Great Is Thy Faithfulness
August 31, 2004
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Uncategorized Feedback : 4 comments
Great is Thy faithfulness, O God my Father;
There is no shadow of turning with Thee;
Thou changest not, Thy compassions, they fail not;
As Thou hast been, Thou forever will be.
Great is Thy faithfulness!
Great is Thy faithfulness!
Morning by morning new mercies I see.
All I have needed Thy hand hath provided;
Great is Thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me!
Summer and winter and springtime and harvest,
Sun, moon and stars in their courses above
Join with all nature in manifold witness
To Thy great faithfulness, mercy and love.
Great is Thy faithfulness!
Great is Thy faithfulness!
Morning by morning new mercies I see.
All I have needed Thy hand hath provided;
Great is Thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me!
Pardon for sin and a peace that endureth
Thine own dear presence to cheer and to guide;
Strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow,
Blessings all mine, with ten thousand beside!
Great is Thy faithfulness!
Great is Thy faithfulness!
Morning by morning new mercies I see.
All I have needed Thy hand hath provided;
Great is Thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me!
Preparing to be married eight years ago, my future wife and I discussed music for our wedding. Millions of songs, thousands of hymns, but which to choose? One hymn was certain, Chisholm and Runyan’s “Great Is Thy Faithfulness.”
I’m an emotional guy, but as time has unwound I find myself crying less and less. On that day in May as I stood before the woman I loved, this hymn played, encapsulating every thought I had about God’s goodness. I bawled out the words somehow. How wonderful they are! The witnesses of God’s own making, His very creation, each man and woman, all attesting to the faithfulness of the Lord—a God who never changes, never fails, who has been and always will be.
Yesterday I wrote about dust, and that we are. But even as God breathed life into the dusty bones lying strewn across a terrible battlefield (Ezekiel 37:1-14), He can take us, dead and destroyed as we are, and breathe His vital Spirit into us, raising us up and making us to stand, redeemed and ready.
God took a weeping prophet, whose lamentations stained the earth with tears, and allowed him to see that nothing and no one is too far gone for Him to resurrect. And so in his wailing, God showed Jeremiah that His faithfulness is great:
My soul is bereft of peace;
I have forgotten what happiness is;
so I say, “My endurance has perished;
so has my hope from the LORD.”
Remember my affliction and my wanderings,
the wormwood and the gall!
My soul continually remembers it
and is bowed down within me.
But this I call to mind,
and therefore I have hope:
The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases;
his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
“The LORD is my portion,” says my soul,
“therefore I will hope in him.”
The LORD is good to those who wait for him,
to the soul who seeks him.
It is good that one should wait quietly
for the salvation of the LORD.
It is good for a man that he bear
the yoke in his youth.
Let him sit alone in silence
when it is laid on him;
let him put his mouth in the dust—
there may yet be hope;
let him give his cheek to the one who strikes,
and let him be filled with insults.
For the Lord will not
cast off forever,
but, though he cause grief, he will have compassion
according to the abundance of his steadfast love;
for he does not willingly afflict
or grieve the children of men.
—Lamentations 3:17-33 {emphasis added}
We who are dust, are born from dust and return to dust, have a hope. That hope lies in God’s great faithfulness. He does not cast off forever, and though He may seem far away in times of trouble, His compassion is boundless, His forgiveness limitless, and His peace enduring.
So let us praise Him! All we have needed His hand hath provided. The strength we need for today is there for the taking. His hands are open with blessings—all mine and all yours—with ten thousand beside.
Thank you, Jesus, thank you!
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In the Lowlands
August 30, 2004
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Uncategorized Feedback : 1 comment so far
Save me, O God!
For the waters have come up to my neck.I sink in deep mire,
where there is no foothold;
I have come into deep waters,
and the flood sweeps over me.I am weary with my crying out;
my throat is parched.
My eyes grow dim
with waiting for my God.—Psalm 69:1-3
Wisdom bought through suffering only comes in hindsight. When the hand of God reaches down into the mire and plucks us up, we vow that we will remember what we just went through as if we are living it always. The time of testing came and went, but it cannot be forgotten—at least that is what we promise as we move on to better times.
Then there are occasions when our breath cannot return before the next test comes. We think we will not revisit the recent past, but then our feet are swept out from beneath us and the all-too-familiar stench of the lowlands rises up to embrace us. It’s the quicksand of a fallen world perpetually dragging us down.
Some people seem to cruise through life with the kind of problems that are resolved in the timeliness and manner usually reserved for half hour TV sitcoms. Others find life to be relentless in its harsh messages, seemingly random disasters, and outright sadistic tricks. And the eyes grow dim waiting for God.
We are a people rooted in happy endings. Christians know that happy endings come to those in Jesus who complete the race, but the race itself can be cruel; it kills everyone who runs it. Our willingness to keep running despite the mire is what separates us from the despairing. Our knowledge of the finish line—and who waits for us there—is what gives us hope.
As for me, I lack the wisdom that comes from hindsight. I don’t know why some guys have all the luck, why some enjoy a stunning amount of great breaks. Still, I know bitter people who actually spend their lives waiting for the lucky guy’s winning streak to come to an end, hoping to get a good seat to watch the mire win. I think I am not like that, but I understand how easy it is to become cynical, desiring only the worst for others so our own mire does not seem so deep.
I do not understand why life is so difficult some, many of whom absorb one hit after another for no comprehensible reason. The infertile couple who waits for years for a child, adopts one, only to bury their dream a few years later when a senseless accident takes that child away from them. Or the couple wanting to marry, only to have him sent off to war, be severely wounded, recover, then get shipped back to the States to his fiancee, whereupon she suffers an asthma attack and dies. Those tales may be generic or they may be the tales of the people in your own neighborhood, church, or workplace. Someone we know has endured something like them.
I do not have the wisdom to answer the question of why. Nor do I understand how the wicked can flourish while the righteous live in poverty. All I know is that many people have eyes that are growing dim waiting for God. For them I pray this:
Lord Jesus, you are our only hope in this world. Without you, we are less than nothing, mere dust that is blown away on the breeze. Your compassionate love is infinite in its tenderness, boundless in its strength, and capable of redeeming any person or situation. Into the lives of those trapped in the mire, Lord, we ask that your loving mercy and your strong hand reach out to them, lifting them out of their circumstance and into your redemptive embrace. Mercy, mercy, Jesus, we cry for mercy! May we all know your mercy in due time, at the right time, in the saving time—for your glory alone. Be our Rock and our Salvation, for the days are evil. Maranatha, Lord Jesus. Amen.
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Giving Up on Fair Play
August 28, 2004
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Uncategorized Feedback : 5 comments
I stopped watching the Athens Olympics long before the end. A huge fan of the Winter Olympics, I’ve devoted slightly less attention to the Summer Games over the years. In the future, I suspect I will not be watching any of the Summer Olympics.
I dropped out of watching pro sports when the money overwhelmed the sport. I dropped out of college sports for the same reason. Now with the Olympics bestowing winning athletes with endorsements that crowd out the medals, I think this may be my last Summer Games. What is at stake is not simply being the best at what you do, but turning medals into lucrative deals.
Is it me or is everyone doped up on some chemical in these Games? How many medals have been stripped away? The Wall Street Journal did an interesting piece a few days ago noting how some of the winners in this Olympics were perpetual also-rans, sporting middling times and scores for years, only to suddenly show a burst in speed and skill in just the last few months leading up to the event they later won. In women’s weightlifting, the three top finishers showed ludicrous amounts of improvement since Sydney, numbers that should cause people to scratch their heads (or in the case of some of those competitors, their beards.) Others have noted that if one athlete on a team in a single sport is a human test tube, the coaches of that team are probably doping the rest, too; those others simply did not get caught.
Should we even go into the judging fiascos? Years ago during the Cold War, we knew their judges were ripping us off, and they knew it of ours, too. But now with so much money at stake, a couple thousandths of a point here and there translates into millions of potential dollars—or not, if you happen to be the one who irked the Malaysian judge by putting on your right shoe first while waiting for your score rather than the left one. (You just don’t know how twitchy anyone is anymore.)
No one truly worries about fairness. Does Nike hire you to shill their shoes simply because you play fair? If that were true, then there should be a knock at my door any second now. Nope, even “amateur” sports is about staking your claim in the Q-ratings so you can get your mug plastered on the side of a downtown bus. Check out the milk moustaches on Kerri Walsh and Misty May!
So I’m done.
The Bible says:
Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to those with knowledge, but time and chance happen to them all.
—Ecclesiastes 9:11
Sometimes the best winds up number two. Sometimes the genius ends his life living in poverty. It’s not fair, but it is part of being human. We hate to see it, but are glad when it is not us—at least we like to think it won’t be us one day.
Truth is, we Christians must always live this side of heaven as the also-rans. Living to serve the Lord puts us in an automatic number two position. Living to serve others bumps us down even more. It is not ours to ask the Lord to sit on His left or right, but simply to do His will.
The young missionary who floats speared to death in an Ecuadorian river is not seeking fairness. The elderly man living in the ghetto who gave the best years of his life handing out food to those even poorer than himself does not ask to be justified in his actions. The minister who cleans up the remains of a teen suicide so the parents will not see the outcome will never question the fact that the media ignores his act of kindness. The woman who exists to many today only as a tarnished brass plaque beneath a stained glass window, but who taught little boys and girls about Jesus for fifty years, does not mind that her name continues to fade from church memories as the generations go on. All of them have a greater reward.
Fairness is not ours to demand.
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Absent from the Body?
August 25, 2004
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Uncategorized Feedback : add a comment
I’ve been a Christian for almost thirty years. In that time, one of the trends in the Church in America—even in what is considered the age of the Spirit—is a diminishing of seeking the Spirit of God for direction and power in ministry. The ascendancy of “models” and “programs” has trumped the very Spirit of the Lord, and we are impoverished in the Church because of it.
There’s something perverse about praying over pre-decided programming decisions. There’s a mania in our storming ahead in ministry opportunities without acting like our Lord, who said:
Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise.
—John 5:19b ESV
With that verse in mind, why do so many churches fall in line with what seems to be the hot Christian fad of the month? We wonder why we get tepid results in our ministries; well, this is why.
You cannot substitute for the Spirit of God, but we certainly try. Part of this is because the Spirit is so absent in our assemblies, yet we don’t seem to notice. Have we become that mechanical, so reliant on man-powered solutions that we no longer expect to go out into the world clothed in the power from on high? I go back to this verse time and again as the standard:
When [Peter and John] were released, they went to their friends and reported what the chief priests and the elders had said to them. And when they heard it, they lifted their voices together to God and said, “Sovereign Lord, who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and everything in them, who through the mouth of our father David, your servant, said by the Holy Spirit,
���
“‘Why did the Gentiles rage,
���and the peoples plot in vain?
The kings of the earth set themselves,
���and the rulers were gathered together,
against the Lord and against his Anointed’—for truly in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place. And now, Lord, look upon their threats and grant to your servants to continue to speak your word with all boldness, while you stretch out your hand to heal, and signs and wonders are performed through the name of your holy servant Jesus.” And when they had prayed, the place in which they were gathered together was shaken, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and continued to speak the word of God with boldness.
—Acts 4:23-31
Pay particular attention to that last verse. When was your church assembly last shaken? Do we leave our meetings filled with the Spirit and speaking the word of God with boldness. If not, why not?
We who love the Body of Christ must start asking these kinds of questions and settle for no answers save but a return to living out the life of the Church as embodied by our 1st century brethren. If we are not ministering out of the power of the Holy Spirit, being led by Him and Him alone, then we are wasting everyone’s time when there is no time to waste.
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Killed for Just One Reason
August 23, 2004
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Dying to Self, In the News, Persecution, Spiritual Warfare Feedback : add a comment
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A young couple shot in their heads as they slept on a remote California beach may have been killed because of their evangelical Christian religious beliefs, police said on Saturday.
On the heels of my post We Are Not Ready comes the story of two camp counselors—just weeks away from being married—slain by a servant of Satan on a tranquil beach out west.
While the motive for the slayings is not carved in stone, we who call on the name of Jesus must be prepared to acknowledge that more of this will be coming, and sooner than we care to admit. We must start preparing to meet this challenge, both spiritually and emotionally, because we are ignoring the signs of the age the way we are living now.
Lord Jesus, I pray that you will rouse Your sleeping Bride and make her ready for the days to come. Help her to stand, holy and set apart for Your purpose. Give her the strength to press on under persecution, and unite all who comprise her with one heart, one mind, and one common goal, always for Your glory alone. Amen.
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