israelites, because the Lord has a charge to bring against you who live in the land: “There is no faithfulness, no love, no acknowledgment of God in the land…”6…my people are destroyed from lack of knowledge…14…a people without understanding will come to ruin!
Hosea 5:”… I will carry them off, with no one to rescue them.
15 Then I will return to my lair until they have borne their guilt and seek my face—in their misery they will earnestly seek me.”

There’s no way to avoid the message in Chapters 4 and 5. They’re heading for trouble. The Israelites did not lack information. They lacked making what they knew about God their priority. The charges that the Lord says are their downfall seem like a Cause and Effect story to me. The Cause?..”lack of knowledge.” The Effect? “…no faithfulness, no love, no acknowledgment of God in the land.”

That repeated “no” the prophet uses is a record of proof for us today that information about God doesn’t automatically convert to knowledge and understanding. Information is good but it’s really just ideas to consider, it doesn’t save us. Hosea reminds us of the most important of our priorities…to earnestly seek the Lord that can save us.

“By” Faith

Hebrews 11:1 Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. 2 This is what the ancients were commended for…13 All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth.

Oswald Chambers said “Believe God is always the God you know Him to be when you are nearest to Him.” The mystery of living by faith is how easy it is to forget that.  Sometimes circumstances seem more real than faith

Hebrews 11 is called the “By Faith” chapter. The real life stories of those notable “ancients,” elsewhere in the Bible, tell us the human side of their lives as well. They were not perfect. Their circumstances were very real. Faith was just as mysterious, and the evidence just as elusive, for them as it is for us today and yet they were commended for it. Why?

Twenty one times Hebrews 11 gives us the simple answer to what makes “living by faith” a reality that works even today for our lives. It’s all summed up in that one small preposition, “By.” That little word is the agent of change that makes possible a faith that impacts what we’re able do.  Remembering our most intimate moments with God is what makes living “by faith” something that’s more real than circumstances.  That’s commendable.

Carry On

The observance of Advent and Christmas has served it’s purpose. The darkness of night was lit up with the special lights we hung. We heard the annual music of bells being rung outside many stores. Those once-a-year cookies were both the taste and the aroma of the season.

It’s complete, but it’s not over.

Everything around us in that season was designed [by God] to reawaken our physical senses. Once again we’ve been stimulated by the external celebration to see for ourselves whether the fullness of these words from Mark 12:30 can become real in us: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.”

The season is complete, but it’s not over.

These words from I Timothy 3:16 are our challenge now to carry on: “Beyond all question, the mystery from which true godliness springs is great: He appeared in the flesh, was vindicated by the Spirit, was seen by angels, was preached among the nations, was believed on in the world, was taken up in glory.”

We’ve moved beyond the external stimulation of this Christmas season and that long-ago story of God’s intervention to restore “our” broken world. Now it’s become personal; can Jesus, the Christ, restore “my” broken world?

It’s not over, it’s just beginning.

Temple

branchribbons

“The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else.  From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands.  God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us.  ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’…

Acts 17:24-28

Don’t be fooled into believing any details of the birth of Jesus were God’s last ditch effort to provide a place for him because there was no room in the inn. That stable and food trough became the sacred space, the temple, where the needs of the people and the holiness of God finally came together.

“God did this so that they [we] would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him…” This is the reality of temple building and Advent; it’s not a blueprint of a grand structure that will save us.  It’s God’s intervention into our daily lives that fills a sacred space within us where our needs and his holiness can finally come together.

“Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own. I Cor 6:19

Reality

branchribbons

28 “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
Matthew 5

We celebrate Advent as a season of Good Tidings of Great Joy, but there’s more to that reality. God purposefully chose to send his only son, Jesus, to live among us knowing the dark and painful realities that lay ahead. There would be no reason to celebrate at all if weren’t for God’s intervention – the birth of “The” Advent – into a world full of broken, “weary and burdened”…and desperate people.

That came back full force when I decided to look back at past journal entries for December 14 and found this startling and heartbreaking event from Advent, 2012.

“The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting occurred on December 14, 2012, in Newtown, Connecticut, when 20-year-old Adam Lanza fatally shot 20 children between 6 and 7 years old, as well as six adult staff members.”

Sandy Hook broke many hearts then, including mine. I wouldn’t have chosen the memory of that massacre for this Advent but sometimes it’s the gaps in a broken heart that make room for remembering the reality of why “The” Advent still matters today. Come into my heart Lord Jesus.