August 8, 2012
“Your eye is a lamp that provides light for your body. When your eye is good, your whole body is filled with light. But when your eye is bad, your whole body is filled with darkness.” (Matthew 6:22, 23 NLT)
Perspective means “to look through” to the end. I learned a helpful spiritual discipline on my faith journey when I asked God to give me His perspective of the long view and the forward look. I now find it helpful to look up and ask God to give me His perspective as I take the long view back at the events of my life. I believe it does wonders for our perspective when we regularly shake ourselves out of our introspective pity parties, look up, and ask for God’s long view perspective of our life in both directions.
Robertson McQuilken, a spiritual leader I deeply respect teaches: “It is easier to move to a consistent and problem-free extreme than to remain at the center of tension on any biblical issue, but the truth is often found at the center.”
In an interview Rick Warren was asked how he felt about his wife’s cancer. He reflected that he once thought life was a series of mountaintops and valleys, but he has now decided life is like a railroad track. The left rail represents this hard reality: there is always something bad in our life because God is more interested in our character than He is in our comfort. The right rail represents this blessing: there is always something good in our life because God is good and He does love us.
I have found that when we’re hurting we can often find truth at the center between these two rails of reality.
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Uncategorized | Tagged: Faith in God, faith journey, Matthew 6:22, religion, retrospective perspective, Rick Warren, Robertson McQuilken, spiritual perspective, spirituality, walking by faith | 
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Posted by Dick Woodward
August 3, 2012
“… what does He receive from your hand?” (Job 35:7)
Not many devout people are disillusioned when they see wicked people suffer; however, the people of God are often faith-challenged when the godly suffer. For thousands of years devout souls have been asking God, “Why do the righteous suffer?”
The book of Job is the longest, most profound and comprehensive answer to that question in the Bible. If this is the oldest book in the Bible, then the very first truth God wanted to teach us is His answer to this primary ‘why question’ of His hurting people.
The way this ancient “Saga of Suffering” answers that question turns on a question Job asked his wife. God had given Satan permission to take every possession he had, including his ten children (Job 2:3). Then God permitted Satan to take Job’s health. When he lost his health and was suffering from a dreadful disease, his wife told him he should curse God and die. He responded to her cheerful counsel by asking, “Shall we accept good from the hand of God, and not trouble?” (Job 2:10 NIV)
The essence of Job’s question was, “What should a righteous man expect God to put in his hand because he is living a righteous life?” The answer to Job’s question is found in a discourse of a young man named, Elihu. He told Job he was asking the wrong question. He should be asking, “What is He receiving from your hand?” (Job 35: 7 NIV)
If you are hurting, or when you do, ask God the right question. What have you done for Him lately? What are you putting in His hand?
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Posted by Dick Woodward
July 26, 2012
“The LORD our God has secrets known to no one. We are not accountable for them, but we and our children are accountable forever for all that He has revealed to us that we may obey…” (Deuteronomy 29:29 NLT)
According to Moses, there are secrets God has determined to keep secret. (Perhaps these secrets are on a need to know basis.) However, the things God wants us to do, He has made very plain through His Word, especially the Living Word, His beloved Son. But, if God has willed to remain silent about His secrets, it would be pompous arrogance for us to say we can answer all the “why” questions regarding our suffering.
Where did we ever get the idea that we should expect to understand everything that happens to us? Where did we ever get the absurd notion that God owes us an explanation for everything He has done and is doing in our world and in our lives? If God gave us an explanation for everything and the answers to all of our “why” questions, the very essence of faith and the need for faith would be eliminated.
Almighty God has willed that without faith we cannot please Him, or come to Him (Hebrews 11:6). God is pleased when we echo these words of Job: “Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him” (Job 13:15 NKJV). In my own words, God is pleased when we come to Him in our crucibles of suffering and cry, “If you heal me, that’s all right. But, if you don’t heal me, that’s all right, too, because You are all right!”
Can you say you are all right because He is all right? Can you leave the secret things with Him?
1 Comment | Uncategorized | Tagged: "why God?", christianity, essence of faith, faith, faith & suffering, hebrews 11, Spiritual secrets, spirituality, Trusting God | Permalink
Posted by Dick Woodward
July 20, 2012
“… that He might make you know that man shall not live by bread alone; but man lives by every word that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord.” (Deuteronomy 8:3)
These words are taken from one of the great sermons Moses preached after the children of Israel were delivered from Egypt just before they invaded the land of Canaan. They had wandered in a terrible wilderness for 40 years in which they suffered every imaginable hardship. In this sermon God tells them through Moses that He was using all that suffering to make them know every word that He has ever spoken.
By devotional and personal application we can realize that this is one of the ways we learn the Word of God today. God is our Mentor and He does His most effective mentoring when we are in difficult places. While facing crises and challenges that overwhelm us God makes us know His Word. Every adversity God permits or directs into our lives is redemptive and is an opportunity for us to let God make us know His Word.
God is fiercely committed to the proposition that we are going to grow spiritually into perfection or completeness and maturity. The first chapter of the letter of James informs us that God’s trials should not be treated like intruders but welcomed as friends because they are sent from God. He does this because He wants us to be perfect or complete and lacking nothing. Jesus told us to be perfect even as our Heavenly Father is perfect (Matthew 5:48).
So when those tough times come sit up and pay attention. God has come to the front of the classroom and He is about to teach us His Word.
1 Comment | Uncategorized | Tagged: Deuteronomy 8:12, facing crises, faith, God's Word, Moses, religion, Scriptures, spirituality, Studying the Scriptures, The Bible, Word of God | Permalink
Posted by Dick Woodward
July 12, 2012
“We have spoken freely to you, Corinthians, and opened wide our hearts to you…As a fair exchange – I speak as to my children – open wide your hearts also.” (2 Corinthians 6:11-13 NIV)
To paraphrase this passage, Paul is suggesting that each of us has a communication “flap” on our heart. We should be face-to-face and heart-to-heart with our communication flaps open. But, the hard reality is that we are often back-to-back with our communication flaps down and tightly closed. The solution Paul prescribes here is that someone must say, “I am heart-to-heart with you, and my communication flap is open. Be heart-to-heart with me and open your communication flap.”
We face communication challenges every day in our family, work life, and in our interactions with people. When there is a communication problem it is so very important to realize that someone has to initiate a solution by saying, in spirit and in principle, to the person with whom they are having a communication conflict, “I am heart-to-heart with you, and my communication flap is open. Be heart to heart with me and open your communication flap.”
You may be totally amazed at how taking that stance can melt the obstacles between you and that person with whom you are having a difficult and challenging relationship. This can be a communication “circuit breaker” that restores communication in a relationship.
Bacteria multiply in the dark but cannot live in the light. If we do not have good communication in a relationship misunderstandings multiply like bacteria, but when communication is restored it is as if we have turned the light on our relationship. Most of the bacteria will die and we can address that which doesn’t die with the light of our restored communication.
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Posted by Dick Woodward
July 6, 2012
“Every valley shall be filled and every mountain and hill brought low; the crooked places shall be made straight and the rough ways smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.” (Isaiah 40: 4-5)
The essence of Isaiah’s great sermon is that when you build a highway you do four things: you level mountains, you fill valleys, you straighten crooked places, and you smooth out rough places.
Isaiah preached that God was coming into our world and when He did He was going to travel on the highway of the life of His Son. In that life the mountains of pride would be leveled, the empty spaces would be one hundred percent filled with the Holy Spirit, the crooked ways of sin would be perfectly straight and His rough places would be made smooth by the way He responded to them.
Just before Jesus parted with His apostles He told them that in the same way the Father sent Him into the world He was sending them into the world. If His life was to be a highway on which God traveled into this world, our life is also to be a highway for God. I challenge you to ask God to make your life into a highway for Him to travel into this world.
If you pray that prayer when God’s bulldozers start leveling your mountains of pride, His Holy Spirit fills your empty spaces and straightens out your crooked ways of sin and then gives you the grace to smooth out the rough challenges that come into your life.
While all that is happening you can write “Caution: God at work” across your life.
I dare you to have the courage to pray this prayer.
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Posted by Dick Woodward
July 1, 2012
“Then the Lord God called to Adam and said to him, ‘Where are you?… And He said, ‘Who told you?’” (Genesis 3: 9, 11)
A police officer on a motorcycle noticed a large enclosed truck driven down Sixth Street, in Los Angeles, California. The driver stopped every few blocks, got out of the truck, and beat around the sides of the truck with a large baseball bat. After observing this for some time, the officer turned on his siren, flashed his lights and with strong hand signals ordered the driver to pull over. The policeman asked the driver, “Mister, as far as I can tell, you’re not breaking the law. But I just gotta know, what are you doing?”
The truck driver explained, “Officer, this truck here has a capacity of five thousand pounds. But, you see, I got six thousand pounds of canaries in this truck. So, I gotta keep a thousand pounds of canaries up in the air all the time!”
When you begin reading the Bible it may surprise you to discover that the first four things God says to us are questions. Why would the creator God ask questions of the man He has created? I’m convinced God does this because He knows His creature is up in the air about life. God loves us too much to leave us without a definition of life and some direction. He wants to dialogue with us so He can bring what he calls salvation into our life.
Are you up in the air about your life? Because He loves you God would like to greet you with that question “Where are you?” and follow it with the question “Who told you?” when you respond to Him.
2 Comments | Uncategorized | Tagged: faith, Genesis 3, God the Creator, spiritual dialogue, Spiritual Discernment, spiritual questions, spirituality, the Creation, where are you? | Permalink
Posted by Dick Woodward
June 7, 2012
“As evening came, Jesus said to his disciples, ‘Let’s cross to the other side of the lake.’ So they took Jesus in the boat and started out, leaving the crowds behind (although other boats followed). But soon a fierce storm came up. High waves were breaking into the boat, and it began to fill with water. Jesus was sleeping at the back of the boat with his head on a cushion. The disciples woke him up, shouting, ‘Teacher, don’t you care that we’re going to drown?’ When Jesus woke up, he rebuked the wind and said to the water, ‘Silence! Be still!’ Suddenly the wind stopped, and there was a great calm. Then he asked them, ‘Why are you afraid? Do you still have no faith?’” (Mark 4: 35-40 LB)
I have not posted a blog for quite some time because I had a medical crisis that put me in the hospital followed by a limited ability to work for about eight weeks. This experience has reminded me of the story above of a fierce storm that was turned into a great calm by a profound question asked by Jesus.
The disciples clearly believed they were all going to drown including Jesus. The question of Jesus was essentially “When are you going to get some faith?” In other words, “Do you think that all I have told you about My kingdom and your part in it is going to drown at the bottom of the Sea of Galilee?”
Jesus promises to take us to the other side. When fierce storms break into our lives they will not invalidate what Jesus is doing in and through us if we will let this profound question turn our fierce storms into a great calm.
2 Comments | Uncategorized | Tagged: facing storms of life, faith, Jesus Christ, Questions of Jesus, Sea of Galilee, spiritual questions, spirituality | Permalink
Posted by Dick Woodward
May 29, 2012
“When your body suffers, sin loses its power.” (1 Peter 4:1 LB)
As you and I grow closer to God, one of two things happens: God burns out of us everything contrary to the essence of His spiritual and holy nature, or our resistance to this process puts our relationship with God in a spiritual “deep freeze.”
Years ago I visited a man who had just experienced a five-artery bypass operation after suffering a massive heart attack. Involved in much sexual immorality before he became a follower of Christ, he had sought my counsel frequently regarding his continuous battle with a sexually impure thought-life. When I arrived at his room in the hospital, he extended his hand to me from his oxygen tent and said, “I haven’t had a sexual thought since I entered this hospital!”
What he said reminded me of that part of the verse quoted above by the Apostle Peter, which tells us that sin can sometimes lose its power when we are suffering. If people were transparent, many would acknowledge the reality that their loving heavenly Father has kept them from much sin by permitting many shades and grades of suffering and limitations. According to the book of Hebrews (12: 29), and the first letter of the Apostle Peter, God sometimes uses suffering to diminish sin and increase the share of His holy nature with His children.
If a large block of ice and a blowtorch came together slowly one of two things happens: the blowtorch can melt the ice or the ice can extinguish the blowtorch. God knows His business is to prepare us for heaven. He is a consuming fire that sometimes uses suffering to do that business.
3 Comments | Uncategorized | Tagged: 1 Peter 4:1, apostle peter, faith & suffering, Following Jesus Christ, loving heavenly father, spirituality, Strengthening our faith | Permalink
Posted by Dick Woodward
April 20, 2012
“He leads me beside the still waters.” (Psalm 23:2)
Most people associate the still waters of David’s Shepherd Psalm with peace. However, if you do some research you will find that when a sheep drinks from a stream of water that stream must be as flat and still as a mirror or the water will go up the snout of the sheep. The authentic application of this metaphor is therefore that the still waters mean our great Shepherd leads us to the places just suited for us.
In 1979 I resigned from a large church and accepted a call to a small church that had just begun. After being in the small church for a year I went to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester Minnesota because of weird symptoms I was experiencing. After nearly a month of studies, the doctor who directed my program misread my file. Thinking I was still in the large church, when he gave me the diagnosis of multiple sclerosis he told me I needed to go to a small church in a small town. I told him that I had already been in a small church for a year. I was to learn to be fulfilled with doing less and doing it better.
As my symptoms persisted and I was confined to a wheelchair a group of men helped me build a house that accommodated my physical challenges. One of them made a stained glass window with two words on it. Near the entrance for 26 years those two words have been “Still Waters.” Those two words are not just a label for my home but also my ministry – in this location I have accomplished the most fruitful work of my life.
Can you write those two words across what God is doing in your life right now?
2 Comments | Uncategorized | Tagged: church, Divine Providence, Faith in God, prayer, Psalm 23, spirituality, Still Waters, Trusting God | Permalink
Posted by Dick Woodward
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