“… I being in the way the Lord led me…” (Genesis 24:27)
When we discover the context of these words of Scripture we realize they are teaching us a principle of how God often works in the lives of His people. It is easier to steer a moving vehicle than one that is stationary. God can sometimes steer us more easily when we are moving. That’s why we will find that one step frequently leads to the next step when we have faith to be led by the Holy Spirit.
The words above were spoken by Abraham’s servant who was commissioned by Abraham to travel to the land of his people to find a wife for Isaac. As he journals the events of his search he writes that while he was in the way the Lord led him he encountered the family of Rebekah. When he met her he knew that his search had ended.
We who are committed followers of Christ were commissioned two thousand years ago to go to all nations and make disciples for Jesus Christ. A journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. Like the servant of Abraham, as we embark on the adventure of obeying our great commission, we should expect that each step will lead to the next step.
We don’t always have to know where the road leads as long as we know it is the right road. While we are in the way our Lord has commissioned us to go we must have the faith to take that first step and then, one step at a time, expect our Lord to show us His will about the next step.
“… who comforts us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort those who are in any trouble, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.” (2 Corinthians 1:4)
The Apostle Paul has just experienced life threatening persecution when he was stoned in Lystra. As he describes that experience for the Church in Corinth he gives them (and us) a perspective on suffering. He writes that there is a kind of suffering that drives us to God and there is a quality of comfort that can only be found in God when the level of our suffering drives us to Him.
According to Paul, an evangelist is “one beggar telling another beggar where the bread is.” A hurting heart that has discovered the comfort that can only be found in God is “one hurting heart telling another hurting heart where the Comfort is.”
As a pastor when I met grief stricken parents who had lost a child, since I had never suffered that loss I sent a couple to comfort them who had lost a child and found the comfort of God to help them. Any time your heart is hurting because God has permitted you to suffer, realize that you are being given a credential by God. As you find the comfort that is to be found in God you are now qualified to point any person with that same problem to the comfort you discovered when you had that hurt in your heart.
Although you will not answer all of the “why” questions until you know as you are known, are you willing to let this perspective bring some meaning and purpose to your suffering?
“…being confident of this very thing, that He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ…” (Philippians 1:6)
This is second day of a new year. A friend informed me that he no longer makes New Year’s resolutions. When I asked why he said, “My willpower is nearly always out of power.”
The Apostle Paul’s favorite Church was the Church he planted at Philippi. Having brought scores and scores of people to faith in Christ in that city, he finds himself in prison and unable to have any physical contact with them. As their pastor he cannot use his powers of reason and persuasion or his spiritual gifts of wisdom, preaching and teaching. Yet he has an unwavering confidence that they will continue in their faith until Jesus Christ returns.
This confidence is not based on them or on himself. He believes his positive and upbeat perspective about them because he knows that the One Who began a miraculous work in them will complete what He has started.
The word “perspective” means “to look through to the end.” At the starting gate of a New Year it’s so very important to have healthy perspective. I’m not thinking about willpower driven resolutions but spiritual goals that only the risen, living Christ can make doable. I’m talking about what you would like to see Christ do in your life this year.
I have recently learned a new formula for setting goals. In the context I have established, let the letters BHAG stand for Big, Hilarious, Audacious, Goals. As you set goals for the New Year make them big enough to let Christ in. Watch Him work because you have set goals that only He can accomplish!
“Then He brought us out that He might bring us in…” (Deuteronomy 6:23)
Are you ready for a new thing? God often wants to do a new thing in our lives but He has three challenges. When He wants to bring us out of the old and into a new place He cannot get us out of the old because we are insecure and want to hold on to the old place. He then has to blast us out of the old. That’s why a call of God is often made up of a pull from the front and a boot from the rear.
His second challenge is that He has to pull us through the transition between the old place and the new. Transitions can last for years and they can be very painful. But He promises He can pull us through the worst of them.
His third challenge is to get us right so He can settle us into the new place. We should no more resist that work of God than a baby should resist being born and coming out into life.
Don’t give God a hard time when He wants to do a new thing in your life. We must believe that God is good all the time. If we trust His character we should cooperate with Him when He wants to make changes and do new things in us and for us. A rut is a grave with both ends knocked out. Our loving Heavenly Father does not want to see His children in the living death of a rut.
Instead of giving God a hard time, make it easy for Him as He brings you out of the old place and leads you into the new places He has for you in the New Year.
“I bring you good tidings of great joy which will be to all people.” (Luke 2:10)
When the angels appeared to those frightened shepherds, they gave them a wonderful Christmas greeting. They announced that they were bringing good tidings of great joy to all people.
These good tidings were not just for Jewish people or for good people. They were to bring great joy to ALL people! That means all kinds of people – and all kinds of people everywhere!
Before He ascended, the last words of Jesus were: “… go be my witnesses, telling people about me everywhere… to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8 NLT).
Some enjoy their faith as if the last words of Jesus were: “Now don’t let it get around!” They live out their faith as if the Gospel is a secret to be kept.
Never forget these two beautiful Christmas words, “All people!”
The spiritual community of those who believe and follow Jesus is not to be a secret organization. It is a community of people who exist for the benefit of their non-members.
Jesus Christ came to bring good news and great joy to people who are not good. The Bible tells us that all of us have gone astray and turned every one of us to his or her own way. That’s the bad news. But the good news is that God laid the penalty for all of our sins on His Son (Isaiah 53:6).
Two more great Christmas words are “mercy” and “grace.” The mercy of God withholds from us what we deserve and His grace lavishes on us all kinds of marvelous things we do not deserve. His mercy and grace give us more blessings than we can count if we have the faith to receive them.
“So the Word became human and made his home among us…And we have seen his glory, the glory of the Father’s one and only Son.” (John 1:14 NLT)
God became human and made His home among us so we could see and not just read what He wrote in the 39 books of the Old Testament. We should find a Christmas challenge in the words of the Apostle Paul which tell us “… that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh” (2Corinthians 4:11).
One of the reasons God did Christmas was because He felt that a written Word was not enough. He wanted us to see as well as read His Word to us. Everything Jesus was, said, and did was one great spoken Word from God to you and me (John 1: 1, 14, 18).
It is the plan of God that unbelievers in this world today should see as well as read His Word through your mortal flesh and mine. That truth, which is clearly articulated by the Apostle Paul, moved me to make an important decision in my ministry as a Bible pastor/teacher. In the early sixties I was praying about accepting an opportunity presented to me to be a radio Bible teacher. Those words of Paul were used by God to direct me to be the pastor of a church where people could see as well as hear the Word of God in my mortal flesh.
“We’re writing a Gospel a chapter each day by things that we do and things that we say. Men read what we write whether faithless or true. Say, what is the Gospel according to you?”
That should be our Christmas challenge all year long.
“And now abides faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” (I Corinthians 13:13)
Do you know, or do you remember what it is like to live your life, day in and day out, without hope? In the great love chapter of the Bible, the Apostle Paul tells us the three lasting, eternal values in life are faith, hope and love. Love is the greatest of these eternal values because God is love. Faith is an eternal value because faith brings us to God. Hope is also one of the three great eternal values because hope brings us to the faith that brings us to God. In the heart of every human being, God plants hope, the conviction that something good exists in this life and someday that good will intersect our lives. That is what the author of the Book of Hebrews means when he tells us that faith gives substance to the things for which we have been hoping. (Hebrews 11:1).
As followers of Jesus Christ, we must realize that we have Good News that can give hope to the hopeless, and we must not let unbelief silence us. If we never share the Good News of the Christmas that was and the Christmas that shall be, we should ask ourselves if we really believe the essence of the Gospel of Christmas. Because we really believe in the Christmas that was, we should share that Good News with the people Jesus told us He came to seek and to save (Luke 19:10). We show that we really do believe in the Christmas that shall be, when we tell hopeless people that God is going to give us another Christmas.
Like the wise men, we should ask the question, “Where is He?,” seek Him until we find Him, and then worship Him and give the gift of our lives to Him. Then, like those shepherds, we should tell everybody the Good News that Christmas has come and Christmas is coming again to this otherwise hopeless world.
“…whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die. Do you believe this?” (John 11:26)
Has the joyful happy holiday season found you with a heavy heart because you have lost a loved one? I have suggested that if you want to find the happiness and comfort Jesus promised in His second beatitude to those who mourn, you should ask the right questions and listen to God’s answers to the right questions. My third suggestion was implied by Jesus as He gave an excellent right answer to Martha when he asked her, “Do you believe this?”
My third suggestion is that you believe God’s answers to the right questions. When we ask, listen, and believe, the death of someone we love is like an investment in the world to come. We have simply bought shares in heaven and we have increased our motivation to be there in the eternal dimension with Christ and with them.
A devout surgeon I know says that the word we use most in this life is “Why?” However, the word we are going to use most in the next world is going to be “Oh!” An old hymn I don’t hear much anymore proclaims: “Friends will be there I have known long ago. Joy like a river around me will flow. Yet just a smile from my Savior I know, that will be glory be glory for me!”
The whole Bible is filled with God’s answers to the right questions. When we believe those answers we will discover that the happy state Jesus promised those who mourn in one word is salvation. Salvation and the comfort He promised can begin right now and last forever if you will ask, listen, and believe! Will you do that now?
After last week’s post regarding how music expresses the inexpressible, today we are taking a time-out from the written word to enjoy words put to glorious music. My father loved music! With speakers wired all over our home in Va. Beach, he roused us to the table every morning @ 6:15a.m. blasting the theme from “Rocky” by the Boston Pops. He & Mama so loved to sing hymns. They would memorize all the verses & go over the words together, checking them in a file he used on his voice-activated computer, before singing them together with gusto.
Papa especially loved this time of year filled with carols. The Williamsburg Community Chapel piped in the amazing Christmas concert every year by video-feed for my parents to watch. He kept a picture of the WCC Choir singing Fairest Lord Jesus in pride of place in our living room. (It was a no-brainer including that one during his Memorial Celebration.)
We also recorded many Christmas concerts during the holiday season. The other night we watched his annual favorite, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and heard them sing the glorious “From Heaven on High” by Felix Mendelssohn (from his “Weihnachtslied.) Be blessed to listen!
Have you ever wondered why God gave us the miracle of music? We find a clue in the Old Testament book of Chronicles where David divided the Levite priests into courses of four thousand: “four thousand praised the Lord with musical instruments, ‘which I made,’ said David, ‘for giving praise’.” (1Chronicles 23:5)
There are times when we have a need to express the inexpressible. When we are infatuated with love we often give each other nicknames. I had an old girlfriend in California I forgot to tell my wife about when I married her in Virginia. I called that girl “Punky” and she called me “Hunky.” We had written letters to each other using those nicknames. One evening during the third month of our marriage when I came in from work my wife called me “Hunky darling!” How I wished I had burned those letters. We invent nicknames because we are trying to express the inexpressible.*
The greatest need we ever have to express the inexpressible is when we enter into the divine presence of Almighty God. In the last book of the Bible, we read that when a door opens into heaven we find every creature in heaven worshiping a Lamb on the throne of heaven. For that occasion they are given a new song because the need to express the inexpressible will be so very great. I can’t wait to hear what that new song will sound like!
For believers the purpose of music has been, will be, and is now to express inexpressible praise to God. Whether it is in a congregation with a choir, or a worship group leading a large congregation, or in your private prayer closet let music express the inexpressible for you.
Dick Woodward, 17 July 2011
*Editors Note: After 56 yrs of marriage (& counting), Dick still calls Ginny his “Angel Face” and she calls him her “Angel Pie.” (written on 17 July 2011) An addendum today, Papa & Mama kept calling each other Angel Face & Angel Pie until he went to glory… : )
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