Past Devotions

I can’t finish the month without just another peak or two at the psalms. One thing I noticed about the psalmists is their frequent mention of God as a shield. I was reading the opening verses of Psalm 91.  Two phrases grabbed my attention.  Verse 3 says the Most High, the Almighty, the LORD (YHWH) will “Himself deliver you from the hunter’s net,” or “fowlers snare.” The second phrase is in verse 4, “His faithfulness will be a protective shield.”

Two things to notice.  Sometimes God delivers us out of … and sometimes God protects us from.

God’s faithfulness protects us from the evil that abounds in this life.  If we but take refuge in Him, He will keep us from trouble. He is faithful to us. That faithfulness is like a shield of protection all around us. But, there are times when in our rebellion, or something as simple as our curiosity, we find ourselves in trouble. Perhaps we are already snared by the enemy of our soul who prowls around looking for people to catch in his net. When that happens, God “Himself” will deliver us out of that snare.

Of course, it is far better to stay behind that shield of God’s faithful protection. But when we do fail, when we succumb to the enticement and temptation of sin, it is an abundant blessing to know that God will send His Spirit to bring us to repentance, and in our repentance will come deliverance out of sin’s snare.

We are coming to the end of September. My personal emphasis this month has been in the psalms. Of course, my personal emphasis often spills over into the church (and my devotions), but that’s just the way it is with shepherds. We are coming to the end of this month and I’ve been thinking about where to go from here. What will be my emphasis in October, possibly even November? I’m leaning toward the letters of Peter.

When Jesus told Peter to feed His sheep, His lambs, Jesus changed Peter’s life completely. We see that throughout the beginning chapters in the book of Acts. Peter preaching on the day of Pentecost, Peter bravely standing up to the Jewish leaders, Peter opening the door to the Gentiles with his visit to Cornelius.  This shaky, often blustery man was changed by His Lord and Shepherd. What does he say to the sheep Jesus gave him?  How did Peter see his life after Jesus changed him? What better way to see the change in Peter than to read his letters.

As I opened the first letter I was struck as I always am by verse 3. “Praise the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. According to His great mercy, He has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” [Christian Standard Bible]

I could spend a month in that verse alone. Look at the concepts … Praise … God and Father … His great mercy … New Birth … Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.  AND, that one that always strikes at my heart … Living Hope!

As I read and listen and watch what is going on in the world I realize if there is one word which describes our world in our time, it would be “hopeless.” The world has “no hope.” Peter came to understand that in God’s mercy, there is the offer of not just “hope,” but, “living hope.”  I think the theme of Peter’s changed life is “living hope.”  I pray that is the theme of your changed life (and mine) in Christ Jesus.

Thinning out my inbox on my personal email this morning, I ended up with these four emails in a row: 1) At Olive Garden I can get over 50 delicious combinations. 2) Shari’s Café is offering me my four favorites for less. 3) Applebees® has three courses for one amazing price, and 4) at McGrath’s Fish House I can get a free appetizer or dessert.

I have eaten at each of these places and filled out one of those club-style cards with my email address.  Sometimes I get pretty good deals this way, discounts, free birthday stuff, etc. It just seemed funny to me that all four of these places want to feed me today and all four invitations ended up one after the other in my inbox.

Following Jesus’ resurrection, Simon Peter woke up one morning and decides to go fishing. Several other disciples go with him, Thomas, Nathanael, James and John along with two others. They head out to the lake but don’t catch anything. That is until Jesus arrives on the scene. He tells them where to throw their net and immediately there is a great catch of fish. Peter, who realizes this has happened before, suddenly recognizes Jesus and bounds to shore.  They all end up having a nice breakfast together.

When they finished eating Jesus turns to Peter and asks, “Simon son of John, do you truly love me more than these?“

Peter’s response to that is “Yes,” he does love the Lord. Then Jesus says, “Feed my lambs.“  [John 21:15]

Three times Jesus will ask the same question, Peter will respond the same way, and Jesus will tell Peter three times to feed His lambs.  That’s the job of a shepherd, not a fisherman. Jesus completely changed Peter’s life. (Jesus will do that to you!) I don’t think the Scriptures ever record again that the Big Fisherman went fishing. He devoted the rest of his life caring for the Lord’s sheep.

Where I’m working as a temp they have been purging documents no longer needed to be retained in the files.  This has left mountains of paper that needed to be shredded.  Enter the temp.  Last week I probably shredded stacks of paper taller than I am. I stood at the large shredder and fed stack after stack.  It wasn’t really that bad of a job. I did it during the times when I felt my brain was on overload, or I was tired of staring at a computer screen.  It cleared my head and gave me time to think.

There was only one bad part, that was packing down the shreds of paper in the bag so I could fit more in.  Putting my hands in that paper dried them out horribly.  By the end of the week my hands were dry, scaly, and sore.  Just casual contact with that paper over one week took all the goodness out of my skin. It’s taken time, and a lot of hand cream, to get back to normal.

James asks a profound question in his letter.  “Don’t you know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God?” [James 4:4 Christian Standard Bible]

The ways of God and the ways of the world are in direct opposition to each other. The world says that we are what is important. Everything must center around us. The world says we live life to the fullest by accumulating the most, experiencing the most, striving for the most.

God says that He is our Maker; He is sovereign over all His creation. He is the center of life. God says to live, we die to self. (That means we no longer regard ourselves as the center of everything.) To accumulate, we give away. To gain, we sacrifice.

As I watched my hands lose their moisture and become dry and rough just from contact with shredded paper, I thought of how my soul experiences the same thing, just by contact with the world’s ways. “Lord, keep me centered on You!”

Last Thursday night the Cleveland Browns won a football game, one that looked like they were about ready to lose. Now that may not sound like such a big deal until you know that the Browns hadn’t won a regular season football game for about 635 days. They didn’t win at all last year and their record the year before was almost as miserable.

Thursday night the starting quarterback was having a rough night and the crowd was calling for Baker Mayfield. He is the reigning Heisman Trophy winner from Oklahoma who was drafted No. 1 by the Browns. When the starter went out with a concussion, the crowd got their wish. Mayfield came in and led the team to a comeback. The crowd was wild. They were shouting for joy!  Finally, a win.

Psalm 95 begins, “¹ Oh come, let us sing to the LORD! Let us shout joyfully to the Rock of our salvation. ²Let us come before His presence with thanksgiving; Let us shout joyfully to Him with psalms.” [NKJV]

See that wonderful little word “shout.” It is the same word in both verses 1 and 2. It is ruwa. It is sometimes translated as “make a joyful noise.” It comes from a root word meaning “to split the ear with sound.”  It is a word that is often used for “blow/sound the alarm.” It is what we might call an intense word. Not only that, it is a word that we’d think might be much more at home on the football field than in a church worship session.

Cleveland was alive with joy, shouting intensely in triumph last Thursday because they were winners for the first time in two years.  As children of God, we are winners every day. We won the ultimate battle when we gave our lives to the Master of our soul, Christ Jesus our Lord.  That “Let us … shout joyfully” should ring out in every church, every time we meet.

Today and next Sunday we will be studying Psalm 95 in church. This song is the introduction to a series of songs, Psalms 95-100, that center on the worship of God. Listen to the way each begins:

Psalm 95: Come, let us sing for joy to the LORD; let us shout aloud to the Rock of our salvation.

Psalm 96: Sing to the LORD a new song; sing to the LORD, all the earth.

Psalm 97: The LORD reigns, let the earth be glad; let the distant shores rejoice.

Psalm 98: Sing to the LORD a new song, for he has done marvelous things.

Psalm 99: The LORD reigns, let the nations tremble.

Psalm 100: Shout for joy to the LORD, all the earth.

Sensing a theme here?  Maybe we can sum it up in one sentence. Worship is centered on the Great LORD (YHWH) who reigns, not on man. This is central to our health as Christians and to our worship of God.

The church too often specializes in what God can do for us, rather than dwelling on our duty to God.  When we think God has not responded to our needs the way we think He should, we become frustrated. Sometimes we get angry and simply walk away.  Or we stay, but our worship is affected by our viewpoint of how we relate to Him.

This is how we relate to our Great God:  He reigns. He is the Creator and the Center of all things. He is the LORD, YHWH, the Rock of our salvation. We serve Him. He doesn’t serve us. Everything we receive from His hand is given by His grace. To that, we must always bow our knee in worship and thanksgiving.

David was perhaps his very lowest when he penned Psalm 51. He had committed adultery with Uriah’s wife, Bathsheba, and then when he found out she was pregnant from their union, he had Uriah placed in the heat of a battle so that he would be killed. Thinking he had hidden his sin, he took Bathsheba as his wife. But sin never remains hidden and David’s found him out. Nathan, the prophet, brought God’s word to David and it was not a good word. The sword (turmoil) would become a staple of David’s family and the child conceived in adultery would die. God did not take David’s life; he would live amid the destruction brought by his sin. [1 Samuel 11-12]

It was at this lowest point of David’s life that he cried out for mercy from God in Psalm 51. David recognized that his sin was not just against Uriah, it was against the God who had been so faithful to him, who had blessed him abundantly and would have given him even more had he but asked.

The verses in Psalm 51 that always gets to me are verses 10-11, “Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Do not cast me from your presence or take your Holy Spirit from me.” 

David recognized two things. First, he saw that his heart had become tainted, blackened by sin that had weakened his fervent spirit for God. No longer was he steadfast in following after God. He asked for God to create a clean, pure, heart within him, knowing that was something only God could do.

Second, David recognized that he was in a dangerous spot. If he persisted in his sin, he would find himself removed from the very presence of the God he loved so much. He was in danger of going through the rest of his life without the Holy Spirit of God leading and guiding.

Sin, if ignored, will flourish. It will stain our heart, our entire life, and move us far away from the presence of the LORD. “Create in me a pure heart, O God!

If you have spent any time at all in the Book of Psalms, you will have noticed how often the psalmists prayed.  Consistently there are cries for the LORD to hear their prayers, listen to their prayers, and respond to their prayers.  We read, let my prayers come before you, listen to my cry, I cry for help, in the morning my prayer comes to you. The psalms are cries of the heart uttered by people in desperate situations, people who were stressed, oppressed, afflicted, and torn asunder, often by their own guilt.

One such cry comes from David’s heart in Ps 143:1: “LORD, hear my prayer. In your faithfulness listen to my plea, and in your righteousness answer me.”   [Christian Standard Bible]

I have spent August and September in the Book of Psalms. If I’ve come away with anything during this time it is a realization of the neediness of mankind and that the faithfulness and righteousness of the LORD responds to that neediness.

We pray out of our needs, whatever they may be. As the psalmists, our prayers take many forms. We request, we urge, we call out our enemies, we plead, we long, sometimes asking for what is right and sometimes not. But it is God’s faithfulness and righteousness that forms His responses. I believe the LORD filters our prayers through His Holiness, His faithfulness and His righteousness. He responds out of His love for us and for all His creation.

We may not always pray rightly, but God always responds correctly. We may not always understand, but we can trust that His responses will be true to His nature and for our eternal good.

Florence. The Hurricane. The images of her devastation have flooded the news. We’ve seen the massive rescue operations by both first responders and citizens who arrived simply to help others. Perhaps no image was so profound as the picture of the firemen in Wilmington, North Carolina, who fought to get to a family when a massive tree crushed their home. They were able to rescue the father but were unable to save the mother and an infant. The look on their faces as they exited the house made me want to reach out and gather them all in my arms as they grieved. Soon, with all the world watching, these firemen did gather together as they knelt and prayed.

We count the cost of these disasters by tallying the number of the dead or the amount of the property damage. The toll on the survivors, however, is immense.  This father that was rescued, the firefighters who witnessed the mother and infant who perished, will remember for the rest of their lives.

Disasters make us realize that it is not our politics or opinions that matter. Elections, sports, stock market ups and downs, do not count in times like this. What is important is our humanity, our compassion one for another. Brotherly love and kindness rise above our petty differences. They flourish briefly after every disaster, whether natural like Hurricane Florence or made-made as 9/11. But unfortunately, this atmosphere does not become permanent. Before too long we are back to our old ways.

The Scriptures have a lot to say about compassion and kindness and love. There are even special directions for those who claim a relationship with Christ Jesus. We would do well to remember them, not just when disasters abound, but all the time.

 “As God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.” [Col 3:12-14]

Last year we bought a glass storm door for our front entry. We wanted a solid glass door that securely locked, so we could open the wood door when someone knocked without allowing entry.  One of the unexpected benefits turned out to be the warmth coming through that door in winter. The winter sun hits the front side of the house and the glass door acts like a magnifying glass for the heat. Our front room with the high ceiling has always been the hardest to heat in winter, but since we installed the storm door, it is now the coziest.

One other benefit is that my chair faces that door and when it is open it is as if the outside is inside. Saturday morning as I sat studying and writing, I watched the sky lighten and the neighborhood awaken. I watched people drive by in their cars, early morning runners, and the dogs leading owners down the sidewalk. I love watching. I can sit in a mall, airport, restaurant, doctor’s office, coffee shop and just watch.

God is so creative. People are beautiful, different colors and shapes. The little and big dogs walking by are all different, even if they are the same breed. The leaves on the trees are just beginning to turn all shades of reds, yellows and oranges. I have a couple purple petunias that are hanging on to branches that are shriveling and growing sparse. Every moment some sight or sound grabs my attention.

Solomon, the Preacher, noted that “[God] has made everything beautiful in its time.”  We usually miss all that beauty because we are so busy doing that we don’t take the time to just be still and observe. We fill every waking moment when we should reserve some of those moments to simply be. We even feel guilty when we stop and just sit for a while. (It must be that old Puritan/Protestant work ethic!)     [Eccl 3:11]

Saturday, I spent the morning being still. I watched God’s creation awaken and I thought about the beauty He has given us. My soul was refreshed.

In His Time:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wo-rGzx2OZk