Dying to Self

An Encouraging Word

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We all need a dose of encouragement. The world weighs heavy on many. Today, all I have to say is this:

God loves you with an everlasting love that no trial, no pain, no despair can overcome. The weight we feel is life, and while we cannot always avoid the pitfalls of life, we have a sure hope, a God who meets us in our time of need:

7 In my distress I called upon the Lord;
to my God I called.
From his temple he heard my voice,
and my cry came to his ears.

8 Then the earth reeled and rocked;
the foundations of the heavens trembled
and quaked, because he was angry.
9 Smoke went up from his nostrils,
and devouring fire from his mouth;
glowing coals flamed forth from him.
10 He bowed the heavens and came down;
thick darkness was under his feet.
11 He rode on a cherub and flew;
he was seen on the wings of the wind.
12 He made darkness around him his canopy,
thick clouds, a gathering of water.
13 Out of the brightness before him
coals of fire flamed forth.
14 The Lord thundered from heaven,
and the Most High uttered his voice.
15 And he sent out arrows and scattered them;
lightning, and routed them.
16 Then the channels of the sea were seen;
the foundations of the world were laid bare,
at the rebuke of the Lord,
at the blast of the breath of his nostrils.

17 He sent from on high, he took me;
he drew me out of many waters.
18 He rescued me from my strong enemy,
from those who hated me,
for they were too mighty for me.
19 They confronted me in the day of my calamity,
but the Lord was my support.
20 He brought me out into a broad place;
he rescued me, because he delighted in me.

21 The Lord dealt with me according to my righteousness;
according to the cleanness of my hands he rewarded me.
22 For I have kept the ways of the Lord
and have not wickedly departed from my God.
23 For all his rules were before me,
and from his statutes I did not turn aside.
24 I was blameless before him,
and I kept myself from guilt.
25 And the Lord has rewarded me according to my righteousness,
according to my cleanness in his sight.

26 With the merciful you show yourself merciful;
with the blameless man you show yourself blameless;
27 with the purified you deal purely,
and with the crooked you make yourself seem tortuous.
28 You save a humble people,
but your eyes are on the haughty to bring them down.
29 For you are my lamp, O Lord,
and my God lightens my darkness.
30 For by you I can run against a troop,
and by my God I can leap over a wall.
31 This God—his way is perfect;
the word of the Lord proves true;
he is a shield for all those who take refuge in him.

32 For who is God, but the Lord?
And who is a rock, except our God?
33 This God is my strong refuge
and has made my way blameless.
34 He made my feet like the feet of a deer
and set me secure on the heights.
35 He trains my hands for war,
so that my arms can bend a bow of bronze.
36 You have given me the shield of your salvation,
and your gentleness made me great.
— 2 Samuel 22:7-36 ESV

He rescues us because He delights in us. His gentleness has made us great. From His temple He hears our cries and He shakes heaven and earth to come to our aid.

This is the God we serve, the Lord we love, who loves us immeasurably and without ceasing.

If you feel low, or are buffeted by trials, remember who our God is. He will reward you for your faithfulness.

A prayer:

Lord, we thank you, praise, and bless you for your faithfulness. Your promise is that you will meet all our needs according to your riches in glory in Christ Jesus. No good thing do you withhold from those whose walk is blameless.

We come to you today as your children seeking your great mercy. Father, be our deliverance today, be our salvation in our time of need, even as you have promised to from the beginning of all time. All good comes from you, every blessing is yours, infinite and rich.

You know we are like dust and that we cannot save ourselves. Unless you build the house, we labor in vain. Shake heaven and earth to stoop low to our defense, Lord, that we may know your mercy and rejoice in your gentleness toward us. Come make our enemies flee and turn our trials to gold, not for us alone, but for your namesake.

This we pray in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

May the Lord richly bless you today!

Building Castles with Air

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In talking with folks all over, I have been struck by one inescapable reality: We Christians in America have become a prayerless people ignorant of the Bible.

Reasons for this I have outlined in previous entries. We are filling our time with everything but prayer and study. True, our lives are hectic—far too hectic—but if we think we are going to build the Kingdom of God and see ourselves transformed into men and women who would die for Jesus, we cannot do it on ten minutes of prayer dashed off daily as we hustle from place to place. We cannot do it with a lone verse taped to a dashboard. We cannot do it with empty souls.

I do not know why we fail to understand this. But even more, I do not understand why we don’t feel the impoverishment in every part of our lives. It is one thing to be a child of God, but quite another to be filled with the Spirit in such a way that everything we do has a holy sheen to it that others notice instinctively. That we know that this is where we should be, but still we do not care to get there, is a kind of sickness. We have become so used to the illness itself that we have learned to live in this sickly state and to make excuses for feeling rotten.

But this is not what the Lord desires. He wants all of us, not a tossed off token prayer, not a hope that one day we’ll get around to studying and knowing the Scriptures.

We can only get there if we want it. If we are sick and tired of being sick and tired in our souls, then maybe we can work to find ways to make it possible for us to spend the time before the Lord that we need to reach that place where He can truly use us to change the world.

But we have to want it. Do you?

The Anti-Church

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This last weekend I was talking with folks concerning some of the issues I’ve raised in my posts on the Church and work when someone mentioned an issue that had come up in his former church, a good-sized, Midwest congregation.

It seems two families got hit particularly hard by downsizing, putting their incomes in such dire straits that they were threatened with the loss of their homes. When they approached the church for help, they were told nothing could be done. The kicker was the church was in the process of buying an $80,000 sound system. The kicker for those families was that they eventually did lose their homes.

Yet, nothing could be done.

Let me say this: When you love a 64-track digital mixing board more than your brothers and sisters in Christ, you are not the Church. When folks in the congregation spend more time debating whether or not they’ll sign up for the ten channel package of satellite HDTV rather than the twenty channels of programming when all the while your sister in Christ is going to lose her home, you are not the Church.

I am absolutely sick of hearing these kinds of stories. There is never any reason for them to exist. I don’t want to hear about our concern for the lost if we have no concern for them once they are no longer lost. The Church does not stop being the Church once a person gets baptized. We talk and talk and talk about community and love and all sorts of warm fuzzy concepts, but if I see my brother in need and do not do what I can to help, then I am no longer the Church, but a rugged individualist who believes that God helps those who help themselves and can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. If you can point to the chapter and verse that supports that kind of thinking, then I’ll recant, but you simply won’t because it is not the Gospel.

How many of you are sick and tired of playing “church”? Frankly, I’ve had it. Meanwhile, the thief who comes to steal and destroy robs one family after another, families who thought they were surrounded by love, but were in fact only surrounded by theories and nice ideas.

This is only going to get worse, folks. If you are like me, I would challenge the leadership of your church on these kinds of issues. And while we can think globally and worry about someone on the other side of the planet, if we can’t deliver on helping the people we meet together with every Sunday, how can we ever hope to make a difference to the world? We can’t let the Church become some glib, but pale, imitation of itself or else we have become the Anti-Church.

God forgive us for letting it get this far!