Tyranny of Doing

When Moses went up Mt. Sinai to the top to meet with God and receive the rest of the law, he firmly ordered Aaron and the other older leaders to wait on the mountain for him to return.  For some reason, they didn't; they went back to the camp to do whatever they thought was more necessary.  One has to wonder if the entire business of the golden calf would have been avoided if Aaron had simply stayed at his post rather than find something "better" to do down below.  There is a time to go down to the camp but also a time to wait for the clear directive of God.   Few things chaff us as severely as the wait God institutes.  We develop a fine constellation of ideas during the wait and are hell-bent on trying them out before the Lord has given us His "go".  We constantly are confusing the going and waiting; all the time wrecking this and that because we are not patient enough to get to know God's voice and faithful enough to heed His call.  We are like little children who must try everything when the great Counselor is patiently waiting for us to turn into Him for Divine Direction.  Not every jar contains arsenic but some do and our Lord is good enough to tell us in advance how to stay away from it.   Not every opportunity is good; some will take us far from the perfect peace God has prepared for us and those we love.  You certainly can do something but it may be the worst of your possible options and reward you with a lifetime of regret.  Perhaps we could wait upon the Lord just this one time; take time to let Him work Himself into us so that we can get it right when He finally gives us something to do.  Has anything been quite so disastrous as the obeisance we give to the adage of striking while the iron is hot?  Can we not pause even for an instant to be with God in whatever matter is before us?  Do we always have to do?

He (Moses) said to the elders, "Wait here…"   Exodus 24:14 NIV

Timed Responses

No part of any day is as big as the present moment.  Unlike the Lord who can live within each moment equally, we can only live perfectly within the present time, the past is a shadow, the future a misty guess.  Faith is never worked out of either the past or the future but just now.  How do fear and bitterness and discouragement and consternations arise...they filter out of the mind going back or moving ahead.  It is within this time only that you can see clearly the loving care of Christ poured out  upon all you hold dear because it is now that you assess through the eyes of faith and see the hand of God working here and there.  Both the past and the future are easily smeared by the wasting of Satan; God will keep your present pristine as you look to Him  and work through Him. You have the thousand regrets of the past and the ten thousand dreams and nightmares of the future but the present is the one spot where you can see everything as it is and give up everything haunting and grasping and hold only to the love of Christ working through you.  Ask, seek and knock are of neither the past nor the future but contained just within the present and it is in the present that you will have joy and peace.  Look to the Lord with the gaze of a sailor scanning the horizon for any sign of land.  You have waited a long time for some things, dread the coming of others.  Dreary memories dismay you, past achievements bind you.  It is in this place and time that the Lord will make you totally free to have joy and contentment.  Go hopefully and serenely to the Lord now and give this and that to Him as it comes before you.  Ask.  Seek. Knock.  That is the stuff you are to be about now.  Ask.  Seek.   Knock.  The Christian is perfectly within Gods will the moment He knocks for God to open,  seeks the Lord to be there,  asks His Savior to save him.   Give way to fear, despair, anger or frustration and you have left the moment and hidden yourself in either the past or the future.    When you realize you are stuck in that closet, get out as soon as you can and in a flash, the Lord will make your day clear and light.

Everyone was amazed and gave praise to God. They were filled with awe and said, "We have seen remarkable things today."   Luke 5:26 NIV

Forgetting Where We Are

We have bought into the proposition that everything is natural and random, originating in the mindlessness of circumstance.  Even as far back as the exodus out of Egypt the presence and activity of God was lost on the exiting Israelites.  When Pharaoh and his army of charioteers barreled down upon the encamped Israelites, the half-crazed Hebrews lost their minds over the perceived danger they faced.  It was as if they had forgotten altogether the plagues upon the livestock and the deadly hailstorm and the deaths of the firstborn; all of which did not touch them but ripped into the Egyptians.  If the Israelites could be oblivious to the hand of God back then given their experience with His work, it is not unreasonable that this same sociological circumstance would be present today.  The mob reacts to every bit and parcel of circumstance as bad luck, good fortune or the natural outcome of hard work and ingenuity.  The Holy Spirit alone brings to light the absolute and constant interplay of God within our world.  If Israel could stare at the photograph of God's intervention and see nothing, how likely is it that we will see it.  We must rely upon Holy Spirit to part the curtain as it were and make it so we  recognize all the ways our Lord is working in and among us.  Only then can we rest peacefully as we do our work and make our plans and evaluate our situation.  Nothing frustrates our joy more than the blackened goggles we stretch across our eyes given us by Satan to block out our discernment of what is really happening.  Satan cannot inhibit our view of God; he can only encourage us to block Him out of our sight.  You must choose to see God right there with you when you drop the dinner on the floor or your stocks tumble off the table.  You can see Him if you will look with Holy Spirit fixing your mind on what it should be noticing.  The worst of your day is never lost in circumstance...it is just as surrounded by angels as the shepherds who watched their sheep at night.  At no point have you been overtaken by your troubles and hardships...you are in just as good a place as Israel standing before the Red Sea.

"...It would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the desert!"   Exodus 14:12NIV

The Sin Factor

The miracle of the Cross is not sublime at all!  There is a mistaken teaching that has been passed around for hundreds of years that when Jesus Christ was crucified, he magically erased our sins, blotted them out as it were like divine  suds.  That is not the case at all.  He bore our sins; took them into His own body and they putrefied within Him, sucked the life out of Him, and each one added to His misery.  Why is the Church so content to slough off sin as a relic of our past rather than see it as the great monstrosity of our present.  Each sin we commit today adds to the shame and horror of the crucifixion Jesus endured two thousand years ago.  Only God could do this; bear sins committed tomorrow and not just the ones of yesterday.  As we sin and sin unthinkingly, we strike Jesus ourselves with the whip, drive the stake deeper in though his feet, take the rod and break it more ferociously upon his back and sides.  The sins of today are not nothing; they pry out of Christ's body more blood and break His heart even worse.  We may be free of real guilt but that does not mean Christ is.  He bears them all, the sins of yesterday as well as the ones of today and at some point, won't we just stop it?  Won't we just fiercely reject the notion that we can sin freely and easily and it doesn't matter?  John the Apostle says we don't have to keep sinning willy-nilly; we can put an end to it...not because we are getting better at righteousness but because the Holy Spirit lives in us and empowers us and moans too with the agony we cause Jesus every time we throw our fist up to the Heavens and tell the Lord we will do as we wish.  There is no greater evil in this universe than our own sinning...it is the root of every terrible thing we find all about us.  Certainly your "little sin"  did not tear the earth enough to cause the earthquake out in China but it was sin that diseased the universe and continues to scourge earth and sky.  We are such fundamentalists when it comes to getting our garbage sorted among the various recycling options but do we give the same care to the very sin that brought this mess upon us?  We do not have a population crisis in our world, we have a sin crisis and the multiplication of sin is what is "doing us in".    Pray with great emotion and bitter pain that God would keep you from temptation.  The Christian who truly understands sin will begin to loath every point at which sin enters through him...not because of the cost he pays but due to the cost Christ pays and that hurts dearly.

God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. 2 Corinthians 5:21 NIV

Fretting For What?

It is never the crisis that unsettles us but rather the deviation away from Christ.  We are so infatuated by how things will turn that we forget just how perfectly Christ is fitting Himself into us.  When the Lord reminded us not to worry about what we would eat or wear, do we think that was all there was to His point?  Jesus was not unsettled by criticism or temptation, by poverty or that frustrating co-worker.  He simply was not rattled and that is what God wants for us too and has for us.  This is possible not because we become skilled at scaling back our responsibilities or cutting out negative relationships; this is our personality in Christ.  The Lord does not want us to imitate Jesus but rather for Him to live in us.  As we give sway to Christ at every instance, we find the mind and emotions of God coming out of us in all sorts of exciting and surprising ways.  God did not die for us to just take away our punishment for sin; He died that we might have life and have it more abundantly.  That life is not a life of fretting, stewing or striving.  The life God died to give us is one with the Lord Jesus Christ living fully through us.  Each turn we take is an opportunity for the wisdom and love of Christ to manifest itself in what we do and how we think about all we encounter.  Lust, selfishness and pride are the archaic remnants of a dying breed.  The new man is being established as us: Christ joined to me, Christ joined to you in a dynamic synthesis that will be perfect.  As you read the Bible, don't look for ways to make something of your life; look for Christ to live fully and happily in and through you as He works out your day moment by moment.

For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.  Colossians 3:3 NIV

Absolute Focus

The brevity of a day is just the space God needs to make a planet spin, a sun explode and a soul find refuge.  Perhaps the great oddity of our Lord is that he cares about a moment in time.  Eternal and without end or beginning and yet He contemplates the second and each second with the same attention.  For us as we grow older, the days and years become a wash; a repetitive splash of wave after wave.  But God takes the moments seriously, both past and coming with  equal affection and consideration.  The instant you find your doll in the back of the car and exult, the Lord celebrates mightily with you too.  And when your baby is found dead in your womb, the Lord weeps then just as mournfully as if He had only lived that day and seen just that one sorrow.  The Lord God lives out with you the surprising joys and the devastating losses at the time it happens and He is not looking forward to the end of the saga or backwards to before it began.  He is looking with you at the same thing you are and He sees it with clarity and attention.  Your fever burns now and God is with you in it fully engaged and your all night study session is not lost on Him either even as you fight to stay awake.  You slice your finger and God flinches with you; take your fury out on your son and he weeps in the night too.  Argue with your wife and the Lord is centering in on every part of the fight, take your kids to the zoo and He is having the time of His life with you there.  It is nothing for the Lord to be riveted by what you do and say and hear and think, but it is not inconsequential to Him either.  He bores in on your life as if it were the only one contained within the universe and does not turn His back upon it even for an instant.  You may disregard the depth of your existence but God has never done so.  It is a tangle of distracted complexity to you but simple and all consuming to Him.  The Lord sees you!

O Lord, you have searched me and you know me.  You know when I sit and when I rise...  Psalm 139:1-2 NIV

How Do You Assess Your Day?

If we give in to the corrosive habit of whining, the very point for which we are made is lost.  The image of God is not latent;  in Christ it is front and center.  From every pore seeps Christ and His nature and as you live out the day God has given you, something miraculous happens; God in flesh is realized, or better, discovered.  You are where you are because God has placed you there with no other task than for Jesus Christ to live through you and flow out from you.  You can snap at  your husband or complain about your boss, gripe about your friend or grit your teeth over your salary but what you have really done is dam off the spill of grace from your response line.  What could have been a sparkling ray of light became a shadow and God was kept at bay by your refusal to be crucified with Christ right then.  The greatest saint is not the one drawing the biggest crowd, it is the one so hidden by Christ that all that is seen is God head to toe.  The artistry of Jesus is blighted the moment we cannot see God in our plight and that critical brushstroke is never reworked.  The Lord won't impose His will upon you for then all that will be manifested is the forgery, a charlatan's trickery.   It is you who must choose to believe the Lord has done good with you now and then and only then Christ will spring forth from you like the brightest dawn.  The most important work you have is to believe God is in each spot in your life and trust His judgment and care for you as you go about your business.  Satan is not your greatest foe; your unbelief is and that must be squeezed out of you daily as you look for God at every corner and turn and trust Him to make all things good that come your way.

...but the Lord rises upon you and his glory appears over you. Nations will come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn.  Isaiah 60:2-3 NIV

Life Upside Down

If there is one thing we are never quite ready to do, it is laying down our lives  for anyone we haven't got the utmost respect and affection.  Give that person a nasty side, a ridiculous bit of arrogance, a slanderous disdain for anyone or anything we like and all bets are off.  The deal is done and whatever Christ may have to say about the romance of love, we see right through it.  We are better than that.  We have the sophistication of our pride to barricade us from laying down our lives for such frivolous purposes.  Jesus told us to lay down our lives for our friends in the same way He did and that is where this spins on the dime.  He put His life on the ground of the cross for the snarling world that despised Him and that is the very point at which His children do so also.  We have mistaken nearly altogether what it means to lay down the life.  It is not dying for some cause ; it is letting ourselves go that the Holy Spirit might work Himself through us.  It is a surrender at the moment of discernment that God wants to do something through me just now: help a rude customer, defend a selfish co-worker, encourage a lazy friend, pick up an insolent child, give way to a pretentious prig.  We have no way of knowing what God is going to do with us as we lay down our lives but we can be certain of this.  He must do something He insists matters and do it right then.  An eternal array of circumstances and shifts are about to begin as we lay down our lives and to stop them all because we insist on our right to do as we wish is profound arrogance.  A serial killer can give up his life for a philandering prostitute; only one with the Spirit of God working through him or her will lay down  life at the moment of the Holy prompt, an unwelcome prompt perhaps but a certain prompt.   The opportunity to be the pipeline through which God's work in humanity flows is most astounding if you think about it.  You, dirty and contentious as you are with God are His chosen beloved partner in the transformation of a world all about you.

 Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command.   John 15:13-14 NIV

Love Beyond Measure

Nothing diminishes us more than the desire to be someone else--to possess in ourselves a benefit someone else has.  At perfect points in our lives, the Lord gives us something...an insight, a strength, an ability, an accomplishment and it is as magically attached to us as our shadow.  Our problem is we do not trust the Lord enough to be full of love in how He distributes His gifts; specifically how He allots them with regard to ourselves.  If the Lord did not like you, then He would never have made you, never have let you in on His grace, never have called you friend.  Our God is perfectly truthful in all of His dealings; if not then He is a devil and should be despised.  He has told you that He loves you and that love is complete and without room for more so in it He audits what comes your way and does so to guarantee your total joy.  But when you snivel and complain and try to wiggle out from under the dominion of Christ, you make a mess of all you have.  Like a child who breaks his toy because he wants his brother's toy, you smash your own happiness in the discontent you hold in your hand.   The parable of the workers who were all paid the same wage but worked for different lengths of time is not a teaching on the seeming unequal treatment of the Father; it is rather a statement of how childish we all are with regard to the generosity of God.  Our work is in God's strength and His ability, our adherence to the scriptures is by His power and determination, our popularity and success  is through His good fortune.  We are God's in every way and the sway of our lives is His too so it is sheer lunacy to get bent out of shape over the wage He gives you...it is far more than He needs to give and it is perfect in its ultimate good.  What if those workers, instead of moaning about the coin handed them at the end of the day rejoiced instead that it was a coin and it had the blessing of God stamped upon it.  The coin could become a thousand coins in a moment as the Father determined and it could be kept at one because the one was more likely to bring happiness than ten or ten thousand.    Who would in their right mind want van Gogh's great talent at the cost of acquiring at the same time his misery or would beg incessantly for Hitler's power to attract a crowd and have along with it his filthy end.  And on the other hand, how many of us shoot for Stephen's lone convert as the end game to our work...Imagine the child complaining about the terrible drive down to L.A. just as his father pulls into the parking lot at Disneyland.   

But he answered one of them, "Friend, I am not being unfair to you..." Matthew 20: 13a NIV

Personhood

An individual has no accountability to anyone.  He does as he pleases when he wants.  The person has merged with the personhood of God and lives within the personality of God.  There is no other way to know God than to live within Him; for His nature to come into your nature and transform yours.  Otherwise you merely know about God as rumors and individualized ideas.  We are more likely to fight for our individualization than give way to the transformation of Christ in us.  Sarah could never have gone with Abraham up the mountain to take her son Isaac onto the altar.  She had not yet shown any sign that God's will was becoming hers.  She was happy to receive His gift but not so prepared to take His nature.  We sigh at the prospect of being transformed by the Spirit of God not because we don't like the idea of it but because we dread the actuality of it.  In real life as you stand before the stove and while you pull out your notes to study or as you meet with your supervisor, the Spirit of God will rise up and make His will certain to you and it is then that you decide for your individuality or your personality.  There is no room for God in your individuality but all the space you need in your personality.  Knowing God comes the moment you bend your will into God's and give Him full sway over your circumstance at the moment.  Something will need to be placed on the altar...a desire, a grudge, a discontentment, an achievement, a visionary attainment...but it must be given up on the spot or you will stumble off on your own and gain nothing but the delusion of self-hood.  Hell is not the cadre of the like-minded; it is the stuffing together of individuals who can never be together at any level any longer.  Both Abraham and Isaac found at the same moment their union with God.  Just imagine the love that swept over them as they made their way back home together.  An individual, caught up in what he will and will not do can never know this wild and consumptive love; he is left only to talk about it. 
I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things.  Philippians 3:8 NIV

The Hidden Life

One of the most elegant descriptions of how God wants his people to be is the little aside found in John telling us of the boy who gave his bread and fish to the disciples to do with as they wished.  Matthew, Mark and Luke don't even mention him; he was so forgotten to them yet John's Gospel proves his hidden act of faith was not lost on the Holy Spirit.  Where we stumble badly is the thought that the flash and bangles of Christianity is what God really likes.  We turn the page altogether and hardly give it a glance where Christ said to make no show of your giving or praying.  If this is so for the person, why would it not be also for the church?  We are to hide ourselves in Christ and let God lift us up at the proper time.  Nothing insults the Spirit more than the propagandist view of Christian living.  We are most bound up in our Lord and His life when in Christ we quietly wash the dishes and unobtrusively ignore the rough edge of a grumpy neighbor.   God has not called us to make something of ourselves; He has taken us under His wing so that everywhere we go, Jesus is noticed.  We have a task before us, to become so acquainted with Christ working all about us that we hardly notice what we are doing.

For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. Colossians 3:3 NIV

Personal or Individual

An individual has no accountability to anyone.  He does as he pleases when he wants.  The person has merged with the personhood of God and lives within the personality of God.  There is no other way to know God than to live within Him; for His nature to come into your nature and transform yours.  Otherwise you merely know about God as rumors and individualized ideas.  We are more likely to fight for our individualization than give way to the transformation of Christ in us.  Sarah could never have gone with Abraham up the mountain to take her son Isaac onto the altar.  She had not yet shown any sign that God's will was becoming hers.  She was happy to receive His gift but not so prepared to take His nature.  We sigh at the prospect of being transformed by the Spirit of God not because we don't like the idea of it but because we dread the actuality of it.  In real life as you stand before the stove and while you pull out your notes to study or as you meet with your supervisor, the Spirit of God will rise up and make His will certain to you and it is then that you decide for your individuality or your personality.  There is no room for God in your individuality but all the space you need in your personality.  Knowing God comes the moment you bend your will into God's and give Him full sway over your circumstance at the moment.  Something will need to be placed on the altar...a desire, a grudge, a discontentment, an achievement, a visionary attainment...but it must be given up on the spot or you will stumble off on your own and gain nothing but the delusion of self-hood.  Hell is not the cadre of the like-minded; it is the stuffing together of individuals who can never be together at any level any longer.  Both Abraham and Isaac found at the same moment their union with God.  Just imagine the love that swept over them as they made their way back home together.  An individual, caught up in what he will and will not do can never know this wild and consumptive love; he is left only to talk about it. 
I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things.  Philippians 3:8 NIV

Blindsided by Grace

We shuffle back and forth between believing God, questioning His goodness and forgetting His existence.  There is something God wants to do with you but it requires your perfect acceptance of His love for you in a matter and the moment you try to fix things yourself without Him working through you, the work crumbles.  Christ cannot and will not fill you if you slight God's love by complaining about your circumstance or by questioning His goodness.  Job was blindsided by the miracle of grace being worked out in Him and the Lord could not finish His work until Job threw up His hands in faith and accepted his place as creature rather than creator.  Job's friends proved to be of no help to him in this as they kept distracting him from the real development.  They pushed the discussion outside the realm of actuality by questioning Job's morality and integrity when those parts of him were never the issue.  Grace doesn't contend at the point of one's personal goodness  but rather at the spot of the Lord Himself working His own character into you.  Christ did not suffer the cross so that you could make a go at getting yourself straight or gaining some flury of accomplished gilding but rather to completely reconfigure your personality into the dynamic of God worked thoroughly through you.  Like yeast in dough, Christ risen in your heart will recreate all the promise he planted in you at the beginning through the difficulties and trials and mundane tasks of your everyday activities.  Be careless about what you're making of yourself but obsessed by the hand of God everywhere around you.

But he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." 2 Corinthians 12:9 NIV

I Know What I Am Doing

How often do we trick ourselves into thinking we've got it but those around us don't.  Far too soon in our Christian journey we come up against the oldest of Satan's tricks; the implication that we know what we are doing.  Eve convinced Adam that she knew what she was doing and Peter tried to convince Jesus too that he had the right idea when he lost his mind over three shelters.  It is a fallacy to believe that we can make it on our own just this one time because we have figured out other things so well.  What do we make of the Cross then?  Did Jesus endure it because we were only a few marks off in our thinking or because we were thoroughly wrecked by sin?  The notion that once we become Christian we somehow need Jesus a bit less if we play it sharp is an insult to the blood He poured out upon the ground of our lostness.  We need Christ at every moment of every day and the Holy Spirit must be heeded far more than ever now.    You do not need to read the Bible less as you move along because you have gotten familiar with it;  you need to read the Bible with greater fervor than ever because you should realize even more just how wicked you really are without the Word of God filling you head to toe.  Your point of comparison is not some poor soul next to you whom you barely know; it is the filth of the tar pit that stands within you waiting to suck you in at just one bumbling stumble over a cock-sure determination.  The love and mercy of Christ is not poured out for your independent strut but to galvanize your total  dependence upon God to take you through each day.
You save the humble but bring low those whose eyes are haughty. Psalm 18:27 NIV

Distancing Yourself From Sodom

Don't think it is so odd that Lot hesitated before leaving

Sodom.  It is the most human of all tendencies; to flinch at the moment God starts to move in a life.  He reveals a sin, directs a move, makes a determination and we pause in our acceptance of it.  The nature of man must be conquered in this spot; our wincing doubt.  Nothing gets done in us without faith in God.  We can believe a billion things about ourselves and others but until we have grown to trust God in the smallest part, we have gotten nowhere.  Abraham believed God which is why he never had a Sodom to abandon.  He waited for the Lord to guide him where to go and believed God would.  There is nothing complex about living in Christ.  Faith in Him is at the heart of the relationship...not personal holiness, not sacrificial giving, not even generous love and affection.  Everything else comes around as we take faith in God at the tiniest point and move forward from there.  Faith the size of a mustard seed moves mountains!  Imagine what might come of faith a bit larger than that?  Christ cannot be followed until He is trusted.

In you our fathers put their trust; they trusted and you delivered them. Psalm 22:4 NIV

Pushing Forward

Why do we think we have developed a heightened level of spirituality when we give up on praying and stifle our love of Christ in a muffling "your will be done"?  Nothing so marks the carnal mind like the indifference to praying and "keeping on" praying.  It is passive aggressive bitterness that stops at the point of impassioned interceding for all the needs that come to our mind.  The great purpose of intercessory prayer is simple; to bring each and every one of those things that disturb us to the mind of Christ and there with the Holy Spirit working in our heart  learn to love God with the type of love Mary had not many minutes after she  wondered aloud why Jesus had waited too long to save Lazarus.  The pagan determination to pray for the dead is not so far off the mark as we think.  In Christ, who is the Alpha and Omega all at once, who is to say our praying cannot reach back before us and alter even what has happened in the past.  Where is the justification for giving up on everything that seems hopeless to us if God can pull the dead from the grave on the last day?  The praying of one believing Christian can change the course of events miraculously and in stunning fashion, not because she is worthy of it but because the love of God is poured out in the interceding and that love is a healing fire.  Nothing in the spiritual realm is quite so intoxicating as the determination to quit on a matter because it seems hopeless.  It is the morphine of Satan, this resolve to let go of the thing when the Holy Spirit is pressing us forward in prayer.  Who among us has not quit on a matter just as arrogantly as the mourners who laughed when Jesus informed them that the little girl was not dead but merely sleeping?  The opportunity to pray at any given moment for each part of a day is a privilege won for us at the Cross and we should not quit on it so carelessly.  

Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours. Mark 11:24 NIV

Faith Claims

Be careful about declaring what God will do before He says it Himself.  The pretentious trend in Christian circles of deciding what God must do has wrecked the faith of too many childish believers.  The assumption that if God loves me he will do this or that is a psychological landmine.  God will do what He actually says He will do.  When He told Sarah in her old age that He would give her a child He did.  When He told Jehoshaphat that He would give Judah a resounding victory over the Moabites and Amonites, He did.  When He told Moses that He would give Israel freedom from Egyptian rule, He did.  He did not say He would give James a long life and He did not tell Peter He would keep him from a painful end.  What if James claimed a long life for himself and Peter knew his ministry would not close out on a cross?  Would they not have sounded like so many who post a claim and then assume the claim is vouched for by God with Him agreeing to the claim?  It is blasphemy to speak for God when He has said nothing about a matter.  Take your troubles and painful trials to the Lord and leave them with Him.  Faith is worked out in us not by assuming something will happen or won't but when we confidently trust the Lord to make everything in time work out for our good and for the good of those we love.  Habakkuk waited on the ramparts not because he demanded everything go well with Jerusalem but because He knew an eternal Kingdom was being established and he would be a part...the Lord had said this was so.  He never named the miracle and then like a puffed out child waited for it to happen.  His hope was in God alone, not in an outcome He demanded.  
But the just shall live by his faith...  Habakkuk 2:4 NIV

Wanting More

The difference between wanting and demanding is quite clear when you are dealing with your children but seems nebulous when it is found in your praying.  How can you be certain you have not run off the tracks as you make your way through your requests?  Hezekiah saw nothing wrong with begging God for added years when told he was about to die and Hannah is renowned for her spiritual fortitude in frantically crying out to God for a baby.  How can we know a desire is godly and not just a self-centered lust?  Hezekiah took his added fifteen years and fathered a son who became the most wicked of all the kings of Judah and Hannah took her boy Samuel and turned him back over to God to raise and mold into arguably the greatest of all priests not named Jesus.  We can pray for anything and feel quite justified in our praying.  After all, Christ Himself told us to ask and keep on asking.  God may grant our demands just as freely as our wants but as Israel regretted the longing she had for a king, we too may wish we never got what our fevered prayers demanded.  Our drive must always move in this one direction, that we become so close to God that our wants become His.  Then what we ask for in prayer will truly bless all it touches. Give the Holy Spirit space to reshape your wants into God given desires.

People who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap...  1 Timothy 6:9 NIV

Self-Determinism In The Dock

Is there not a point at which we must stop making excuses for ignoring God and no longer blame the other person for our behavior?  When Sarah lashed out at her husband Abraham for merely doing what she told him to do, God took the matter out of her hands and put things squarely in Abraham's grip.  The son Ishmael was conceived because Sarah demanded it; then when he was there Sarah hated Abraham for the part he played in the boy's presence.  Why is it that God spoke directly to Abraham and bypassed Sarah altogether in the sacrifice of Isaac?  Why did Abraham not take Sarah with him on the terrible duty up the mountain?  Perhaps it is because Sarah lost her way in not accepting the part she played in the denial of the Lord's providential leadership with regard to the building of her family?  In the end it was Abraham that had to get the job done, who had to wield the knife and raise it in faith.  One might wonder which was the worst, bringing the boy or having to watch him leave.  Yet in the end, each of them, at the previous point of rebellion, had to believe God all the way out to where self-ambition faded into complete faith in God and His way.  Sarah had to trust in Abraham to hear from God clearly and Abraham had to trust what he heard from the Lord and not slide out from under it.  No more passing the buck, no more waffling when God spoke.  It is allegiance to God only that we all must eventually determine for ourselves.         Then Sarai said to Abram, "You are responsible for the wrong I am suffering, I put my servant in your arms, and now that she knows she is pregnant, she despises me.  May the Lord judge between you and me."  Genesis 16: 5

Untested Gifts

Be careful of the gift that seems so timely and needed.  Hagar probably was given to Sarai during her sojourn in Egypt and that gift became a terrible snare for Sarai and Abram.  Hagar eventually was the out for each of them as they frantically searched for a way to make God's promise of a child come true.  Rather than trusting solidly in the Lord Himself, they took the gift of Pharaoh as the solution to the difficulty they faced.  Later Abram proved his growing awareness that not every gift should be accepted willy-nilly by rejecting the offer of wealth from the king of Sodom.  But in Egypt, with his mind clouded by the affluence surrounding him, Abram saw nothing wrong with gathering everything offered him there including the lovely maiden Hagar.  It can seem like such a minor issue, taking this, accepting that and yet there may never have been a more haunting image for Abram all his days than the moment he turned his back on Sarai (albeit at her demand) and fathered the son Ishmael with Hagar.  We must be suspicious of what we mark as a blessing and what we decide is a curse.  The wounds of God are sweeter and more lovely than the poisoned presents of Satan and it takes discernment to know what you have in your hand at any given moment. A job offer, an open door, an opportunity for change may not come from who you think.  Be careful about the gifts you accept and the difficulties you reject.     Do not be afraid, Abram.  I am your shield, your very great reward.  Genesis 15: 1 NIV

Discrimination

We have lost the service of the word discrimination because of the evil Satan has spawned from it.  The Christian is to discriminate and do so constantly.  The task of recognizing the difference between good and best is a flip of the coin for most.  But the Holy Spirit is our guardian against indiscriminate wandering and short-sighted living.  We can make the right decision every time if we would just pause long enough to let the Holy Spirit direct our way.  The impatience of our age has wrecked far too many of us.  The Lord has promised to guide our steps even in something so seemingly insignificant as what to prepare for dinner or the length of time we should give a conversation.   Determine today to heed the guidance the Lord wants to give you and let Him make the most of each of your opportunities and crucial split-second reactions to what seems in your unknowing trivial and inconsequential.  For this God is our God for ever and ever; he will be our guide even to the end. Psalm 48:14 NIV 

The Egyptian Temptation

When Abraham brought his little family down to Egypt along with all his slaves and employees, he did far more than put them all at risk, he cut at the tight cord of faith each of them had.  The last word the Lord gave Abraham before the famine was that the land where he was living was his land and the land of his progeny.  Nothing in the promise included a disclaimer about moving away if things got rough.  The test of faith is aimed at our spot of confidence, not our weak point.  The clear word of God became murky for Abraham when the shortage of food struck him personally.  And yet courage and trust were the defining character traits of Abraham up to this moment.  The confidence Abraham had in his strategic response to the famine made him a prime target for Satan and as soon as he crossed the line between faith in God and self-assurance, he found out just how wickedly cunning Satan can be.  The son Isaac was to be Abraham's, not Pharaoh's and if it weren't for the rough intervention of God, Abraham might have lost his wife to the King of Egypt along with the lineage leading to Christ.  Doubt is contagious and Isaac later made the same terrible error a hundred years later.   Beware of your own insight into the problem you face.  It could shatter many years of faith not just for you but also those who look to you for direction.  Go to the Holy Spirit in every instance and you will find yourself secure within the hand of God.     Now there was a famine in the land, and Abram went down to Egypt to live there for a while because the famine was severe. Genesis 12:10-11 NIV

The New Year Resolution...Biblical?

Try as you may, you will be hard-pressed to find a single man or woman of God in Scripture making New Year's Resolutions or goal setting.  They attempted the impossible but not as some long term plan.  Perhaps Solomon alone would be classified as a goal setter but this flowed more out of his love of the world order than any developed affinity for God.  Jesus had one goal in mind and it began before birth--go to the Cross and die there.  This is a far cry from the goals and resolutions we hear bandied about in Christian circles and meetings.  Ask a Christian worker or church attender what his or her goals may be and they will never sound like what Jesus settled upon as His clear direction.  If anything, the normal way of Christ was simple day-by-day dependence upon the Father to guide you in what He had where He was.  Jesus  stayed in a town until the Father directed Him away from it, healed those the Father brought Him and taught whoever He was given at the moment.  He didn't set goals for attendance at His Sermon on the Mount and made no resolution to quit drinking or cut down on His calories.  He remained so close to the Father that He just did as He was directed and trusted in the process of Life working within Him.  Nothing frustrates the will of God more than the determination of a Christian to accomplish his set goals without regard for the still small voice entering His world in real time.    Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own. Matthew 6:34 NIV