Daily Archives: February 26, 2015

Charles Stanley

Charles Stanley – Forgiveness: An Act of Love

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 1 Corinthians 13:4-7

Forgiving those who have wronged us is a tough command to follow. Our human nature finds it easier and more satisfying to hold onto our anger. But as vessels of God’s love, Christians no longer live according to the impulses of the flesh. Thanks to the Holy Spirit, when someone mistreats us, we can not only forgive but also show love to that person.

First Corinthians 13:5 tells us that . . .

  • Love does not seek its own. Many people are preoccupied with their “rights.” Yet the idea of entitlements is a worldly construct, not a biblical mandate. That’s not to say we should allow others to take advantage of us; rather, the Bible teaches that our primary concern should be something other than our own interests—namely, we’re to be focused on showing God’s love to our enemy (Matt. 5:44).
  • Love is not provoked. Maintaining a peaceful spirit when we are irritated is difficult. But the moments when we are persecuted or wronged are precisely the times we most need to be mindful of God’s love flowing through us. Think how often Jesus had to face religious leaders who deliberately provoked Him, and yet, on the cross, He sought the Father’s forgiveness for them, too.
  • Love does not take into account a wrong suffered. God’s love flowing through us can carry away a hurt done by another person. But we must allow this to happen instead of holding onto pain.

People will wrong us. But if we have a caring attitude and refuse to be provoked or preoccupied with rights, then we will be able to let go of bitterness and forgive with love.

Our Daily Bread

Our Daily Bread  – Changed Perspective

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Now while Paul waited for them at Athens, his spirit was provoked within him when he saw that the city was given over to idols. —Acts 17:16

 

Read: Acts 17:16-23
Bible in a Year: Numbers 15-16; Mark 6:1-29

As an early riser, my wife enjoys the quiet moments before the house wakes up and uses it to read the Bible and pray. Recently she settled into her favorite chair, only to be confronted by a rather messy couch left there by “someone” watching a football game the night before. The mess distracted her at first, and her frustration with me interrupted the warmth of the moment.

Then a thought hit her, and she moved to the couch. From there, she could look out our front windows to the sun rising over the Atlantic Ocean. The beauty of the scene God painted that morning changed her perspective.

As she told me the story, we both recognized the lesson of the morning. While we can’t always control the things of life that impact our day, we do have a choice. We can continue to brood over the “mess,” or we can change our perspective. When Paul was in Athens, “he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols” (Acts 17:16 niv). But when he changed his perspective, he used their interest in religion as an opportunity to proclaim the true God, Jesus Christ (vv.22-23).

As my wife left for work, it was time for someone else to change his perspective—for me to let the Lord help me to see my messes through her eyes and His. —Randy Kilgore

Dear Lord, grant us the wisdom to change
our perspective rather than linger over messes.
Help us to see—and fix—the “messes”
we make for others.

Wisdom is seeing things from God’s perspective.
Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Free Fall

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Amusement parks had always been destinations of choice for my family while I was growing up. It didn’t matter the vacation spot, we would, if there was an amusement park nearby, make it a priority visit. The reason for this priority was that we loved roller-coasters. The Matterhorn Bobsleds at Disney Land; Space Mountain at Disney World, and all the various roller-coasters at Six Flags theme parks called to us to ride them over and over again to our sheer delight.

There was one exception: The Free Fall ride. I do not know if it is still in existence, but when I knew it at my local Six Flags it was a ride like an elevator without a door. Only a seatbelt harness held us in. Up six stories it climbed while our stomachs fell. Climbing higher and higher, the expanse of the park and the surrounding communities became like miniature-versions of themselves. It seemed the ride would climb as high as the heights of heaven. Then suddenly, the ascent ended. The car would tilt forward ever so slightly, so that all you could see below was the drop back to earth. For maximum thrill or terror, the car wouldn’t plunge down immediately. Riders sat for what seemed to be an eternity of waiting; suddenly, the mechanical support drew back and the elevator-like car would make its free fall back down to the ground at speeds as high as 90 mph. I only ever went on the Free Fall once. I hated that ride.

“Sometimes suffering feels like a free fall,” writes J. Todd Billings in his book Rejoicing in Lament.(1) It is a free-fall away from all that was normal and routine in one’s life down into what seems to be a spiraling abyss of chaos and despair. After receiving the phone call in the early morning hours that my husband had suffered sudden cardiac arrest, I fell into my own free-fall. While sitting in the airport waiting for my flight home, I remember saying to my mother, “My life will never be the same again.” I would free-fall into another world never to return to the world I had inhabited for seventeen years with my husband. There would be no return to what was ‘normal.’ There would only be a steadying of my legs, like I had to do after the free-fall ride at the amusement park, landing in the strange new world of grief and loss that was mine.

Fortunately for me, I was not the first person to ever experience a loss like this, just as surely as I was not the first to ride the Free Fall, nor the last to experience its terror. There were many who reached out to me from similar experiences in person; and others who reached out to me through the pages of articles and books chronicling this shared journey. Of course, Christianity affirms a God who joins us in this journey, not as a fellow rider on a free-fall, but as the foundation on which we might find our footing again. For author and theologian Todd Billings, this foundation has been tested in his own journey of grief and suffering as a result of a terminal cancer diagnosis. Yet, he writes:

“In a deeply paradoxical way, full of a mystery that blinds by its brightness, Jesus Christ, the God-human, displays the love of God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—by taking on our human suffering and terror. Christ, the God-human, takes on the path of human suffering so that we are not pioneers in the darkness, so that we are not in free-fall. Instead, even when our suffering seems senseless, even when we feel like we are in free-fall, we can look to Christ to see, hear, and taste that we are still in the ever-faithful, ever-loving hands of God.”(2)

The ‘Man of sorrows’ and the one ‘acquainted with grief’ is the reason why Christians can affirm that nothing is able to separate us from the love of God…not even death. Jesus Christ offers those who experience the free-fall of suffering a firm foundation on which to land. Becoming fully human, Jesus is made the “high priest who is able to sympathize with our weaknesses.” And it is here, Billings notes, in the mystery of the Incarnation “that in Christ, the impassible God becomes one with suffering flesh in order to heal it.”(3) God is not caught off-guard because of human suffering and misery, even as God in Christ identifies with all that it means to be human. “We hope because in Christ, God has taken on human suffering and death so that they are emptied of their ultimate sting.”(4)

But this is not a truth easily gained. In my own free-fall into grief, despair, and pain, I needed the space to fall; if only to see and to know that there was a foundation on which I could depend, and which could sustain the weightiness of my pain. I needed to scream all the way down as I fell—screams of desperation, abandonment, anger, and loss. And it was necessary for me to lose all those supports that were, in reality, flimsy and faulty. It was only then, after this long, hard fall that I could begin to feel steady again, strengthen my legs, and stand up.

In the psalms of lament, the anguished cries of the prophets, and in the life and ministry of Jesus, there are pioneers who have gone before all who grieve and suffer. They have experienced the terror of all the twists and turns, the drops and descents of human life. They gave voice to their lament. Perhaps like myself, Dr. Billings, and all those who would wish for a different way, who would wish they didn’t have to ride the free-fall of grief and loss, the paradox of the Incarnation—that God is in Christ enveloping human suffering—will yet invite sufferers to stand on this firm foundation.

Margaret Manning Shull is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Bellingham, Washington.

(1) J. Todd Billings, Rejoicing In Lament: Wrestling with Incurable Cancer and Life in Christ (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2015), 151. For more information visit http://www.rejoicinginlament.com.

(2) Ibid., 157.

(3) Ibid., 163

(4) Ibid., 163.

Alistair Begg

Alistair Begg – God’s Work in Salvation

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Salvation belongs to the Lord!   Jonah 2:9

 

Salvation is the work of God. It is He alone who quickens the soul “dead in…trespasses and sins,”1 and He it is who maintains the soul in its spiritual life. He is both “Alpha and Omega.”

“Salvation belongs to the LORD!” If I am prayerful, God makes me prayerful; if I have graces, they are God’s gifts to me; if I hold on in a consistent life, it is because He upholds me with His hand. I do nothing whatever toward my own preservation, except what God Himself first does in me. Whatever I have, all my goodness is of the Lord alone. Whenever I sin, that is my own doing; but when I act correctly, that is wholly and completely of God. If I have resisted a spiritual enemy, the Lord’s strength nerved my arm.

Do I live before men a consecrated life? It is not I, but Christ who lives in me. Am I sanctified? I did not cleanse myself: God’s Holy Spirit sanctifies me. Am I separated from the world? I am separated by God’s chastisements sanctified to my good. Do I grow in knowledge? The great Instructor teaches me. All my jewels were fashioned by heavenly art. I find in God all that I want; but I find in myself nothing but sin and misery. “He only is my rock and my salvation.”2

Do I feed on the Word? That Word would be no food for me unless the Lord made it food for my soul and helped me to feed upon it. Do I live on the bread that comes down from heaven? What is that bread but Jesus Christ Himself incarnate, whose body and whose blood I eat and drink? Am I continually receiving fresh supplies of strength? Where do I gather my might? My help comes from heaven’s hills: Without Jesus I can do nothing.

As a branch cannot bring forth fruit except it abide in the vine, no more can I, except I abide in Him. What Jonah learned in the ocean, let me learn this morning in my room: “Salvation belongs to the LORD.”

1) Ephesians 2:1   2) Psalm 62:2

Today’s Bible Reading

The family reading plan for February 26, 2015
* Exodus 9
* Luke 12

 

Devotional material is taken from “Morning and Evening,” written by C.H. Spurgeon, revised and updated by Alistair Begg.
Charles Spurgeon

Charles Spurgeon – A blast of the trumpet against false peace

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“Peace, peace, when there is no peace.” Jeremiah 6:14

Suggested Further Reading: 1 Corinthians 1:18-25

Many of the people of London enjoy peace in their hearts, because they are ignorant of the things of God. It would positively alarm many of our sober orthodox Christians, if they could once have an idea of the utter ignorance of spiritual things that reigns throughout this land. Some of us, when moving about here and there, in all classes of society, have often been left to remark, that there is less known of the truths of religion than of any science, however obscure that science may be. Take as a lamentable instance, the ordinary effusions of the secular press, and who can avoid remarking the ignorance they manifest as to true religion. Let the papers speak on politics, it is a matter they understand, and their ability is astonishing; but, once let them touch religion, and our Sabbath-school children could convict them of entire ignorance. The statements they put forth are so crude, so remote from the fact, that we are led to imagine that the presentation of a fourpenny testament to special correspondents, should be one of the first efforts of our societies for spreading the gospel among the heathen. As to theology, some of our great writers seem to be as little versed in it as a horse or a cow. Go among all ranks and classes of men, and since the day we gave up our catechism, and old Dr Watts’ and the Assemblies’ ceased to be used, people have not a clear idea of what is meant by the gospel of Christ. I have frequently heard it asserted, by those who have judged the modern pulpit without severity, that if a man attended a course of thirteen lectures on geology, he would get a pretty clear idea of the system, but that you might hear not merely thirteen sermons, but thirteen hundred sermons and you would not have a clear idea of the system of divinity that was meant to be taught.

For meditation: The unconverted by themselves cannot understand the truths of the Gospel when they hear them unless God enlightens them (1 Corinthians 2:14; 2 Corinthians 4:4). But there are parts of the country where they would find it very hard to hear the truths of the Gospel being preached (Amos 8:11,12).

Sermon no. 301
26 February (1860)

John MacArthur

John MacArthur – Enjoying a Bountiful Harvest

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“Bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God” (Col. 1:10).

Your fruitfulness is directly related to your knowledge of divine truth.

Every farmer who enjoys a plentiful harvest does so only after diligent effort on his part. He must cultivate the soil, plant the seed, then nurture it to maturity. Each step is thoughtful, disciplined, and orderly.

Similarly, bearing spiritual fruit is not an unthinking or haphazard process. It requires us to be diligent in pursuing the knowledge of God’s will, which is revealed in His Word. That is Paul’s prayer in Colossians 1:9, which he reiterates in verse 10.

The phrase “increasing in the knowledge of God” (v. 10) can be translated, “increasing by the knowledge of God.” Both renderings are acceptable. The first emphasizes the need to grow; the second emphasizes the role that knowledge plays in your spiritual growth.

As your knowledge of God’s Word increases, the Holy Spirit renews your mind and transforms your thinking. As you gaze into the glory of the Lord as revealed in Scripture, you “are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory” (2 Cor. 3:18). You have “put on the new self who is being renewed to a true knowledge according to the image of the One who created him” (Col. 3:10).

One of Satan’s ploys to retard spiritual productivity is getting Christians preoccupied with humanistic philosophy and other bankrupt substitutes for God’s truth. That’s why he planted false teachers at Colosse to teach that knowing God’s will is inadequate for true spirituality. Paul refuted that claim by affirming that Christ is the fullness of deity in bodily form (Col. 2:9). In Him are “hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Col. 2:3). He is all you need!

Scripture commands you to grow in the grace and knowledge of Jesus Christ (2 Pet. 3:18). Is that characteristic of your life? Are you looking forward to a bountiful spiritual harvest?

Suggestions for Prayer

  • Thank God for the privilege of knowing His will and studying His Word.
  • Prayerfully guard your mind from sinful influences. Saturate it with God’s truth.

For Further Study

Read the following passages, noting the effects of God’s Word: Psalms 119:9, 105; Acts 20:32; Romans 10:17; 1 Thessalonians 2:13; 2 Timothy 3:14-17; Hebrews 4:12-13; 1 John 2:14.

Campus Crusade for Christ

Campus Crusade for Christ; Bill Bright – Great and Mighty Things

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“Call unto Me, and I will answer thee, and show thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest not” (Jeremiah 33:3, KJV).

How long has it been since you have prayed for great and mighty things – for the glory and praise of God?

I find in God’s Word at least six excellent reasons you and I should pray for “great and mighty things”: to glorify God; to communicate with God; for fellowship with God; because of Christ’s example; to obtain results; and to provide spiritual nurture.

There is a sense in which I pray without ceasing, talking to God hundreds of times in the course of the day about everything. I pray for wisdom about the numerous decisions I must make, for the salvation of friends and strangers, the healing of the sick and the spiritual and material needs of the Campus Crusade for Christ ministry – as well as for the needs of the various members of the staff and leaders of other Christian organizations and the needs of their ministries.

I pray for the leaders of our nation and for those in authority over us at all levels of government. I even pray about the clothes I wear, on the basis of the people I am to meet – that the way I dress, as well as my words and actions, will bring glory to God.

But there is another sense in which there is a set-apart time each day for prayer – I often kneel quietly before the open Bible and talk with God as I read His Word.

Before I begin to read the Bible, I ask the Holy Spirit, who inspired its writing, to make my reading meaningful. Throughout the reading I often pause to thank God for His loving salvation and provision, to confess the lack in my own life revealed by the Scriptures, to ask Him for the boldness and faith His apostles displayed and to thank Him for new insights into His divine strategy for reaching the world with the gospel.

Bible Reading: Jeremiah 33:4-8

TODAY’S ACTION POINT: Today I will call unto God, expecting Him to show me great and mighty things beyond anything I have ever experienced, for His glory and for the blessing of those about me, that they may know that God does supernatural things in response to the faith and obedience of His children.

 

Presidential Prayer Team

Presidential Prayer Team; J.K – Circle of Blessing

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Almost 500 years ago, Martin Luther wrote, “To be a Christian without prayer is no more possible than to be alive without breathing.” Author Robert Wolgemuth continues this thought: “Prayer is the glue that affixes your heart to your Heavenly Father.” It is profound reverence for God, the fear of the Lord, which causes you to hate the things that God hates and love the things that He loves…to walk in holiness.

Blessed is everyone who fears the Lord, who walks in his ways!

Psalm 128:1

Paul exhorted the Ephesians to “look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days are evil.” (Ephesians 5:15-16) Walking in His ways puts the capital “W” in worship. Your actions reflect His character. Picture this wonderful circle of blessing: prayer brings you to deeper fellowship with God, leading to a loving fear of Him, giving you the wisdom of God, motivating you to obedience, manifesting itself in your praise to Him, involving you in activities that are eternally important, and giving Him glory and you the blessing.

God places amazing significance on your prayers. Do not be disheartened as you intercede for this nation and its leaders. God will work for good and bless those who fear Him.

Recommended Reading: Colossians 3:17-4:6

Greg Laurie

Greg Laurie – How to Win against Worry

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Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God.—Philippians 4:6

Do you remember when you first got behind the wheel of a car? You had to consciously think about everything you did. Okay, let’s see . . . key in the ignition, look over your shoulder, and pull out. You had to think about it. It was challenging at first. But after a while, you got it down, and now it comes naturally. You don’t even think about driving anymore. You just get in the car and drive. It’s a conditioned reflex.

A conditioned reflex is something you learn. You teach yourself to do it, and through repetition, you find yourself doing it naturally. Then there is a normal reflex, which comes naturally. For instance, if you touch a hot iron, you will pull your hand away quickly because it’s hot. A child will do that too.

We also have normal and conditioned reflexes to fear and worry. Our natural tendency when we are in trouble is not to pray but to worry. Something happens, and we begin going through scenarios that stack up in our minds like dominoes. What if this happens? What if that happens? What if this other thing happens? The normal reflex when we are in trouble is to worry.

But what we need to teach ourselves to do is to pray. That is a conditioned reflex. It is not what we naturally want to do. When we get bad news, what should we do? We should stop and pray. That is what the Scriptures tell us to do.

Often when we are facing adversity, our first instinct is to turn to people for help. And there is no question that God can work through people. He can provide through family and friends and help us. But ultimately we should turn to God when trouble comes.

 

 

Max Lucado

Max Lucado – Grace–A Never Ending Supply

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Grace is simply another word for God’s tumbling, rumbling reservoir of strength and protection. Grace comes to us not occasionally or miserly but constantly and aggressively, wave upon wave. We’ve barely regained our balance from one breaker, and then, bam, here comes another. John 1:16 calls it “Grace upon grace.”

We dare to stake our hope on the gladdest news of all! If God permits the challenge, he will provide the grace to meet it. We never exhaust his supply. He never says, “Stop asking so much! My grace reservoir is running dry.” Heaven knows no such words. God has enough grace to solve every dilemma you face, wipe every tear you cry, and answer every question you ask. Would we expect anything less from God? Having given the supreme and costliest gift, Romans 8:32 says, “How can He fail to lavish upon us all He has to give?”

From GRACE