Category: Devotional

For March 15, 2020
During the glory days of ancient Israel, King Solomon had the Temple constructed to honor the name of the LORD; the Creator of Heaven and Earth; the God of Israel. Upon its completion, Solomon offered a prayer of dedication to invoke God’s presence and blessing on the Temple and His people forever in 2 Chronicles 6:18-21ff (NLT):

But will God really live on earth among people? Why, even the highest heavens cannot contain you. How much less this Temple I have built! Nevertheless, listen to my prayer and my plea, O LORD my God. Hear the cry and the prayer that your servant is making to you. May you watch over this Temple day and night, this place where you have said you would put your name. May you always hear the prayers I make toward this place. May you hear the humble and earnest requests from me and your people Israel when we pray toward this place. Yes, hear us from heaven where you live, and when you hear, forgive….

Solomon continues his prayer and closes with the following:

O my God, may your eyes be open and your ears attentive to all the prayers made to you in this place. And now arise, O LORD God, and enter your resting place, along with the Ark, the symbol of your power. May your priests, O LORD God, be clothed with salvation; may your loyal servants rejoice in your goodness. O LORD God, do not reject the king you have anointed. Remember your unfailing love for your servant David.   2 Chronicles 6:40-42 (NLT)

After the prayer, a remarkable thing happened. God answers with fire from Heaven, which consumes the burn offerings and sacrifices dedicated on the brass altar, and the glory of the Lord fills the Temple to such a degree that the priests could not enter the Temple to perform their sacred ministerial duties.

Then those who saw the fire consume the sacrifices along with God’s glory filling the temple, bowed themselves, worshipped and praised the Lord saying: “For He is good; for His mercy endures forever!”

An even more astonishing thing happens a few days later. God appears to Solomon at night and affirms his prayer by saying: “I have chosen this place to myself for a house of sacrifice.”¹

Then God utters those timeless words that I believe are especially relevant and applicable for us today (my emphasis):

At times I might shut up the heavens so that no rain falls, or command grasshoppers to devour your crops, or send plagues among you. Then if my people who are called by my name will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sins and restore their land.  2 Chronicles 7:13-14 (NLT)

None of us are exempt from adversity, sickness, peril, or even death. Job aptly observes that our lives are relatively short, yet full of trouble.² In addition in Matthew 5:45, Jesus assures that both the Children of God (just) and those who are not of God (unjust) will encounter random, uniform difficulty as  long as we live on earth.

Unfortunately, it is often during our times of trouble when we doubt the Lord’s goodness, presence, and protection on our behalf. But hardships do not negate God’s love, grace, and mercy, nor are they signs of His desertion.

Recently, quarantine, mass testing, hording of supplies, and widespread panic have resulted from our fears concerning the coronavirus. However, in 2 Chronicles 7:14, God provides the formula to address our troubles appropriately: 1) Humble ourselves, 2) Pray, 3) Seek God’s face, and 4) Turn from our sin. God is faithful and can deliver us as Psalm 34:19 (NLT) teaches, “The righteous person faces many troubles, but the LORD comes to the rescue each time.”

What ever happened to prayer? In other words, why are we not calling for prayer; seeking God’s help and intervention instead of wildly running into a panic mode? Why not humble ourselves, seek God, turn from our wickedness and allow Him to be God—not us—in this and every situation we face?

Jesus Christ suffered adversity on His way to Calvary’s cross. But there, His death paid the price for our sin so that we can have a restored relationship with God the Father that will last forever. In the final analysis, Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection help us to understand that all the things we experience will work together for our good just as Romans 8:28 teaches.

God has not abandoned us. He will give us the extraordinary resolve to count it all joy³ because our unspeakable treasure is not on the earth—it is in Heaven. Jesus assures us that in Him, we have the ultimate victory:

I have told you all this so that you may have peace in me. Here on earth you will have many trials and sorrows. But take heart, because I have overcome the world. John 16:33 (NLT)

We can be steadfast and ever vigilant in pursuit of our incorruptible inheritance because we are kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation, ready to be revealed in the last time.⁴ Our toils serve as constant reminders of the presence of sin in our fallen world, which contrasts God’s magnificent Heaven. There, all our toil and suffering will be forgotten instantly the moment we see Jesus Christ in his full majestic splendor.

What a wonderful Savior!

 

For March 8, 2020
Although consuming and tantalizing, sin does not fulfill our deep longings like a personal relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ does, and we cannot have any such relationship when we are pursuing a life of sin simultaneously. Faith in God cannot happen without our repentance of sin.

For this to happen, Jesus Christ must be to us more than just a celebrated historical figure. He has to become both real and personal to us, as Edward T. Hiscox writes,

We believe the Scriptures teach that repentance and faith are sacred duties and also inseparable graces, wrought in the soul by the regenerating Spirit of God; whereby being deeply convinced of our guilt, danger, and helplessness, and of the way of salvation by Christ, we turn to God with unfeigned contrition, confession, and supplication for mercy; at the same time heartily receiving the Lord Jesus as our prophet, priest, and king, and relying on Him alone as the only and all-sufficient Savior.¹

The Bible teaches that human life is sustained by blood, which God uses to remediate sin.² A sinless Jesus Christ shed his blood to pay the price for all of our sins—past, present, and future. Therefore, consciously, deliberately, and reverently, we must acknowledge that our sin offends God and that Christ’s perfect lifestyle and sacrificial death supersedes our best efforts.

In other words, the moment we understand that God loves us and wants to fill our deepest longings through Christ, we repent (or change our minds) about pursuing our former life of sin. In essence, we turn from sin, turn to Christ, and invite him to be our personal lord and savior. Then, God seals us with his Spirit forever.

Now we are free to pursue Christ and his righteousness with every fiber of our being, completely released from sin’s domination. This is because we have received that spiritual transformation promised in Ezekiel 36:25–27 (KJV), where God purifies us from the inside out,

Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean: from all your filthiness, and from all your idols, will I cleanse you. A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them.

Through our faith in God through Jesus Christ, God makes us perfect by His wonderful spiritual graces that change our being, position, choices and destiny; forever making us suitable for eternal fellowship with Him in Heaven.

What a Wonderful Savior!

 

For March 1, 2020
All of humanity is plagued by a sinful internal condition or Nature that influences how we think, speak, and act, such that even toddlers can defy their parents, teenagers can carry out brutal murders, and adults can perform unconscionable acts, leaving us to wonder how anyone could commit such atrocities.

Someone trying to live a “good life” might ask, “How can I be a sinner?” “I’m not like him or her or those other ‘bad’ people!” The answer to this question is simple: “When was the last time you lied?” “When was the last time you took something that did not belong to you?” “Have you gossiped about another person recently?” “Have your words or actions caused someone to lose a promotion or lose their job (so you could be hired instead)?

“Have you forgiven that person who wronged you?” “When have you expressed inappropriate, sexual feelings towards another person?” “How has your hate or ill-will ruined your relationship with another person? “How has envy or jealousy tarnished your relationships with others?”  “Does your altruism tend to be self-centered—what’s best for me?”

Your sin(s) may or may not be listed here, but that does not excuse the fact that we are sinners not because of the sins we commit. We commit sin because of the Nature we’ve inherited from Adam and Eve, our ancestors that is always at work inside us.

We’ve lost fellowship with our holy God because He never fell from perfection; we did, and our Nature is highly offensive to Him.

I have worked with people who’ve completed their prison sentences, and I have often noticed a strong public resistance toward them upon their return to society. Perhaps our resistance is based upon our fear they will vandalize our property, steal from us, assault a friend or family member, or commit some other heinous act.

We are very particular about the people with whom we choose to associate. However for the same reasons, can we not expect our holy God to be choosy about those whom He associates? It should not surprise us that God has a “no riffraff” policy that remains in force today.

God gave us the Old Testament Law through Moses to understand sin and righteousness from His perspective, along with His promise of peace and prosperity. It also defines our proper worship, service, and love, and it remains applicable today, even as the Lord insists in Matthew 5:18 (KJV): “Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the Law, till all be fulfilled.”

Achieving God’s righteousness should be simple, right? Just keep the Law. But our Nature makes this impossible because we worship other gods, create idols, irreverently use God’s name, break the Sabbath, disrespect our parents, commit murder, are sexually promiscuous, steal, lie, and covet. At best, the Law serves as a permanent reminder of how condemned we are—because we cannot keep it!

Yet to make matters worse, with all the technology, self-help, and other resources we have at our disposal, we can do nothing to correct our Nature. Daily we watch the tragic futility of those who seek remedies through wealth, sports notoriety, political power, corporate achievement, social status, academia, technology, and medicine. Our failures remind us that, although we are unfit for a glorious Heaven morally and spiritually, we are well suited for a tormenting Hell.

Our Nature is a repressive, internal, spiritual condition that we cannot fix with our own external, physical efforts. We cannot have fellowship with God until He gives us clean hands and pure hearts, as the Psalmist writes,

Who shall ascend into the hill of the LORD? or who shall stand in his holy place? He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart; who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity, nor sworn deceitfully. He shall receive the blessing from the LORD, and righteousness from the God of his salvation (Psalm 24:3–5).

Trying to compensate by doing good deeds is comparable to Adam and Eve using fig leaves to cover their shame and nakedness—it doesn’t work. When God confronted Adam and Eve about their sin, they resorted to hiding from God and blaming others and their circumstances. Much has not changed, since we tend to use these same tactics today to avoid accountability for our sinful behavior.

God could have solved our sin problem by programming us to obey Him like robots, but He wanted us to love him freely and surrender to Him willingly. God could have created loopholes and exemptions in His perfect Law to accommodate our sin problem, but then He would have made Himself less than holy by sacrificing His perfection for our imperfection.

God chose the most effective remedy instead. He became a human being in the person of Jesus Christ so that He could pay the price for our sin Himself and John writes in John 1:14 (KJV):

And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.

Jesus Christ heralded a New Testament age for all people everywhere. Now we can have our sins forgiven, experience a complete, internal, spiritual transformation, and we can have our need for an intimate, eternal fellowship with God satisfied as well.

This new period in history also revoked all claims of neutrality toward God. In John 8:24, Jesus warns that those who refuse to believe in Him will die in their sins. Either we can choose to receive His gift of abundant life on earth and eternal life in Heaven, or we can reject it and face an empty, unfulfilled life on earth along with a tormented eternity in Hell as a result.

We must make Jesus Christ our Personal Savior, because He is standing at the door of our hearts—knocking. He will not force His way upon us. He wants us to invite Him into our hearts and lives as Revelation 3:20 (NLT) teaches:

“Look! I stand at the door and knock. If you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in, and we will share a meal together as friends.”

What a Wonderful Personal Savior!

 

For February 23, 2020
In an attempt to refute the notion that Jesus Christ was both God and man, naysayers argue that it is futile to rely on Jesus Christ alone to redeem us and that somehow we need someone or something more. My reply to this notion is in 2 Timothy 1:12 (KJV): “I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I have committed unto Him against that day.”

I have determined to follow the Lord Jesus’ leadership because He never suggested that His was one of many ways to God. Instead, He insists that He was the only way to God in John 14:6 (NLT): “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me.”

As both the Son of God (God), and the Son of Man (human), Jesus Christ could make the bold assertion: “Before Abraham was, I AM.”¹ Only He can establish such an unprecedented association with Israel’s Old Testament Covenant God (YHWH), which in John 8:56-59, prompted many of His hearers to interpret His words as blasphemy—punishable by death, and to kill Him as Leviticus 24:16 authorized them.

Adam and Eve, our ancestors disobeyed God in the Garden of Eden by eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. As a result, the entire earth is plagued with sin and death, and we are sinners by nature.² Thus, the Bible teaches that the wages of sin is death, and all have sinned an fall short of God’s glory.³

In other words, according to God’s standards for righteousness, death is the payment for our sins while blood provides for our purification.

For the life of the body is in its blood. I have given you the blood on the altar to purify you, making you right with the LORD. It is the blood, given in exchange for a life, that makes purification possible. Leviticus 17:11 (NLV)

To reconcile us to God, someone with great power and authority—who could identify with both God and Humanity—had to die and their blood had to be shed. Thus, Jesus Christ became the “Suffering Servant” to redeem a lost humanity, as Isaiah describes in Isaiah 53:4-6 (NIV):

Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

Jesus Christ insists that Abraham rejoiced to see His day (John 8:56), and as the “Seed of the Woman,” He would be the one foretold through whom the entire world would be blessed.⁴ And as “The Good Shepherd,” His vicarious death imparted new life to His precious sheep just as He promised, “The Thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.” John 10:10 (KJV)

Our Lord’s mission and message about the Kingdom of God is distinct from anything the world has ever seen or heard, and His theme is very simple:

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.  John 3:16-18 (NIV)

The Apostle Peter summarized this radical idea when He states in Acts 4:12 (NIV): “Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved.”

We must accept Jesus Christ as our personal Lord and Savior. Nothing else is required, and no one else is needed in order for us to benefit from the vicarious merits of His perfect life and sacrificial death. In the final analysis, absolute safekeeping is ours through Jesus Christ who died for our sins and rose for our Justification as Romans 4:25 tells us.

What a Wonderful Savior!

 

For February 16, 2020
Isn’t it amazing how easy it is to express our love towards others when they are reciprocated? We want to feel safe, and not vulnerable when expressing one of our strongest emotions—without feeling victimized. How often do we avoid the people whom we feel will reject us, or not reciprocate our kindness, or somehow will show through their words and actions that they do not have our best interests at heart.

So many personal, family, and social relationships fail when we choose not to consider how the other person’s concerns are just as important and/or valid as our own. As relationships break down, conflicts arise because we have not learned to listen and respond (instead of reacting out of hostility).

Death is the ultimate price anyone can pay to demonstrate his or her love. Nevertheless, the Lord Jesus Christ did this for us when He forever payed our sin debt as John 3:16-17 (NLT) teaches:

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.

Jesus Christ, the Son of God was beaten, spat upon, insulted, and crowned with thorns. Yet He still was yet willing to be stripped of his clothing, affixed to a wooden cross with metal spikes driven through His hands and feet. Then He was crucified on a hill between two thieves in front of thousands of mocking people.

He could have resisted sacrificing Himself for our benefit by commanding tens of thousands of angels to come to His rescue. Instead, He gave His life as the supreme payment for our sins. Three days later, He rose from the dead, declaring that all power is given Him in Heaven and earth. His love for us raised Him from the dead and caused Him to ascend into Heaven where He intercedes for us today.

His love prompted Him to give us His Holy Spirit to comfort us and abide in us until He returns for us. Then we will forever know His vast love and glory in full measure.

We show Christ’s perfect love as we forgive others when our anger tells us to retaliate with violence. As we show mercy instead of seeking justice for bring wronged, and we extend goodwill towards the unlovable, we are practical demonstrations of Jesus’ love in our world. Here, His Spirit is active within us to supply us with the ability to express our benevolence towards others—just as He did—without being driven by selfish recognition or repayment.

God’s redeeming love as demonstrated through Christ emphatically proves that He wants what is best for us despite our acceptance of it, for Christ redeems all humans everywhere—even those who refuse to accept His love or believe in Him. No longer is there anyone without the hope for redemption. The Lord Jesus Christ left His deity and glory just to show us what true love looks like, and not because of what we sinful humans could ever do for Him.

Is love the answer? 1 John 4:10 tells us that true love is not based on our loving expressions towards God. Instead, it is by how much He loved us and sent His Son to pay for our sins. Only through His unselfish love can we honor the Lord as active demonstrations of His amazing grace. God’s love lifted us from despair into His glorious presence forever.

What a Wonderful Savior!