July 26, 2024
“I am the vine, you are the branches.” (John 15:5)
The apostles were in awe of the profound words and miraculous works of Jesus. In their last retreat with Him, Jesus essentially said that the key to His preaching, teaching, and supernatural ministry is that He and the Father are one. The Word of the Father was spoken on earth and the work of the Father was accomplished on earth through Jesus because He is one with the Father.
Jesus taught the disciples that after His death and resurrection, if they would be at one with Him He would do His work on earth through them. While they were in a garden, Jesus pulled down a vine that had many branches loaded with fruit. He said: “I am the Vine and you are the branches.”
In this metaphor the fruit does not grow on the vine. The fruit grows out on the branches because they are properly aligned with the Vine. The branches can bear no fruit without the Vine, and the Vine can bear no fruit without the branches. If the Vine, Jesus, wants to see fruit produced, He must pass His life-giving power through the branches.
Jesus wants to see fruit produced far more than the apostles want to be fruitful. By this inspired metaphor, He was teaching two propositions: “Without Me, you can do nothing” and, “Without you, I will do nothing.” It is the plan of God to use the power of God in the people of God to accomplish the purposes of God according to the plan of God. Jesus is a Vine looking for branches.
Are you one of His fruitful branches?
Dick Woodward, 31 July 2012
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Posted by Dick Woodward
July 23, 2024
“I have brought you out that I might lead you in…” (Deuteronomy 6:23)
There are times when God wants to do a new thing in our lives. To do this new thing God faces three challenges. First God must get us out of the old place. That is not easy because we often love the security of where we are. God therefore has to blast us out of the old. That can happen in many ways. We could be fired, or we may just know in our knower that it is time to make a change. The call of God is often made up of a pull from the front and a boot from the rear.
The second challenge is that God has to keep us going to pull us through the transition time between the old place and the new place to which God is leading us. Transition times can be difficult!
The verse above describes the way God brought the children of Israel out of Egypt to bring them into the Promised Land. Their transition time involved crossing a desert, which should have taken eleven days. They went around in circles for forty years. They circled that desert because they did not have the faith to invade the land of Canaan. When God wants to do a new thing in our lives, do we go around in circles because we do not have enough faith to enter into the new place God is leading us?
The third challenge is that God has to make us right to settle us into the new place God has for us. One translation of 2 Corinthians 6:1 reads that we are “co-operators” with God. When we realize what God is trying to do in our lives, are we ready to give God a little more cooperation?
Dick Woodward, 24 July 2009
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Posted by Dick Woodward
July 19, 2024
“…& mercy shall follow me all the days of my life...” (Psalm 23:6)
Mercy is the unconditional love of God. This word is found 366 times in the Bible. Perhaps God wants us to know we need mercy and unconditional love every day of the year! Many people think we don’t hear about God’s mercy until the Sermon on the Mount; however, we find 280 mercy references in the Old Testament.
King David concludes Psalm 100 with the observation that God’s mercy is everlasting. My favorite Old Testament reference to God’s mercy is found at the end of Psalm 23. One of David’s greatest psalms ends with the declaration that he is positively certain the mercy of God will follow him always.
The Hebrew word David uses for ‘follow’ can also be translated as ‘pursue.’ David brings his profound description of the relationship between God and man to a conclusion by declaring the unconditional love of God will pursue him all the days of his life. This is true for all who confess, “The Lord is my Shepherd.”
There are many ways to fail. When we understand the meaning of God’s mercy, however, we should realize that we cannot possibly out-fail God’s mercy. No matter what your failures have been, God has sent you a message wrapped in this five-letter word “mercy.”
The amazing message is that you did not win God’s love by a positive performance, and you do not lose God’s love by a negative performance. God’s love and acceptance of you is unconditional. According to David, the mercy of God is not only there like a rock for you, but God is pursuing you with unconditional love and forgiveness.
Dick Woodward, from Happiness that Doesn’t Make Good Sense
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Posted by Dick Woodward
July 16, 2024
“You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly…” (James 4:3)
At the heart of a counseling session, a woman once said, “Don’t confuse me with Scriptures, Pastor. My mind is made up!” Seeking God’s will for our lives is often out of reach because we have our agendas in place when we come before God. If our minds are set like concrete before we converse with God, we are then actually asking God to bless our will, our agenda and the way we have decided to go.
James tells us that when we pray, we ask and do not receive because our asking is flawed by our self-willed agendas. To seek and know the will of God we must be completely open to whatever the will of God may be. Our prayer and commitment must be in the spirit of the familiar metaphor, “You are the Sculptor, I am the clay. Mold me and make me according to Your will. I am ready to accept Your will as passively as clay in the hands of a Sculptor.”
There are two reasons to be open and unbiased as you seek to know God’s will. The first we learn from Isaiah 55: the ways and thoughts of God are as different from our ways and thoughts as the heavens are high above the earth. Another is that we become a totally new creation when we are born again.
It is tragically possible to miss the will of God for your life because you do not have the faith to believe that God can make you a new creation in Christ: a new creation with extraordinary potential.
Dick Woodward, from A Prescription for Guidance
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Posted by Dick Woodward
July 12, 2024
“…because as He is, so are we in this world…” (1 John 4:17)
As the Apostle of Love continues to give us reasons why we must love (in 1 John 4), having told us twice that God is love (verses 8 and 16), he writes that as God is, so are we in this world. He also told us in verse 16 that God lives in us. If God is love and God lives in us, then it follows that as God is (love), so are we (to be love) in this world. This is yet another reason why we must love.
The perfect example of this is Jesus Christ when He was God in human flesh for 33 years. The greatest dynamic of His personality was love. If you met with Him for a day like Zacchaeus, the Chief of the Publicans (Luke 19), or for an hour like the Samaritan woman (John 4), or briefly like the young man we call the rich young ruler, you would know that you are loved as you have never been loved before. We are told that Jesus, looking intently at the rich young ruler, loved him. (Mark 10:21)
The Apostle John, the author of the fourth Gospel, lived with Jesus 24/7 for three years. John refers to himself in his Gospel many times with these words: “I am the disciple whom Jesus loved.” Sixty years later, he dedicated the last book of the Bible to Jesus with the words “…unto the faithful Witness Who loved us…”
When people meet with us today do they feel that they have been loved as never before because we are God’s Love with skin on in this world?
Dick Woodward, 16 July 2010
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Posted by Dick Woodward
July 9, 2024
“If someone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God Whom he has not seen?” (1 John 4:20)
Tradition tells us that the Apostle John escaped from the Isle of Patmos by swimming out to a ship that was bound for the city of Ephesus where he lived to a very old age and was buried. With white hair and a long white beard, he was so feeble they had to carry him to the meetings. While at the meetings he would bless those who attended and cry: “Little children, love one another, little children, love one another!”
As we have seen in this chapter, John gives us ten reasons why we must love one another. One reason is that God is love and if we plug into the love God is we make contact with God, and as we become a conduit of God’s love God makes contact with us.
John gives us a second reason that if we say we love God and we hate our brother we are liars. Because if we do not love the brother, we can see how can we love God Whom we cannot see? His point is that it’s not easy to love God because we cannot hug a Spirit. There is an inseparable vertical and horizontal dimension of this love that God is.
These two dimensions form a cross.
We cannot say we love God if we do not love one another.
Dick Woodward, 09 July 2010
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Posted by Dick Woodward
July 5, 2024
“God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God lives in him.” (1 John 4:16)
In the epistle of First John, the apostle of Love is giving us ten reasons why we must love one another. Among those ten reasons is the one expressed above. We must love one another because God is love and the person who loves in this way is living in God and God is living in that person.
One application of what John is writing is that when we plug into the love that God is, we live in God and God lives in us. In the 1950s I made a great discovery. As a social worker while responding to a night call at 3:00AM, I prayed a prayer like this:
“God, You say You are a special quality of love. I believe You are doing Your love thing where people are hurting. I’m now going to where hurting people are. When I get there please pass the love You are through me and address their pain.”
There were times when I prayed that prayer I thought I was being electrocuted with the love of God. I challenge you to accept the challenge of the Apostle John.
Go where the hurting people are with that prayer on your heart. When you become a conduit of God’s love, you will never be satisfied with anything less. This is because as a conduit of the love of God you will experience Who, What and Where God is – and where you want to be for the rest of your life!
Dick Woodward, 06 July 2010
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Posted by Dick Woodward
July 2, 2024
“…for the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost.” (Luke 19:10)
In Luke 19, verses 1–10, we encounter Jesus interacting with the tax collector, Zacchaeus. The beautiful part of the Zacchaeus story is that Jesus spends His only day in Jericho with this little crook, and all the people are griping about it. It would make a great painting if an artist would paint Jesus who was a tall man, according to Josephus, walking home with His arm around small and short Zacchaeus.
Here we see the strategy of Jesus. Jesus is passing through Jericho. He obviously wants to reach the man who can impact and reach Jericho for Him after He has passed through and beyond the city limits.
It must have made a big impact upon the city when Zacchaeus started calling in the people he had “ripped off.” Imagine their surprise, joy, and awe when they, thinking he was going to get into their purses even deeper, discovered that he wanted to pay them back 400% because he had met Jesus!
This is an illustration and an application of what Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) that the solution, the answer, the salt, the light – is something we are, and that we simply must hear His word and do it.
Dick Woodward, MBC New Testament Handbook
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Posted by Dick Woodward
June 28, 2024
“For in fact the body is not one member but many.” (1 Corinthians 12:14)
The greatest Scripture in the New Testament about the way a church should function is chapter 12 of First Corinthians. After the Apostle Paul uses the words diversity and oneness several times, he brings these two opposite concepts together in his inspired metaphor that the Church is to function as a body.
Paul writes that it is not either/or but both/and. Diversity should be celebrated rather than resolved. As diverse members of the body of Christ come together to have a ministry there are “let it happen people,” “make it happen people,” “don’t know what’s happening people,” and “don’t know anything is supposed to be happening people.”
Let it happen people desperately need make it happen people. And the other two kinds of people obviously need these first two kinds of people. The truth is they all need each other to function as a team, a body and a Church.
There are Mary and Martha kinds of people and they both need each other. Often, Marthas do not appreciate Marys because they think they are unorganized. But Marys need Marthas and Marthas need to realize that if it were not for the Marys there would not be anything to organize.
Are you fitting in with those kinds of people who have what you do not have and sharing with them what you have that they do not have? When we experience unity while celebrating diversity we do not have uniformity but a supernatural community that is in reality the body of our risen and living Jesus Christ.
Dick Woodward, 25 June 2013
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Posted by Dick Woodward
June 25, 2024
“For if I make you sorrowful, then who is he who makes me glad but the one who is made sorrowful by me?” (2 Corinthians 2:2)
You can’t control the weather or rainy days, but you can control the emotional climate that surrounds you. There is a principle of relationships that tells us communication is a two-way street. Whatever you send down that street comes back up that street and into your relationship with another person.
That is the essence of what the Apostle Paul is teaching: “If I say things that get you down who is going to build me up and pull me up?” The reality is that you are probably going to pull me down because misery loves company. This is a negative way of stating the positive truth that if I say things to you that build you up, I have equipped you to build me up.
In another place Paul wrote: “Let no corrupt word proceed out of your mouth, but what is good for necessary edification, that it may impart grace to the hearers.” (Ephesians 4:29)
In every relationship you have – with your spouse, children, parents, those you work with, those you work for, and those who work for you – make the commitment to say and do things that build them up and minister the grace of God to them. You will be surprised by joy to discover what you send down that communication street will come back up that street and into your relationship with that person.
Jesus gave an unstable man named Simon the nickname Peter, which meant stable like a rock. After calling Peter a rock for three years Peter becamea rock. Try that in your relationships.
Dick Woodward, 29 June 2010
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Posted by Dick Woodward
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