April 18, 2012

Wednesday: April 18, 2012

READ: Proverbs 2

BACKGROUND: This chapter deals with pragmatic, moral benefits of wisdom.

By Verse:
1 – This repeats the idea of Psalm 1 (and many other places) that storing up God’s word within you is an incredibly important part of a wise and righteous life.
4 – Job 28:12 also compares searching for wisdom to mining for silver. What would it look like in our lives if we passionately pursued wisdom the way we do material gain?
9 – If we truly know the Lord and we’ve sought his wisdom, we’ll know the right path to choose at every twist and turn of life.
12-19 – The world will continually try to entice us to leave God’s path and seek after foolish pleasures. Wisdom will help us avoid making this mistake.
21-22 – Israel was promised the land, but God made it clear that their disobedience could result in the removal of the Promised Land from them. Sadly, it happened.

THINK: Today I got in a Facebook fight with my brother. This happens frequently enough that I sometimes worry whether other people who see our posts will begin to think that we don’t get along or that we dislike each other – which couldn’t be further from the truth. The truth is, we both find Facebook fights humorous and amusing. But today’s fight was totally his fault. He posted about tacos and used the phrase “Me and Diana…” when he very clearly ought to have used “Diana and I…” As a loving, caring, kind, wonderful, gracious, etc. older brother I gently corrected him in a comment on his post. He promptly texted me to inform me that he was going to delete my comment. Then he deleted my comment. So I posted it again. And things devolved from there. 🙂 But it struck me, while reading Proverbs 2, that grammar was not my brother’s only faux pas tonight. He also failed to exhibit a teachable spirit. Instead of thankfully accepting the correction that was offered, he turned defensive and even spiteful while refusing to admit his mistake.

I think it’s really easy for all of us to do that. It’s so easy to develop a spirit that just isn’t teachable – to believe that we know it all or that we have it all together or that we don’t need help or instruction. And this is fairly harmless in a ridiculous Facebook faceoff, but in life it can be crippling. When our pride and self-righteousness leave us in a place where we’re unwilling to learn – and not only that but to seek after learning and actively pursue teaching and correction – then our growth is stunted and our potential is left undeveloped. This happens spiritually when we don’t actively seek teaching and correction and wisdom by reading the Bible.

The Sacramento Bee tells the story of Kevin Severin and his son Aiden, then 7 years-old, who committed in 2008 to spend at least 15 minutes every day of the year searching for treasure together. No matter what the weather, they went out and searched each day, and by the end of the year they’d found random items worth over $1,000. Not only that, but they had spent a ton of time enjoying each other’s company and having fun together.

What would it look like for us to develop the kind of humble, teachable spirits that lead us to spend 15 minutes every day in God’s Word? If we seek after wisdom the way that we seek after other things and if we allow God’s Word to penetrate our hearts, then we will grow and we will be transformed into the image of Christ!

ASK: Where, in the busyness of my schedule, can I make regular time for seeking after God and learning from his Word? How can I develop a teachable spirit?

Posted by on April 18, 2012 in Poetry.

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April 17, 2012

Tuesday: April 17, 2012

READ: Amos 5-6

BACKGROUND: Barring the occasional thematically inspired deviation (i.e. Good Friday & Easter) I’m generally trying to start with the beginning of books and work through them systematically to give more context to each of the readings. But it’s my birthday so I’ll do what I want to today, and this is one of my favorite passages in the whole Bible.

Amos was a shepherd (not a typical job for a prophet) from Tekoa in the Southern Kingdom of Judah whom God called and sent to the Northern Kingdom of Israel with a message of judgment for it’s wickedness in turning away from him. One of their great sins – which Amos addresses in this section specifically – is just going through the motions of faith. They check off all the boxes and do the religious rituals, but it doesn’t mean anything to them and they aren’t really living for God and being transformed by him. And, frankly, it makes God mad!

By verse:
5:1 – When Amos calls it a “lament” it indicates that he’s writing as though Israel is already dead.
4 – He gives hope to Israel, imploring them that if they would just seek God they could yet be saved.
5 – Bethel (which ironically means “House of God”) had become a place of paganism and idolatry. Gilgal and Beersheba had too.
7 – They had corrupted the procedures & institutions of justice (like the courts) which essentially turned them into instruments of injustice.
11 – The rich stored up treasures for themselves and ignored the needy. God promises to smash their wealth and take away their treasure.
16 – Farmers being summoned to weep signifies an incredible destruction and calamity because they were usually too busy to be caught up in such things.
21-23 – It’s not that the practices were wrong. It’s that the attitude behind them was wrong. They were empty practices. People were just going through the motions of religion.
27 – This is a preview of the exile.
6:10-11 – This is a frightening scene where a survivor in a house is afraid even to speak God’s name because of the incredible wrath that he has poured out.
12 – This is intentionally ridiculous imagery to show how ridiculous Israel’s behavior was.

THINK: On August 28th, 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., and delivered one of the great speeches in American history, “I Have A Dream.” And in that speech, just prior to declaring publicly his dream, he quoted Amos 5:24. He noted that he was continually asked, along with other leaders of the civil rights movement when they would be satisfied. How many concessions would the white power structure have to make for them to be satisfied and pipe down? How much was enough? When would they be satisfied and settle?
This was his response: “We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied, as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating “For Whites Only”. We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

He had a holy discontent that the world was not the way it should be. I think that God was not satisfied until those things happened, that God will not be satisfied until justice rolls like a river and righteousness like a mighty stream. And I want to challenge all of us to be less satisfied with out world. I think it’s so easy for us, like the nation of Israel, to just go through the motions of faith and check off the right boxes and then return to the incredible materialism of our culture and wallow in self-centeredness. God is not content with that. Not remotely. And we must find his heart. We must line ourselves up with him and develop a holy discontent with a broken world that is not the way it should be.  Can we simply sit back and contentedly enjoy our affluence when thousands of people around the world starve to death every day, and millions of orphans have no place to call home, and hundreds of thousands of children don’t even have shoes to protect their feet, and evil regimes oppress, imprison, coerce, and kill innocent people, and kids are beaten and abused, and there are people in our schools who get made fun of and have no friends, and people in our schools struggle with destructive addictions to drugs & alcohol, and racism exists whereby people are judged by the color of their skin rather than the content of their character, and hurting needy people are lost because they don’t know God? God is not satisfied and so we must not be. We are his hands and feet. We are his instruments and his plan to heal the brokenness around us and we must not stop allowing this mission to define our lives until justice flows like a river and righteousness like a mighty stream!

ASK: Do I sometimes just go through the motions of religion without letting it affect my heart? What are some things in my world that I can no longer tolerate, and how is God calling me to make a difference?

Posted by on April 17, 2012 in Prophecy.

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April 16, 2012

Monday: April 16, 2012

READ: Genesis 12

BACKGROUND: Genesis 12 is God’s calling upon Abram – who was later called Abraham – the great patriarch of the nation of Israel. Abraham is one of the most important characters in the entire Bible, and he serves as an incredible example of a life of great faith in God.

By verse:
1 – If we flash back to the context provided in chapter 11, we see that Abram was called by God while he was living in Ur. To get from Ur to Canaan meant either traveling across the Arabian Desert (impossible with all of his flocks) or taking a 1500 mile journey along the Euphrates.
2 – The irony of God saying “I will make you a great nation” (again from the context of Chapter 11) is that Abram is already 75 years-old & his wife Sarai is 65 and they don’t have any kids.
3 – God says that through Abraham the whole earth will be blessed. He is blessed in order to be a blessing!
12 – The Egyptians had a high respect for marriage so they wouldn’t have just taken Abram’s wife. Knowing this, he suspected that they’d kill him before trying to add Sarai to Pharaoh’s harem.
13 – He seeks to deceive the Egyptians and – in what I must say is a pretty poor display of husbanding – gives up his wife in order to save his own skin. At this point Abraham is being a liar and a jerk.
17 – The plagues aren’t described specifically. Likely they were something that prevented Pharaoh from defiling Sarah. God was gracious to Abraham even though Abraham had sinned and not trusted him in the first place.

THINK: Unlike the great Kip Dynamite, I do not love technology always and forever. In fact, I have a genuine dislike for it, and I understand it less and operate it more poorly than most people my age. And I really hate when I finally get used to something – to the point where I’m mildly functional at it – and then it changes. That’s why I was horrified a few years ago when the church forced me to switch to a Mac. I’d been using PCs for years, and that was all I knew. And I kind of had an anti-Mac bias because it seemed to me that Mac users were largely a bunch of skinny-jean-wearing, fancy-coffee-sipping, hipster tech-geeks who loved nothing more than to talk about how wonderful Macs are and how they’re better than PCs. I resisted this talk because PCs were familiar to me, but eventually it became impossible to avoid being regularly macvangelized (a combo of Macintosh & evangelized) by loyal users who had tried Mac and become convinced that it was not only better, but so much better that everyone should be using it.

Then I got a Mac. And it took me about a week to decide that it was awesome and that it was better than any PC I’d ever used and I became a macvangelist myself. You should really get one. 🙂 The macvangelisim model is a really effective one though, and it has only a few simple steps that result in big impact: 1. Mac users are so in love with the product that they tell everybody how great it is and invite their friends to try it; 2. Their friends try it, fall in love, and begin telling everyone they meet about it; 3. The movement snowballs.

This is also God’s model for revealing himself to the world and drawing people to himself. I think that Genesis 12:3 is one of the key verses in the entire Bible! It gives us a framework through which to understand what God is doing and what he calls his people to. He tells Abram, “In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” God is saying, “I am calling you out and setting you apart for myself so that everyone around you will be drawn to me through you!” God’s plan for the nation he created through Abraham, Israel, to be a light to all the other nations. His design for Israel was that they love him so much and live for him so fully that everyone else around them couldn’t help but be compelled and try it out for themselves. That’s still his design for the church today.

What would it look like if we were as excited to tell everybody around us about how awesome our God is as we are to tell them how great our computer or phone or iPod or car is? Or if we were so compelled by our love for God – and by the amazing love he has shown to us – that we couldn’t help but tell everybody around us all about him? God’s wants to use us to bless our world and point it towards him. Passionately telling people about what he has done in our lives is incredibly powerful to the point of being nearly irresistible. And we can be fully confident in this: if they try him out they’ll find joy and peace and love and grace and forgiveness and hope that they can’t find anywhere else.

ASK: What is stopping me from telling people about what God has done in my life and why I love him? What could the world look like if Christians decided God’s plan to be a blessing to everyone around them by boldly telling everyone about him?

Posted by on April 16, 2012 in Law.

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April 15, 2012

Sunday: April 15, 2012

READ: Proverbs 1

BACKGROUND: Proverbs is a compilation of wisdom literature written mostly by Solomon but by some others as well. 1 Kings 4:32 says that Solomon spoke 3,000 proverbs and 1,005 songs. Many of them are included in this book. The Hebrew word for proverb means “comparison” and it’s generally used to refer to any moralizing declaration. The point of this book and the many comparisons is not to provide quote-worthy material or come up with pithy and popular sayings. It is to filter God’s wisdom and the Law in a way that makes it highly applicable for those wishing to follow after him in this life. It is a guidebook to wise living.

By verse:
2-6 – This is the stated purpose of this book. It was written in order “to…”
7 – This is the single most important verse in the book! It is the theme of Proverbs. It is the foundation upon which the book is built. “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction.”
1:8-9:18 – This is a large section written by Solomon on the basic principles & guidelines for wisdom.
8-19 – One of the main principles – and, it should be noted, the very first one that gets pointed out in Proverbs – which pops up time and time again in wisdom literature is keeping good company and avoiding bad company.
22-33 – This is a quotation from “Wisdom.” Wisdom is speaking in the 1st person here.

THINK: An investment company’s full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal began with these words: “Information is everywhere. Insight is all too rare. For insight goes beyond information to discern underlying truths.”

Today, we are long on information and short on insight. Television offers scores of channels. Encyclopedias and world atlases are on compact disks (CDs). Online databases give us the temperature in Hong Kong and the baseball score in Birmingham. We’re wired and tired from trying to grasp the meaning of all we know.

Years ago, a friend encouraged me to read a chapter from Proverbs each day. One chapter each day takes me through this marvelous book of God’s wisdom every month. “You can get knowledge in college,” my friend said, “but wisdom comes from God.”

Here’s what Almighty God promises when we seek His wisdom: “If you cry out for discernment, and lift up your voice for understanding, . . . then you will . . . find the knowledge of God. For the Lord gives wisdom; from His mouth come knowledge and understanding” (Prov. 2:3-6).

ASK: Why would someone not want to be wise? (Prov. 1:7). What happens to those who live foolishly? (vv.31-32). What are some benefits of wisdom? (v.33; 2:6-11).

– Written by David C. McCasland in Our Daily Bread, August 1, 1996

Posted by on April 15, 2012 in Poetry.

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April 13, 2012

Saturday: April 13, 2012

READ: Psalm 8

BACKGROUND:
By Verse:
1 – The name of the Lord is the most majestic name in all the earth. It is the only name in which we have purpose and reason for life. The name of the Lord is our everything and it’s because of that name we exist.
3-5 – When we think about how amazing and huge God’s creation is we can quickly feel insignificant and small, but God crowns us as His prize creation.
6-8 – God chose us to care for His creation. It’s an honor to know that God has set us apart from all creation as the superior being to rule over them.
9 – David is wise enough to wrap up this thought by acknowledging God as the Lord over everything. It’s God’s power at work in the heavens and its God’s power at work in everything created here on earth.

THINK: I’ve got a challenge for you today. If you can’t complete it today, try to make time for it this week. I want each of us to revel in the beauty of our God. Here’s why:

In the hustle and bustle of our world, it is so easy to minimize the greatness of our God. The truth is, our finite minds will never be able to understand or appreciate the infinite majesty of our God. But all too often, we don’t even take the time to honor God by quieting our hearts, minds, and lives. So let’s do it. Here’s the challenge:

Find a place outside where you can fully appreciate the beauty of God’s creation (by a lake, in the woods, in your yard, in a field at night when the stars are bright). Leave your cell phone, your ipad, your ipod, etc. inside. Take your Bible with you and read Psalm 8, out loud if you’d like. Take ten minutes (at a minimum) to adore our majestic God. Thank God for being in complete control. Thank Him for creating you and giving you life. Thank him for caring for you. Thank him for knowing you intimately even though he is the God over all of creation. And then be still. Quiet your heart, quiet your mind and allow our majestic God to speak to you. When David described the goodness of God, he couldn’t help but be humbled by his own humanness. That is a good place to be.

Enjoy these moments away from the stress, busyness, and noise of life. Enjoy encountering our incredible God in a new, intimate way as you experience him through his creation!

By: James Howard

Posted by on April 13, 2012 in Psalms.

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April 12, 2012

Friday: April 13, 2012

READ: Genesis 9:18-11

BACKGROUND: Noah and his family had just witnessed God’s tremendous provision as the only humans protected from the flood that destroyed all the Earth. As they left the ark, God instructed them to be fruitful and multiply and He made a covenant with them to never destroy the earth again by flood. In today’s reading we see a series of unwise choices by Noah, his son, and all of his descendants. Then we see, as we will throughout the Bible, that God’s sovereignty cannot and will not be compromised by human pride.

By Verse:
9: 18-20 – Even though Noah was a godly man, he was a sinner and his unwise choice to give himself to drunkenness displays his human weakness. Without God’s strength, no man can avoid temptation.
22-23 – Ham chose to disrespect his father by broadcasting his sin.  Shem and Japheth respected their Father by covering his shame.
24-27 – Noah curses Ham’s son Canaan and blesses Shem and Japheth. It’s not clear why Noah curses Ham’s son instead of Ham himself, but it may be a way of saying that Canaan and his descendants would be even worse than Ham. This blessing and curse are seen in the victories of the Israelites over the Canaanites. The Jews were descendants of Shem, so Jesus was a descendant of this line. Gentiles were descendants of Japheth.
10:1-32 – This chapter shows the genealogy of Noah’s three Sons. Through these three sons the whole earth was populated.
11: 1-9 There is significant archaeological evidence pointing to the Tower of Babel.
4 – The people’s plans were egotistical and proud.
6 – God saw the people’s attempts to take their futures into their own hands and remove God from their lives.
8 – God is infinitely creative and gracious in dealing with sinful, proud people. In this case, he decided to make everyone start speaking a different language so that their plans would not succeed.
10-32 – This is more of the genealogy of Shem. It ends here with Abram and will ultimately end with Jesus. Abram is a famous Bible character.

THINK: I would be approximately $500 richer today if only I was willing to learn from experience. The tally of speeding tickets I’ve earned in my short life is really ridiculous and slightly embarrassing. I’ve been pulled over on the interstate, in town, and I’ve even been lucky enough to get a couple of tickets in the mail after I was caught by traffic cams.  I don’t really have road rage and I don’t typically intend to speed like crazy, I just don’t pay enough attention and always seems to push the pedal to the medal at just the wrong time. And I’ve paid for it – time and time and time again. I know good and well that there are expensive consequences for speeding and yet I continuously ignore the law. That’s dumb.

When I read Genesis, I start to feel the same frustration towards these Old Testament characters that I do towards myself – how have they not learned? Why in the world do they keep ignoring God’s commands and promises? How could they be so dumb? Thank goodness my life story isn’t recorded for you all to read, because unfortunately my battle with sin would look similar to my battle with speeding tickets – why don’t I learn?

Noah’s descendants no doubt knew about the flood. They were well aware of God’s judgment over the entire earth when people chose idol worship and evil practices over honoring God. And yet how quickly they let pride creep into their lives. Their pride led them to believe they didn’t need God and they could build themselves a tower to Heaven. Their pride caused them to dishonor God by making idols of self, seeking to make their own names great. They paid seriously for their pride and so do we. Proverbs 16:18 says, “Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall.” Their pride led to the destruction of their evil plans. Our pride will always fail us.

Pride keeps us from having teachable spirits. Pride keeps us stuck where we are spiritually. Noah’s descendants witnessed and experienced an incredible miracle of God. They knew he was real and powerful, but in their weakness they allowed pride to make its way in to their lives. Each of us has seen God’s terrific power in our world (just look at creation) and in our own lives, yet we often continue to live as if we can direct our lives better than God himself. We can’t.

Fortunately we have countless books that document the history of Christ followers who have gone on before us. We can take advantage of these terrific resources (the Bible included) and learn from the experience of others. We learn from this story of Noah’s descendants that our pursuit of God requires surrender of our selfish pride. We can trust God with our entire lives. He is faithful. He was then and He is now. Pride says we don’t trust a God who has proven himself nothing but trustworthy throughout all of history. Humility says we recognize our desperate need for a Savior and will submit to his Will.

ASK: Do I have a teachable Spirit? If I am continually struggling with the same sin, what do I need to do to surrender and begin to live God’s best for me? Is pride preventing me from putting my full faith in God?

Written by: Cari Widdel

Posted by on April 12, 2012 in Law.

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April 12, 2012

Thursday: April 11, 2012

Special guest writer today – My mom: Deb Howard

READ: Matthew 5

BACKGROUND:  Bible scholars often divide the book of Matthew into five parts. Chapter five begins part three of those five and starts with the early public ministry of Jesus. Jesus is now drawing lots of attention and some big crowds, and these crowds listen as Jesus teaches his disciples.  The first part of Chapter 5 is commonly called the Sermon on the Mount and almost everyone has heard at least parts of this. Jesus offers some radical prescriptions for happiness: how to be happy with ourselves, with God, and with others. After surprising everyone with his wisdom on living as children of God, Jesus goes on in verses 17 -20 to explain how he came to fulfill the law, and finishes in verses 21 – 48 by rejecting traditional thinking. This chapter is packed with important truths spoken by Jesus.

By verse:
1-12 This section is referred to as the Beatitudes. Beatitude means supreme blessedness.
3 – Blessed is more than just being happy. Happiness is an emotion that  often depends on our circumstances, but blessed refers to the spiritual joy that we can have at all times because of our salvation through Jesus.
Poor in Spirit is the opposite of pride. We are poor in Spirit when we consider God’s opinion of us: wretched, blind, miserable…..and realize we need a Savior!
4 – Mourn – the world says be happy. Jesus says the only true way to happiness is to mourn our sin and seek repentance.
5 – Meek – a foreign idea to us as self-sufficient Americans. Meek describes a person who is God-controlled!
6 – Ask God to generate this desire within us! We need to want more of him….
7 –  Our debt was paid on the cross. Surely we must show mercy to others as Jesus showed mercy to us!
10 – Jesus knew what was coming for him, for the early Christians, and for us!
11 – Salt in Jesus day was a precious commodity and extremely important to preserve food. Jesus says we are that valuable to him! Salt makes us thirsty – the world should see what we have and want it!
17 – 20  – The Law is the first five books of the bible. Jesus taught that the Bible was the authority over our lives! Though in our culture not all the details of Old Testament laws are followed, the principles are timeless.
21 – 47 – Jesus confronts the Pharisees who wrongly assume only overt actions were sin. God looks at the heart! Avoid anything that leads to impurity!
48 – Be mature, be perfect….God wants us to grow up, take his Word seriously, and change from the inside out!

THINK:  My favorite part of every summer is Vacation Bible  School. Growing up it was a tradition not to be missed. I feel like our church always started VBS planning as soon as Christmas is over. Looking back, it was probably a great excuse for my friends and me to get out of the house, drink coffee, and chat for hours while our husbands got stuck with dinner and bedtime. I remember specifically a few of the early VBS years and seeing the way that they stuck with my kids. One year a stuffed bear led all the songs with his helper, a stuffed bee…and you’ve got it….we sang our way right through the BEE-attitudes!  I can’t remember the words, but I do remember feeling very convicted, and that’s just what Jesus words are designed to do – not convict so that we feel overwhelmed with guilt, but convict so that we repent and receive the JOY that Jesus says will be the reward of all who follow him! Sure, in this world we will have trouble, but we can BEE happy because he has overcome the world!

ASK: Am I allowing Jesus’ words to change the way I live? Do I believe in the radical transformation that’s available through surrendering to His radical plan for my life?

Posted by on April 12, 2012 in Gospels.

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April 11, 2012

Wednesday: April 10, 2012

READ: Joshua 10-11

BACKGROUND: This passage follows the nation of Israel as they complete the conquest of Canaan, otherwise known as The Promised Land. The violence of the conquest is jarring at times, especially with the repeated message that the nation of Israel left no survivors whatsoever as they conquered. It’s important to remember, though, that this wasn’t senseless or needless violence. This was a bunch of people in Canaan who were wicked beyond measure (bestiality, infant sacrifice, & more), and God destroyed them – like he did with all the Earth in the flood – to protect all of humanity from total theological error that would cut them off completely from him. For a further discussion see this article.

By Verse:
10:6 – “Come and save us” is kind of a cool appeal by the Gibeonites because Joshua’s name means “The LORD saves.”
9 – Gilgal was 20 miles East of Gibeon, and uphill. It was quite a march. Attacking them “by surprise” likely means that Joshua attacked in very early morning.
12 – What a ridiculous prayer.
13 – What an incredible answer! 🙂 God stopped the sun so that the battle could continue and Israel could finish the defeat.
11:4 – “As numerous as the sand on the seashore” isn’t a literal observation that there were millions of troops. It’s simply a figure of speech indicating there was a vast number.
6 – Hamstringing horses means cutting the tendon above their hock (ankle) so that they could not walk again. But why? Why hamstring the horses and burn the chariots? Because God wanted it to be clear every single time that it was HIM who won the battles and not the fighting strength of Israel. They didn’t need horses or chariots to win…and if they had horses and chariots they would be tempted into thinking that’s why they won. God is removing that possibility.
18 – “A long time”? About 7 years in total from the beginning of the conquest until they took Hebron.

THINK: Growing up, Christmas presents for me looked WAY different than Christmas presents for my wife, Jenny. Jenny – being an anal retentive, linear thinking, highly organized math nerd, always wanted her ducks in row, always wanted to plan ahead, so she would make her mom detailed lists of precisely what she wanted for Christmas, what stores to find it at, what it cost, etc. And her mom would get her exactly those things.  So, on Christmas, opening up gifts was simply an exercise in checking each thing off the list. She knew exactly what she was getting – with a few fun surprises thrown in. My mom, on the other hand, never really worked like that. She was big into surprising us. I made lists too – not nearly as detailed – but lists nonetheless. Some years I’d get a few things on my list, some years a lot, some years none. But I was always surprised – sometimes not pleasantly. “Oh, mom, that’s such a cool snowman sweater. Thanks! I’m pretty sure I know what I’m wearing for my yearbook photo!” 🙂 But one thing that I always put on my list – every year – and my brother did to was a game console. My mom thought video games rot your brain (she probably wasn’t too far off) so we never had a Nintendo or anything growing up, but every Christmas we asked. Really, though, we asked without expecting. My brother and I would put it on our list – just to have it on there – but we absolutely did not expect to get it. Finally, when I was in high school, I just quit asking because I didn’t think there was any point. It was a waste of ink and paper. My brother didn’t quit though, and one Christmas he opened up a box and there it was, the cutting edge gaming system of the day: Dreamcast. We were shocked. He’d asked for it, but not one fiber of his being expected that my parents would get him what he asked for even though he knew they were nice parents and they loved him.

How often do we do that with God? How often do we pray for things without having any faith that God can, or will, answer our prayers? How often do we just go through the motions of faith and prayer without believing that God can do big things in our world? How often do we just give up? How often do our prayer lives mirror my attitude toward Christmas lists? We don’t think anything will probably happen so we don’t even bother.  If we’re honest, if I’m honest, the answer to those questions is: A lot. It happens often.But it doesn’t have to! The Bible paints a bigger, better picture of what prayer can accomplish. This doesn’t mean that God is going to answer every prayer that we pray exactly how we want him to, but God does want to do incredible things in our world, and he wants us to pray big, huge, audacious, outrageous, specific prayers, and he wants to answer them.

Joshua prayed a preposterously impossible prayer, and God answered! Joshua prayed for something that he had no hope of accomplishing on his own, and God came through for him. Here he was, he’d won the battle over the people who were seeking to destroy him, they retreated, and he pursued them to finish them off, but he realized that if night fell then the pursuit would stop. They’d escape and they would, without doubt, regroup and attempt to attack him again. And Joshua knew that God had promised that nobody who stood against him and tried to destroy him and destroy Israel would stand. So, he got the crazy idea that God – who created the world and has all the power in the world – might be able to do something he couldn’t, something beyond his wildest dreams, to help Israel achieve the victory. And he prayed – out loud in front of the whole army – “Sun, stand still over Gibeon, and you, moon, over the Valley of Aijalon.”

Joshua prays this impossible prayer with a huge faith in God. He calls upon God’s promise and God answers him. God does what only God can do. And he does it even though Joshua got the prayer wrong. What do I mean by that? Well, due to the advancements of modern science I can be fairly confident that the sun stays relatively still all the time. It’s the earth that moves in orbit around the sun. If Joshua wanted to get it totally right, he’d have said “Earth stand still.” But he didn’t do that. From his limited vantage point it seemed like the sun moved, and all he knew was that he wanted it to stay high in the sky so that he could achieve victory. And guess what: God answered his prayer. And I think that’s super encouraging for all of us. We don’t have to have all the right words in the right order to unlock God’s power, and we don’t even have to fully understand what he’s gonna do or how he’s gonna do it. We just have to be willing to identify the problems in our lives and in our world that we cannot fix on our own, bring them to God, and expect him to do great things. We have to be willing to pray big, huge, bold, audacious prayers!

ASK: Do I really trust that God listens to me and answers prayer? What are some big, huge, specific, audacious prayers that I need to be praying for my world?

Posted by on April 11, 2012 in History.

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April 10, 2012

Tuesday: April 9, 2012

READ: Psalm 7

BACKGROUND BY VERSE:
1-2 – The title to this Psalm implies that David is being attacked (physically or verbally by a man named Cush from the tribe of Benjamin (which likely means he was a supporter of Saul, who was also a Benjamite).
3-5 – David is pleading his own innocence, saying he has given his enemy no cause to attack him.
6 – When David pleads with God to “arise” or to “awake” he isn’t implying that God sleeps or takes time off from being God. He doesn’t. He is simply using this imagery to express his longing and his frustration with waiting for God’s justice to be realized.
10-13 – David expresses confidence that his prayer will be heard.
17 – Even though David is troubled and he is currently waiting for God’s justice, he makes the vow to praise God anyway and he is confident in God’s love and deliverance.

THINK: One of my favorite television moments of the last few years was a shot of Michael Scott (Steve Carell) from The Office doing a little bit of introspection. I laughed at his observation because I felt like I could relate, and not only that, but I felt like probably a whole lot of people could relate? How many of you have felt like this?

🙂 We all like to be liked, even if we’d say that it isn’t a need. But sometimes in our lives we encounter people who don’t like us, or, at the very least, people who say hurtful things about us and try to put us down. I can think of a number of examples in my own life where I earned the dislike – times where I said or did something or acted in a certain way that resulted in negative things being said about me as a consequence. I’m sure that all of us can. But there have also been times when I haven’t done or said anything wrong or acted in a way that offended someone and, despite that, had someone say something negative about me. I’m sure that everyone can relate to that as well. And when that happens we have this profound sense of injustice. Our inner Michael Scott-like need to be liked is violated and we don’t know what to do.

When this happened to David he took it before God in prayer. Cush, the Benjamite, had slandered him, and David hadn’t done or said anything wrong to provoke it. So he brought it before God and trusted in a few things: 1. God hears our prayer, & 2. God will defend us and bring about justice so we really don’t need to worry or be concerned with defending our own reputations. This is really liberating! We need to be careful not to act in ways that offend others and cause them to lash out at us. But in the inevitable instances in life where we are unfairly accused and slandered there is no need whatsoever to allow worry to creep in or allow our lives to be defined by the words that were said. God hears our prayers, and he is just. We don’t need to be liked. We need to remember that we are truly loved!

ASK: What would it look like to release my own need/desire for revenge totally to God and trust him with the situation? How does it change the way I react to the negative comments & actions of others if, instead of first thinking about the way they perceive me, my first thought is to remember how much God loves me?

Posted by on April 10, 2012 in Psalms.

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April 9, 2012

Monday: April 9, 2012

READ: Matthew 23

BACKGROUND: This is an incredibly powerful passage where Jesus speaks directly to the religious leaders and religious elites of the day – the Pharisees – and points out how incredibly hypocritical they are. He tells them that they’ve missed the point. In their striving for perfection and their ritual-based, works-based religiosity they’ve missed out on the relationship with God that drives it. Their focus on the externals – looking good on the outside – has prevented them from realizing it’s the inside that actually matters.

By verse:
4 – “Tie up heavy loads” spiritually, not physically
5 – Phylacteries are boxes with Bible verses printed in them they were worn almost like jewelry. The cords symbolized prayer.
15 – It’s not the evangelistic efforts that are the problem, it’s what the Pharisees are converting them too: works-based, external righteousness
23 – Giving a tenth of everything was an important practice. The Pharisees in their legalism, counted out even their spices to the grain in order to do this. They took it to the extreme. But this isn’t what Jesus criticizes. Again, he says it’s okay, but not at the expense of the things that really matter.
24 – Gnats were “unclean” so Pharisees strained their water to avoid accidentally drinking them.
25 – Why whitewashed tombs? 1. It provides a clear picture of being pretty on the outside but rotten on the inside. 2. It was a cultural practice to paint tombs/ gravesites white so that people could avoid going near them unintentionally as this would make them unclean.
35 – Abel = 1st murder in the Old Testament in Genesis 4:8. Zechariah = the last murder in the Old Testament (in the Jewish arrangement of the OT books) in 2 Chronicles 24:20-22. From first to last they are guilty.

THINK: Yesterday was Easter. That means today is the Day of Joy and Laughter! Never heard of it? Most people haven’t. A number of centuries ago a monk was reflecting on the Events of Holy Week: the Triumphal Entry, the Garden of Gethsemane, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection, and what it all meant. And as he thought about it he came to the conclusion that Easter was the greatest practical joke of all time. On Friday the Devil thought he had won. Jesus was dead, and he was convinced that this meant he had achieved victory. And then God sprung his brilliant joke on Satan. Jesus rose again and unlocked the prison of death from the inside! The monk laughed aloud at this thought, and his fellow monks asked him why. He told them what he was thinking and how it made him laugh to know that God had the last laugh on Easter. The monks decided to call it the “Easter Laugh” and began to celebrate the Day of Joy and Laughter every year on the day after Easter. This was a day dedicated to telling jokes, having fun, and laughing hard in celebration of God’s victory and his humor.  This tradition, at one point, was more widespread but exists today mainly within Eastern Orthodox circles and monasteries. I think it’s worth reviving!

Those of you who know me are aware that I really like a good joke, and I have a deep appreciation for humor. And God does too! He created humor and laughter. He even named one of the main characters of the Old Testament Isaac (which means “laughter”) after Sarah’s response to the notion that she could have a baby in her old age. Also, Jesus was a really funny guy. Sometimes I think this gets missed in the translations form Aramaic (which he spoke) to Greek (which the New Testament was written in) to English (which our Bibles are written in). Matthew 23 may seem like an odd passage that has very little to do with this devotional thought, but it isn’t. This, I think, is Jesus at the peak of his humor. He says a ton of hilarious things in this passage. I mean, he’s hammering the Pharisees here, but he’s doing it in a really comedic way. Among this jokes he makes: “You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, but when he becomes one you make him twice as much a son of hell as you are.” Burn! Next he makes fun of the particulars of their oaths – basically saying, “What are you, 10 years-old? Get serious!” Then he says, “You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.” Think about that word picture! Then he says their focus on externals is liking washing the outside of a cup but leaving the inside dirty. Bam! Jesus is on a roll. Then he caps it off by saying, “You’re a whitewashed tomb,” which basically translates, “You’re so pretty; you look like a corpse with makeup on!” Super-burn!

Jesus was a smart and funny guy. And he got the last laugh at the expense of the Devil on Easter. Tell a joke today. Listen to a joke today. Laugh hard in celebration of God’s victory. Live the abundant life God created you for! Happy Day of Joy and Laughter to you all!

ASK: How does it shape my understanding of God to think that he appreciates humor – that he is funny? How can I live out a faith that is based on what’s inside my heart rather than just on the way I appear to others on the outside?

Posted by on April 9, 2012 in Gospels.

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