Month: December 2021

On God’s Dreams For Us

Deuteronomy 28:11-14 (MSG) 11-14 “God will lavish you with good things: children from your womb, offspring from your animals, and crops from your land, the land that God promised your ancestors that he would give you. God will throw open the doors of his sky vaults and pour rain on your land on schedule and bless the work you take in hand. You will lend to many nations but you yourself won’t have to take out a loan. God will make you the head, not the tail; you’ll always be the top dog, never the underdog, as you obediently listen to and diligently keep the commands of God, your God, that I am commanding you today. Don’t swerve an inch to the right or left from the words that I command you today by going off following and worshiping other gods.”

Matthew 5:17-18 MSG “Don’t suppose for a minute that I have come to demolish the Scriptures—either God’s Law or the Prophets. I’m not here to demolish but to complete. I am going to put it all together, pull it all together in a vast panorama. God’s Law is more real and lasting than the stars in the sky and the ground at your feet. Long after stars burn out and earth wears out, God’s Law will be alive and working.

Observation

Deuteronomy 28 is a list of the covenant promises from God – blessings for obedience and cursings for disobedience.  The blessings are God’s dreams, what He desires to do, for His people.  He wants to lavish prosperity, peace and grace upon them – blessing upon blessing on His beloved.  I can imagine God closing His eyes and envisioning all of His dreams coming to pass – His people resting in His faithfulness, returning love for love, trust for trust, grace for grace – giving everything, all their hearts, in return for the all He provides – embracing Him as Father, Protector, Redeemer, Beloved.  How His heart must yearn for this!  Sadly, what He dreams for us is rarely what we allow Him to deliver.  

Because He is just, He must also keep His promises for disobedience.  Keeping those promises must be heartbreaking for Him.  He asks us to trust Him absolutely, but His people (we) are inconsistent in our response, sometimes obedient, trusting, listening, wanting only to please Him and sometimes wandering hearts, easily distracted, making our own rules, choosing our own ways, gratifying our own pleasures at the expense of wounding Him.  Knowing that He is slow to anger and full of mercy, we play the odds as we gamble with the temptations that become transgressions that then become barriers which we find difficult or impossible to overcome on our own. 

Because we humans are so inconsistent, fallible and distracted by the shiny baubles of the world, He made a new covenant with the only innocent, unfailingly faithful human who would never break it – Jesus Christ – allowing us to be the beneficiaries of Jesus’ unfailing obedience.  Because His patient endurance and mercy far surpasses mine (or, be honest, all of us) He made provisions for redemption, repentance, and restoration in and through Jesus’ sacrifice.  He did this so He could reach His hand over the barriers we ourselves construct and beckon us to let Him rescue, restore and fulfill His dream for us – because He is not willing to let His dreams die.

Impact on Me

Who is this God Who has such vast oceans of love, loving kindness as a flood, grace and peace like mighty rivers, Who would give His own Son so that He can reach over the barriers I myself constructed to draw me into His dream for me?  Who is this God Who remains merciful in the face of the rebellion and offense that humankind throws in His face? Why would He pursue this lost soul, broken and recalcitrant, with patient endurance and undeserved grace to bring me to repentance? I am so grateful that He created repentance, redemption and restoration because I need it all. Why does He insist on making me His partner in revealing His heart and His message of redemption? Surely He could do it more efficiently and effectively without my clumsy efforts.

Why? Because He is the One Who calls us His beloved, His creation, His child, even as we come before Him soul-naked without excuse and our hands empty. I do not deserve His love, His grace, His forgiveness but I am going to embrace it. I will never take for granted the price paid. Obedience seems a small price to pay on my part for living God’s dream for me.

Prayer

I come before My God, My Creator, My Father, My Redeemer, the only true God, to worship You and thank You for rescuing me.  Oh, Lord, I want to enter into your dreams for me.  I am human, fallible, inconsistent and weak.  Give me the courage, wisdom and strength to be faithful and wise in my choices. Let me be one who will always “obediently listen to and diligently keep the commands of God,” so I may walk only in Your ways and continuously bring joy to Your heart.  Make it so, in Jesus’ name.

On Judging My Performance

Micah 6:6-8 NLT 6 What can we bring to the Lord? Should we bring him burnt offerings? Should we bow before God Most High with offerings of yearling calves? 7 Should we offer him thousands of rams and ten thousand rivers of olive oil? Should we sacrifice our firstborn children to pay for our sins? 8 No, O people, the Lord has told you what is good, and this is what he requires of you:
to do what is right, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.

Matthew 22:35-40 NLT 35 One of them [a Pharisee], an expert in religious law, tried to trap him with this question: 36 “Teacher, which is the most important commandment in the law of Moses?” 37 Jesus replied, “‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.’ 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 A second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 The entire law and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commandments.”

Observation

We are a people who love metrics, the objective ways we measure achievement, commitment, success, winning.   These metrics are beneficial when an activity or performance has truly objective measures of success and achievement. Winners in many sports can be measured in these ways – the number of shots in golf, the number of missed balls in tennis, the number of players across home base in baseball, and so on.  The “even playing field” (consistent rules and method of scoring) also provides a relative method of comparison to all those who have competed in the sport in the past. This is why competitors are not only focused on finishing first but also doing it in record time or by beating a record score.  Controversy begins to increase as we apply metrics to more subjective activities that rely on a judge’s opinion using a grading system (e.g., gymnastics, diving, skating).

However, the real breakdown for us occurs when we try to create metrics for more subjective activities or performance, such as honoring the Lord. When we attempt to create rules and regulations that measure our success, achievement, or commitment by visible results or actions, we find ourselves among the Pharisees who became so focused on enforcing the rules that they lost the joy and meaning of the goal. It is as if they stopped running the race midway to stand on the course and inspect all the other competitors to find reasons to disqualify them! (Matthew 23:13 Woe to you, you teachers of the law and Pharisees. There is such a gulf between what you say and what you do. You will stand before a crowd and lock the door of the kingdom of heaven right in front of everyone; you won’t enter the Kingdom yourselves, and you prevent others from doing so.).

Impact on Me

The two passages I chose today do not lend themselves to human metrics.  There is no way to keep score or objectively compare my performance to another. While there should be visible evidence of my efforts to obey, only God can truly judge my motives and effectiveness in these areas – whether and why I am faithful “to do what is right, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.” Only He can judge how well I “love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.’ … [and] ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.” 

Our God is Love and all He is and does is motivated by that Love.  He is not looking for me to be motivated simply by a dutiful response to His authority.   Rather, He wants me to love Him enough to trust Him and be as generous with my love for Him and others as He has been to me.  I am not in competition with anyone one else to win His love or His favor; He has more than enough for me and has provided me with more than enough to give away to others. That is simply what He asks me to do to honor Him, to show my gratitude, to love Him in return.

Why do I want to make serving Him more physically demanding, more difficult, more challenging, more painful (no pain, no gain)?   Here is where the ” walk humbly with your God” comes in. Perhaps I am so bound to human metrics and what people think that I find it hard to simply let go and let God alone make the rules and be my judge.

Prayer

Lord, I pray that I will allow You to work Your love, grace, peace, mercy in me so that I can be meek and humble, walking this earth as Jesus did, secure in Your love, overflowing with your grace and truth, allowing Your power and anointing to flow so that You are revealed in and through my life, so that others will come to know You because they meet You in me.  Help me to be simply and constantly motivated by gratitude borne of love so that I will be faithful to say “yes” whenever You ask. In Jesus’ name I pray. Make it so.

On Remembering

Deuteronomy 24:18-22 (MSG)   18 Don’t ever forget that you were once slaves in Egypt and God, your God, got you out of there. I command you: Do what I’m telling you. 19-22 When you harvest your grain and forget a sheaf back in the field, don’t go back and get it; leave it for the foreigner, the orphan, and the widow so that God, your God, will bless you in all your work. When you shake the olives off your trees, don’t go back over the branches and strip them bare—what’s left is for the foreigner, the orphan, and the widow. And when you cut the grapes in your vineyard, don’t take every last grape—leave a few for the foreigner, the orphan, and the widow. Don’t ever forget that you were a slave in Egypt. I command you: Do what I’m telling you.

Observation

“Don’t ever forget that you were once slaves in Egypt and God, your God, got you out of there.”  In Scripture, Egypt is representative of the life of sin.  The Promised Land is meant to be like our life in Christ.  God is commanding His people to remember when they have plenty that they were delivered from slavery and bondage so they will have grace and mercy on those who are not yet free or have suffered loss.  He wants the foreigner, the widow and the orphan to be blessed by the generosity of His people so that they will find rest, sustenance and, hopefully, belonging.  

Their is a tendency for us to forget what our lives were like before embracing Christ.  We like to think that we weren’t that bad, just a little lost, slightly wandering, but basically good people.  Lost is lost regardless of whether we are a rule follower or a rule breaker.  We were all born in Egypt.  We were all foreigners, fatherless and orphaned.  Some choose to live all their lives in slavery and bondage, chasing after the wind of knowledge, pleasure or accomplishment.  Then there are those who brave the wilderness to find the Promised Land, finding grace, redemption, healing, peace and blessing – because “God got you out of there.”    He wants them to remember t what was freely received should be freely given.  

Impact on Me

I overheard a conversation by two young men while I was sitting in a public place.  They were talking about the best bars for partying. What was of so much interest to them was completely foreign to me.  I realized that these young men were culturally different from me in so many ways, like foreigners in my land.   I then thought about those who are aware that God exists and are willing to talk with me about Him, but have really surrendered nothing into His care; to me, these, too, are foreigners in my land, sojourners just traveling through, leaving nothing, taking nothing.

I have a Father God and, as a member of His body, am the bride of Christ. To me, the fatherless and widows of this passage are those who travel through or live in my land, but have not yet understood and fully embraced the riches available to them in Christ. They are those who need love, support and comfort, those overwhelmed by circumstances, symptoms or loss.  Now that I have come into the land promised to me and been blessed, adopted and married to the Lord, I am commanded to remember to be generous to all of these because I was once a slave in Egypt (sin) and came to my land as a foreigner or sojourner, fatherless, a widow and orphan.  I survived because of the generous grace extended to me. Should I not do the same for these others?

Jesus commands me to remember that His body was broken and His blood shed so that I could possess the land promised to me, an inheritance so rich that I can never spend it all. He reminds me that I should not hoard those riches or greedily gather them, not judge who is worthy to glean after my harvest, not count the cost or fence my fields; rather, He commands me to leave behind – be willing to share from my abundance – enough for those who may not be much like me now, but so like me before this became my land of promise – the strangers, sojourners, fatherless, widows and orphans who do not yet understand or embrace the One Who desires to bless them in the same way as He has blessed me.  If I truly love Him, truly trust Him, truly remember where I was before He brought me into this land, truly live like He is my source, my provider, my redeemer, I will leave a more generous portion behind so that they can eat their fill and know that the Lord is good.

Prayer

Father God, the One Who delivers and redeems us because You love us so, I want to be ever grateful for my freedom from my Egypt and careful to share Your goodness and grace with others who may not yet be free or are not yet experiencing the fullness of Your grace, mercy and peace.  Break my heart with what breaks Yours!  Give me compassion and grace for those who are so unlike me now but so like me before I knew Jesus and embraced Him.  I ask this all in Jesus’ name.  Make it so.