Archive for the 'Devotional' Category
Every Wednesday night I get the special privilege of gathering together with a group of believers from the church and praying together. We usually begin with a short devotional and then launch into a time of prayer for our church, our community, our nation, etc.
Recently we read through Psalm 139 and were moved by the tenderness that David uses in referring to God’s continual presence even in the midst of suffering.
David writes, “O Lord, you have searched me and known me! You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from afar. You search out my pat and my lying down and are acquainted with all my ways…Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence?…If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light about me be night.’ even the darkness is not dark to you.”
One of the things that I love about the psalms is how realistic they are. David spends much of the chapter using this kind of intimate language for the presence of God. Having written all of this, you would think that David would be a man without a care and without anxiety and yet in verse 23 he writes, “Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and see my anxious thoughts.” It’s comforting to me to know that even the author of Psalm 23 and Psalm 139 struggled with anxiety from time to time.
The lesson that I take away from verse 23 is that the cure to anxiety is found in intimacy with the Lord. That isn’t to say that we won’t ever experience anxiety or have cares in this world, but the secret to finding shalom (peace) is where we go in the midst of those cares. So with that in mind, our small group took our prayers to the throne of grace and we found peace.
September 06 2010 | Devotional | No Comments »
It’s funny how you can read a verse over and over again throughout the course of your life and all of a sudden one day it pops out of the page like you’d never seen it before. That happened to me the other day as I was reading Proverbs 18:1 – “Whoever isolates himself seeks his own desire; he breaks out against all sound judgment.”
One of the clearest signs that a member of my congregation is being severely tempted by sin is that I don’t see them around the church anymore. After all who wants to be in a place that talks about sin as if it’s a bad thing when you’re enjoying it so much. You see sin is inherently anti-social, it naturally draws our attention in upon ourselves and drags us out of community with other believers.
So what’s the solution to the temptation to isolate ourselves and pursue our own desires? In a word “community.” We desperately need to be engaged in an authentic community that simply will not let us go when we try to isolate ourselves and “break out against all sound judgment.”
August 16 2010 | Devotional | No Comments »
One of the last things that I did before leaving Mount Vernon was to visit one of the sweetest women that I have ever met with my good friend Caryl. We pulled up to her apartment, walked in and enjoyed talking to her about her many decades ministering at EBC, where her favorite plants were from, and what it was like to be diagnosed with caner. It was a very special afternoon.
As I drove back to the church I noticed a group of college girls running on the side of the road conditioning for some kind of sport and then it hit me. It wasn’t that long ago that this dear woman who I’d just visited was able to run and play with her own friends. It wasn’t that long ago that the entire world seemed to be full of possibilities for her and adventure waited around every corner. It wasn’t that long ago that cancer was the furthest thing from her mind and yet today, just a few short decades later it’s probably one of the only things on her mind.
I guess what I’m saying is that this experience was a powerful reminder that “life is short!” It won’t be long before I begin to slow down myself, and it probably won’t be very long after that when God will call me home. And in a few short years there will be very few people who even remember my name. The Psalmist talks about this in Psalm 90:12, “Teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” The point is that we only get so many days and before we know it life has passed us by, so the question is how am I going to spend these few days that the Lord has given me? The best place to start is probably in asking yourself, “How am I going to spend today in light of how short my life really is?”
July 26 2010 | Devotional | 3 Comments »
One of the hard realities about Biblical Counseling is the realization that you cannot change someone. If a drunk is determined to drink, all of the talk in the world isn’t going to change the fact that he is going to go to the bar tonight and get drunk. The good news is that while I cannot change anyone, God can and he seems to use two primary means of doing so. 1) By using a faithful counselor to confront sin and encourage the process of change. 2) By using painful circumstances in life to bring a person to a sense of his need for personal change.
2 Chronicles 33:1-13 is an intriguing account of a king named Manasseh who sinned greatly against God and who God had to chasten in order to bring about repentance.
Verses 1-9 record the atrocities that Manasseh committed:
He did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, according to the abominations of the nations…he burned his sons as an offering in the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, and used fortune-telling and omens and sorcery, and dealt with mediums and with necromancers. He did much evil in the sight of the Lord, provoking him to anger…
Verse 10 records God’s first response to Manasseh’s rebellion, “The Lord spoke to Manasseh and to his people, but they paid no attention.” Since Manasseh refused to listen to God’s counsel verse 11 says, “Therefore the Lord brought upon them the commanders of the army of the king of Assyria, who captured Manasseh with hooks and bound him with chains of bronze and brought him to Babylon.” Finally, verse 12 records Manasseh’s repentance, “And when he was in distress, he entreated the favor of the Lord his God and humbled himself greatly before the God of his fathers…and God was moved by his entreaty…and brought him again to Jerusalem…Then Manasseh knew that the Lord was God.” It took the hooks and chains of Assyria to finally bring Manasseh to his senses and realize that the Lord is God.
The fact of the matter is that God is very jealous for His people and He will use any means necessary to bring his people to the place where they will listen to Him, even if that requires using hooks and chains to get our attention.
July 19 2010 | Devotional | No Comments »
I’m convinced that one of the reasons God gives us family is to teach us that we are not nearly as sanctified as we think. As I recall, before I married my wife I was almost completely sanctified. Then God gave me this wonderful gift called marriage and I suddenly realized that I was not nearly as holy as I once thought myself to be. It’s one thing to be sanctified when everyone in your family agrees with you (because you’re a family of one), but once you add another person to the mix it’s another story. After a few years of marriage Amy and I kind of figured each other out and resumed our positions of nearly perfect sanctification (or so we thought), until God gave us children…and life has never been the same.
The other day I was at home trying to get some work done when Micah completely lost it. We’ve always had a hard time with Micah when it comes to eating, but it seems that lately things have been especially difficult. He threw himself on the ground in a fit of rage and tears over the prospect of having to eat a bite of pizza (we have pretty low expectations of Micah right now when it comes to food, but pizza is where I draw the line). As I surveyed the situation I was honestly enraged. I immediately took Micah up to his room, disciplined him and slammed the door while he sat and thought about what he had just done to us.
One of the things that parenting has shown me is that I had no idea that I could become so angry over such small things. It’s not that Micah didn’t need to be disciplined, because he certainly did. But there is a big difference between disciplining out of anger over what’s been done and disciplining out of love and concern for the well being of your child. A few minutes later I went back into Micah’s room, apologized for my sin and asked his forgiveness for my anger.
James1:19-20 says, “Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness that God requires.” At the heart of sinful anger is a demand to be right and a demand for other people to meet your standards of righteousness. That’s why James reminds us that “the anger of man does not produce the righteousness that God requires.” You see in the end it doesn’t matter if Micah lives up to my standards or not, what matters is that he lives up to God’s standards which have already been met in Christ who took upon Himself the just wrath of His Father for sin. My job in parenting is not to hold Micah accountable to my standards, but rather to point him to his need of a Savior who has already satisfied the Father’s standards of perfect righteousness and then to rest in that righteousness which comes by faith.
July 12 2010 | Devotional | 1 Comment »
The other day Amy and I took Micah to a Junior High bowling event. We had taken him to this kind of event before and knew that he loves to line the ball up (on the little ramp they give him), push the ball down and watch the pins fall. However, this time things were different for Micah.
It was probably due to the fact that he was overly tired from a late bedtime the night before, and probably overly stimulated by all of the sites, sounds and smells but bowling just didn’t give him the pleasure that we were expecting it to. He would cry about having to wait his turn while the other kids bowled, cry when the ball didn’t do what he wanted it to do, and cry when I tried to hold him in my lap so that we could watch together.
After about 20 minutes, we decided that this wasn’t going to be his night so I walked he and Amy out to the van, loaded them up and let her take him home. As I walked back toward the bowling alley with a heavy heart I couldn’t help but notice how hard Micah was fighting against joy and how heart broken I was that he didn’t get to experience the joy that I’d intended for him that evening. Rather than trusting his Dad to lead him into experiences that would maximize his joy, he was trusting in his own four year old wisdom to get what he wanted and it made him miserable.
You don’t have to be a theologian to see the parallel to the Christian life here. I too fight against the joy that my Father intends for me. I tend to trust my own wisdom above His. I try and do things my way, in my own strength but every time it only leads to sorrow and anxiety.
As I thought about my son I was reminded of Proverbs 3:5-6, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths.” If I want joy in my life, it begins with trusting God to bring me joy and not fighting against His joy by pursuing my own paths.
July 05 2010 | Devotional | 1 Comment »
I was reminded this morning of a spiritual discipline that I often forget, the discipline of looking back. I tend to live my life in the immediate here and now, which I suppose is good in some ways, but in other ways my myopic view of my life tends to keep me trapped in the present. There is great value in looking to the past and remembering the faithfulness of God in all of life’s paths. Here are a few of the things that come to mind when I think of God’s faithfulness over the course of my life.
- Allowing me to attend the Master’s College and to learn the Bible.
- Giving me a wife that is far better than I deserve.
- Giving me three wonderful kids who daily teach me my need of grace.
- Bringing me to Emmanuel Baptist Church and sustaining me here these past five years.
- Leading me to Cool Church and preparing my heart for this new ministry.
- Allowing me to attend the Master’s Seminary and to have godly men pour their lives into me.
- Providing godly Christian parents who love me and taught me how to love Jesus.
- Giving me good friends who challenge me and who genuinely care for me.
- Placing me in a Youth Ministry when I was younger that patiently worked with me and taught me how to have a servant’s heart.
- Letting me serve at PMC Church and assigning Pastor Ray to care for me and to train me in the ministry.
Here’s a quote from F. Whitfield on looking back.
Consider how great things he hath done for you. 1 Sam. 12:24
Look back on all the way the Lord your God has led you. Do you not see it dotted with ten thousand blessings in disguise? Call to mind the needed succor sent at the critical moment: the right way chosen for you, instead of the wrong way you had chosen for yourself; the hurtful thing to which your heart so fondly clung, removed out of your path; the breathing-time granted, which your tried and struggling spirit just at the moment needed. Oh, has not Jesus stood at your side when you knew it not? Has not Infinite Love encircled every event with its everlasting arms, and gilded every cloud with its merciful lining? Oh, retrace your steps, and mark His footprint in each one! Thank Him for them all, and learn the needed lesson of leaning more simply on Jesus.
June 07 2010 | Devotional | No Comments »
Psalm 139 begins with these words,
O Lord, you have searched me and known me! You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from afar. You search out my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all my ways.
These beautiful verses begin what many consider to be one of the most intimate psalms in all of the Bible. As David makes his way through these 24 verses he explains how there is nothing about him that God does not already know. In other words, David stands before God completely exposed, so much so that in verses 15 and 16 he writes,
My frame was not hidden from you when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance…
This level of exposure may sound intimidating at first, because it leaves us with no place to hide. David writes, “Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!” Upon further reflection I believe that this exposure is one of the most comforting aspects of our relationship with God. Consider a few of the benefits of standing totally exposed before God.
- Being exposed before God frees me from any pretense. So much of life is spent trying to be someone or something that we’re not. Yet, there is no reason to pretend with God, because He is already fully aware of exactly who we are. In other words, we are free to be ourselves with God.
- Being exposed before God frees me from the fear of man. Because God already knows every single detail of my life, including all of my faults I don’t need to be afraid of what other people find out about me. This isn’t to say that we need to go parading our sin about, but rather that because God already knows all of the details of my life and there is no one I want to please more than Him, I don’t need to be afraid of what men say or think of me.
- Being exposed before God reminds me of my need for the Gospel. The thing which makes my exposure before God bearable is the fact that Christ has cleansed me and clothed me with his righteousness. Ultimately, I have no business standing before God with any confidence whatsoever, yet because of the work of Christ I can come before the throne of grace with confidence because of what Christ has done.
May 24 2010 | Devotional | No Comments »
The other day I was pondering the question of what it means to “bless God.” In some ways it sounds rather inappropriate, because God is so great and I am so small that I can’t see how I could ever really bless him. As I was thinking, I even began to wonder if the Bible actually calls us to bless God which lead me to Psalm 134.
Come, bless the LORD, all you servants of the LORD,
who stand by night in the house of the LORD!
Lift up your hands to the holy place
and bless the LORD
May the LORD bless you from Zion,
he who made heaven and earth!
Psalm 134 is the second shortest Psalm in the Bible and in it we are commanded to bless God twice and once told that God will bless us. What’s interesting is that the same Hebrew word is used for us blessing God and for God blessing us. Which begs the question, how can I give anything to God that would be considered a blessing? Especially when it says just a few verses later that God is going to give me something that is a blessing.
Some translations have gone so far as to actually change the word at he beginning of the psalm to “praise”, while keeping the last use of the word as “bless”. When I started to look through some commentaries to see if I could get some help I came across this quote from James Montgomery Boice, which I found to be very insightful:
What will happen if you do take God seriously and worship [bless] him reverently, as he needs to be worshiped? The “Maker of heaven and earth” will “bless you from Zion” (v. 3).
This last blessing is not merely something tacked on, like a thoughtless benediction at the end of a morning service. In the Hebrew text the word “praise,” as in “Praise the Lord” in verses 1 and 2, is the same word as “bless” in verse 3. So the thought is that if we bless God in our worship, as we must, then God will also bless us abundantly in our daily lives. This is the only ultimate goal of any Christian: to bless God and to be blessed by him – to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.”
The point is that we bless God in the sense that we actually do Him good when we praise Him, which is the idea behind blessing “to do good to someone”. In other words, it matters to God that we worship him because it does Him good. Not that God is lacking in any way but He actually desires heartfelt worship and is pleased when His children worship Him. In turn, God blesses us and does good to us as we worship because in worshiping God we are doing what we were naturally created to do and thus we find fullness of joy and blessing as we worship.
May 17 2010 | Devotional | 1 Comment »
The other day I got a call from our Real Estate agent with some bad news. Prices in the area are continuing to drop in the worst real-estate market since the 1960’s, so we had to drop the price of our home by another $10,000. This wouldn’t be so bad, if it weren’t for the fact that we had already priced the house $15,000 under what we’d actually paid for it. The good news is that when we bought our home we put a lot of money down, the bad news is that we’re almost certainly going to lose it all…assuming that we can sell the house at all.
I’ve known for quite some time that this is a pretty bad market, so it’s not as though all of this comes as a surprise to me, but somehow that doesn’t make it any easier. Last week, after having our home on the market for over a month without a single person coming to look at it,, I began to get nervous. What if the house doesn’t sell by the time we need to move? Do I rent it out? Where do I find renters? What if the market continues to drop and 2 years from now I’m in a worse position than I am today?
If you’ve ever been in what feels like a desperate situation, you know that questions like these can make you feel as though the walls are closing in around you. You begin to theorize and strategize and to frantically search for any means of escape or redemption.
These feelings aren’t limited to financial situations, they can be equally true of the mother struggling with a disobedient child who only wants him to obey, or of the pastor struggling with a critical church member who only wants to have a church business meeting without any fights, or of the business owner who only wants to see the economy turn around so that he can stay in business. What they all have in common is the passionate desire for some kind of redemption from difficult circumstances.
What I’ve come to realize is that the great danger in these moments
is not that God will not deliver me, but rather that I begin to desire redemption from my circumstances more than I desire the Redeemer. In other words, the danger is an attitude that says, “You can tell me about Jesus having the answer to my problems all day long, but what I really need is…”. The reason that this attitude is so dangerous is that it functionally denies the sufficiency of Christ and replaces my need for Christ with my need for deliverance from a set of circumstances. In the midst of hard things, the only proper response is to trust.
Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines, the produce of the olive fail and the fields yield no food, the flock be cut off from the fold and there be no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the LORD; I will take joy in the God of my salvation. God, the Lord is my strength; he makes my feet like the deer’s; he makes me tread on my high places. (Habakkuk 3:17-19a)
The issue that is at stake when God asks you if you trust Him, is if you desire the Redeemer more than you desire redemption from your circumstances.
April 19 2010 | Devotional | 6 Comments »
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