Thursday Devotional - Certainty

Very few things are certain in this life. As much as I would like to assure James and Sarah that we will always be a family, I can’t guarantee that.

The other day James said he thought he was going to live with his former foster mom forever, but he is living with us. Then, he said he wondered when he was going to go live somewhere else, but he lives with us. He seemed to be verbally processing things and answering his own questions. At the end of his discussion, I told him we planned to be a family and stay together for the foreseeable future. I wanted to reassure him without promising anything I couldn’t guarantee. I CAN guarantee that God will take care of him!

As Jesus reassured His disciples right before His departure, He guaranteed certain promises. As we read last week, one was the gift of the Holy Spirit. Through Him the disciples could experience joy in all situations. Here, Jesus promised that no one can take that joy away!

John 16:20-22         ²⁰ Very truly I tell you, you will weep and mourn while the world rejoices. You will grieve, but your grief will turn to joy. ²¹ A woman giving birth to a child has pain because her time has come; but when her baby is born she forgets the anguish because of her joy that a child is born into the world. ²² So with you: Now is your time of grief, but I will see you again and you will rejoice, and no one will take away your joy.

What trouble or uncertainty are you facing? Do you believe Jesus can turn your grief into joy? As Kent talked about yesterday, through the Holy Spirit we have access to everlasting joy that no one can take away! Are you and I living in that reality? God’s promises are the only things that are certain.

Alice

Joy Everlasting

I go east, but he is not there.
    I go west, but I cannot find him.
I do not see him in the north, for he is hidden.
    I look to the south, but he is concealed.

“But he knows where I am going.
    And when he tests me, I will come out as pure as gold.
For I have stayed on God’s paths;
    I have followed his ways and not turned aside.
I have not departed from his commands,
    but have treasured his words more than daily food.
But once he has made his decision, who can change his mind?
    Whatever he wants to do, he does.  Job 23:8-13

Finding joy.  Sometimes, I worry about my wife.  I will see her, and realize something is not quite right.  Maybe it is something that is bothering her from work, or perhaps there was something I said that has her distant from me.  It is those times where I am most distraught.  However as I give her a hug and we assure each other of our love, I remember what makes our relationship more special than anything else.  We have joy everlasting.  We have been through trials, and even in the midst of the darkest times, we somehow always make it back to that loving embrace that reassures us.  It keeps us moving forward, and makes an overwhelming statement that nothing that God has put together can separate us.

As Christians, we are given an unshakeable feeling of joy.  In reading the story of Job, I am struck with how huge his trials were.  To lose so much had to be overwhelming, and his friends were not always the most supportive in his time of need.  Yet he continued to honor God not because he was happy.  He did so because God was not to be questioned.  Job knew he had followed a righteous path in spite of such grief.  There is very little that is happy about Job’s story, but he had joy knowing that should he follow the path God had laid out for him, God would find him ‘pure as gold.’  He had unshakeable joy in spite of all that he was enduring, and in the end, God rewarded him abundantly.  In this story, we find that while we may not be as blameless as Job and our life may not be what we would have it to be, we have joy through Jesus Christ, who calls us blameless before God.  Like Job, we are to follow the path trusting God and not questioning His judgment.  Instead, we are to seek understanding for as a fellow devotee reminded me this week, we are to “Trust in the Lord with all your heart; do not depend on your own understanding.” (Proverbs 3:5 NLT)

Joy in knowing who God is and what He has done for us is where we should be in our journey of faith.  A relative reminded me of the words of Paul, where he says, “Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything.  Tell God what you need, and thank him for all He has done.  Then you will experience God’s peace, which exceeds anything we can understand.  His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 4:6-7 KJV)  Happiness can be fleeting, but joy is enduring.  If we love Jesus as He loves us, we are instilled with His Spirit and with it the strength to endure whatever trials we encounter.  Furthermore through Christ, we are made pure as gold.  So whether you are dealing with trials or in a time of peace, be assured that God is with you every step of the way.  How can you find joy in your times of uncertainty?  Who can you share the joy of God through Jesus Christ with today?  My prayer is that we remind ourselves that no matter what may be happening in our lives, we have joy everlasting.  Amen.

Tues Devo: The choice

Acts 9:19-22 “Now for several days he was with the disciples who were at Damascus, and immediately he began to proclaim Jesus in the synagogues, saying, “He is the Son of God.” All those hearing him continued to be amazed, and were saying, “Is this not he who in Jerusalem destroyed those who called on this name, and who had come here for the purpose of bringing them bound before the chief priests?” But Saul kept increasing in strength and confounding the Jews who lived at Damascus by proving that this Jesus is the Christ.” (NASB)

Hello,

Certainly the conversion story of Paul is fairly well known. As I was reading this weekend through parts of Acts, something struck me about the early days of Paul (Saul still) from his conversion to following Jesus. Immediately there were naysayers and people who wanted to stop him (if you keep reading, you encounter a plot to kill him). But instead of seeing the opposition and giving up – Paul chooses to double down and focused on his growth. He didn’t run and hide, or try to go to a place where he wasn’t known. He stuck with the truth of which he was convicted. He didn’t let the doubt and fear of others outweigh the strength of the truth.

I challenge all of us to keep burying ourselves in the truth of the Word of God- for that is where we will find the strength we need.

Will Hill

Need to be refreshed?

Psalm 23:1-3

The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing. He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, he refreshes my soul. He guides me along the right paths for his name’s sake.

Last week, there were many in my area that were without power, some up to 5 days.  During times like this, people can get wore down quickly.  I know for my family, we certainly were.  We were without power for 3 days and ended up staying at my in-laws for 2 of those days. 

Yet through this cold, dark period, literally, we didn’t truly lack anything as the Lord was always watching over us. 

We all face times in our lives where we feel down and drained of life.  It is during these times, that we need to allow God to lead us beside the quiet waters and refresh our souls. 

Are you looking for opportunities in your life to have those moments with God?  Today I encourage you to find them as we all need to be refreshed and God can do that for us.

Our Journey to Adoption, Part XIV - Instructions

When James and Sarah came to live with us, we all had many adjustments to make. They also had lots of new house rules to learn!

Remember to take your shoes off.

Only eat at the kitchen table.

Wash your hands before and after meals.

Wash your hands before playing the piano.

Be quiet while the pastor talks.

Keep the water in the tub.

Keep your hands off the widows and mirrors.

Only play with toys.

We tried to remember to word as many things as possible in a positive way. Instead of always saying “don’t take your drink out of the kitchen” we would sometimes ask something like “where does your drink belong?” However, we were still constantly giving them instructions and wondered what was too much! They hadn’t grown up in our house to learn all these things gradually along the way over the past 2-3 years.

As Jesus prepared to leave His disciples He had lots of instructions for them (see John chapters 13-17). Unlike us, He is all wise. He knew how much the disciples could handle at once and what instructions He would wait to give them via the Holy Spirit later.

John 16:12-14         ¹² “I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear. ¹³ But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come. ¹⁴ He will glorify me because it is from me that he will receive what he will make known to you.

We now have access to the entire Bible filled with God’s instructions! The Holy Spirit guided the prophets and apostles to write down God’s love story for us so we could know how to have and enjoy an intimate relationship with our Creator.

How well do you and I value God’s instructions? Do we pick and choose which ones we think are important? Or, do we seek to understand them all, knowing they are for our benefit and protection?

Psalm 25:8-10         Good and upright is the Lord;
    therefore he instructs sinners in his ways.
⁹ He guides the humble in what is right
    and teaches them his way.
¹⁰ All the ways of the Lord are loving and faithful
    toward those who keep the demands of his covenant.

Alice

Whose You Are

 For you are all children of God through faith in Christ Jesus.  And all who have been united with Christ in baptism have put on Christ, like putting on new clothes.  There is no longer Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male and female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus.  And now that you belong to Christ, you are the true children of Abraham. You are his heirs, and God’s promise to Abraham belongs to you.  Galatians 3:26-29

Do you ever lose confidence in your faith?  As someone who finds himself humbled by the level of grace God has shown me,  I teeter between that place of blessed child of God and unworthy of the grace I have received.  If we are a mature Christian, we recognize we are both leaning more toward the former than the latter, but every so often, we fall more deeply into the latter category.  It is that which I find myself losing confidence if I stay there too long mentally.  You see, it is ok to remind ourselves that we have been given this amazing gift from God that we are undeserving of.  However if we stay too deeply in that area, it could move us from feeling unworthy of God’s grace to feeling simply unworthy, period.  What I have learned is that when I feel that way, I remember whose I am.  Sometimes, it is through a simple scripture, and other times, a pastor will remind me.  The importance is that when I lose confidence, I always go back to remembering whose I am; a child of the one true King.

It is always important to remember whose we are in addition to who we are.  We all come from different backgrounds and have different paths to God.  Some have followed God all their life, and others did not even know who God was and found them through someone who did.  If you were like me, you were much like the song Amazing Grace having known God, lost sight of Him, and then finding Him again.  No matter where you came from, realize that in our journey of faith, we all lose sight sometimes.  Some will lose it longer than others.  However, once we believe that Jesus is Lord of our lives, we are saved for all eternity.  I was reminded that we may at times feel unworthy of God’s grace.  The thing we must remember is that only Jesus is flawless.  Furthermore, we are not the only ones who knows are flaws.  He does!  It is not as a reminder of who we are.  It is to remind us of whose we are; a child of God who is made flawless through His love and grace.  We need not focus on our failings.  Rather, we must focus on the truth that through Christ, we are indeed valued.

We are always Christ’s children.  We cannot be pulled away by sin, and we are more valued to God than we can possibly imagine.  Paul said it best in Romans 8, saying:

 No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.  For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.  Romans 8:37-38

So do not let the world tell you that you’re somehow less than worthy.  Be confident that you are indeed a valued and cherished child of God.  What doubt can you cast onto Christ today?  How can you move beyond unworthiness to confidence in God’s love for you?  My prayer is that we gain confidence in knowing that God knows who we are and we know whose we are.  Amen.

Tues Devo: The starting line

1 John 4:1-6 “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God; and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God; this is the spirit of the antichrist, of which you have heard that it is coming, and now it is already in the world. You are from God, little children, and have overcome them; because greater is He who is in you than he who is in the world. They are from the world; therefore they speak as from the world, and the world listens to them. We are from God; he who knows God listens to us; he who is not from God does not listen to us. By this we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error.” (NASB)

Hello,

Think with me to the last big household project you worked on. At some point you picked your head up in exhaustion and doubted if it was ever going to end. You don’t see progress, you see what is left. But then, you look back and realize how far you have come. Then, you tell yourself that you no longer have to do the whole thing – you just have to do what is presently undone. Effectively, you re-draw the starting line. You don’t think about starting from where you were, but starting where you are. I think sometimes in our spiritual lives this is an important reminder. In verse 4 John reminds us that we have already overcome, because of who Jesus is – and our belief in Him has us in a position where we have the greater power in our corner.

I hope that as we all battle daily, we remember that with Jesus, we are starting from a position of victory.

Have a blessed day,

Will Hill

Friday Devotional - Is It Best Jesus Left?

Jessica is out sick today and still doesn't have power back, so please pray for her! I am posting a devotional in her absence...

Have you ever wished you lived during the time Jesus lived on earth?  Have you ever thought it would be easier to make decisions if you could ask Jesus questions face-to-face rather than having to rely on the Holy Spirit?  I have.  In the following passage, though, Jesus tells His disciples that it’s better to have the Holy Spirit inside of them than for Him to remain on earth with them.  

John 15:26-16:7  ²⁶"When the Counselor comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who goes out from the Father, he will testify about me. ²⁷And you also must testify, for you have been with me from the beginning.  ¹"All this I have told you so that you will not go astray. ²They will put you out of the synagogue; in fact, a time is coming when anyone who kills you will think he is offering a service to God. ³They will do such things because they have not known the Father or me. ⁴I have told you this, so that when the time comes you will remember that I warned you. I did not tell you this at first because I was with you.  ⁵"Now I am going to him who sent me, yet none of you asks me, 'Where are you going?' ⁶Because I have said these things, you are filled with grief. ⁷But I tell you the truth: It is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away, the Counselor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you.

I love how Jesus was so careful to prepare His disciples for His departure (John 13, 14, 15, 16, Acts 1, etc.)!  They certainly didn’t remember it all, even though Jesus waited until right before His death to tell them most of these details. However, as Jesus promised in John 14:26, the Holy Spirit would remind them of everything He taught. 

Jesus also warned the disciples of times of suffering (vs 2).  He was specific, yet promised to provide the Holy Spirit to be with them through it all.  This reminds me to be so thankful for the Holy Spirit!  There will never be a day I need to feel alone because He will always be with me until the day I do join Jesus face-to-face!  

How well do you and I value and use the gift of the Holy Spirit?

Alice

Our Journey to Adoption, Part XIII - Name Change

Sarah’s birth name was Serenity. When we first met James and “Serenity,” James couldn’t say Serenity so he called her Sissy. We used that name for her, too, especially after they moved in permanently with us. As we met with our adoption worker, she talked to us about possibly changing Serenity’s name. I was concerned about the affect it would have on the kids, but our worker reassured us and encouraged us to change it to something that would fit with the rest of our family names. Plus, since the kids were young enough, they would adjust quickly. The short amount of adjustment “pains” now would save years of questions she might get down the road.

After using the name Sissy all summer, we finally got word we could start talking to the kids about their upcoming name changes and what that would mean. I was nervous to have the first conversation, but James didn’t blink an eye! In fact, that night at bedtime he asked “so what’s my new name going to be again?” (He got a new middle and last name and “Sissy” got a new first and last name. We called her “Sissy Sarah” for the Fall and we gradually/naturally dropped the “Sissy” over time.)

Jesus gave the disciples a new name, too, to represent their change in status.

John 15:12-17 ¹² My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. ¹³ Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. ¹⁴ You are my friends if you do what I command. ¹⁵ I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. ¹⁶ You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit—fruit that will last—and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you. ¹⁷ This is my command: Love each other.

Has Jesus given you a new name to better represent how you fit into His family? What does Jesus call you and me? Are we His seekers, His followers, His servants, or His friends? His friends know his business, know His expectations, know where He is working and readily join in His cause. We can call Jesus our friend, but can He call us His friend? Do you and I know His Word and His commands and His character well enough to be able to be called His friend? If so, like the disciples, you and I will bear fruit that will last!

Alice

The Bar Of Quality

Therefore if you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any common sharing in the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind.  Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.  Philippians 2:1-4

My wife sent me something that said, “Marriage is a gift from God to us.  The quality of our marriage is our gift to Him.”  I immediately felt inspired by those words.  The wording spoke to something far deeper than just a relationship between married couples.  It speaks to our humanity; our need to be connected to our God and to others.  Wouldn’t our lives be so much better if we strived to make relationships with others a gift to God?  In Romans 12:1 Paul says, “Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship.”  For us as Christians to live our lives looking to please God, we cannot do so without engaging and spending our time with others in healthy and authentic relationships.

What we give of ourselves for God’s sake must include valuing the relationships we have with others.  We can have a great impact giving ourselves selflessly for the greater good of others.  Furthermore, it is in the precious time that we spend with others that our relationship with God is unveiled.  Think of someone who spent time with you in your time of need.  How valuable was it to you?  What did it mean to you?  The times people remember most are not the best of times when all is well.  It is when things are not all together and they are at their worst.  Jesus, when sharing of His Kingdom, spoke of those who would join Him saying, “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.”  (Matthew 25:35-36)  Quality of a relationship is never about things always being perfect.  It is about embracing all that comes with it sharing the unconditional love Jesus Christ shows us.

Our relationship with Christ is the standard by which all relationships should be based on.  If we do not have a relationship with God where we cannot give as God gives, love as He loves, and encourages as He encourages us, we cannot have healthy relationships with others.  Thus, it is impossible to honor God unless with have fellowship with others that is authentic and looking at the interest of others above our own.  It would only make sense for as John 3:16 says, “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.”  That’s what He did for us.  Why would you not give to others as He has given for you?  What relationship in your life requires greater selflessness?  How can you honor God more in your relationships with others?  My prayer is that we focus raising the bar in the quality of our relationships with others.  Amen.