And the Lord said “I have surely seen the oppression of My people who are in Egypt, and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters, for I know their sorrows. So I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians….” Exodus 3:7-8
His words to Israel in Egypt are the same words He has spoken to us in Christ:
I have seen
I have heard
I know
So I have come down to deliver
Dead religion offers no hope of deliverance. It offers only the certainly of a vicious cycle of trying really hard and failing yet again.
But the living God sees
The living God hears
The living God knows
And He came down…..to rescue us.
And even now, when Egypt is a distant memory….He sees….He hears….He knows…..and He comes down.
Sometimes there are these moments when I realize that He is so much more wonderful than I ever imagined.
Sunday afternoon was my city’s annual Earth Day celebration. Mostly it’s just another excuse for a festival with live music, beer and carnival food. After church I went with a small group of people to share the gospel of Jesus. There were some memorable moments during the day when I felt like it was a God ordained moment for me to speak to certain people…..a man who was weighed down by the guilt of his alcohol addiction…..the 20-something pastor’s son who was dabbling in the world and trying unsuccessfully to justify it to himself….so many stories. So many people in need of the freedom that only Jesus can bring. After several hours, the outreach was over and it was time to make my way back to church for prayer meeting. Arriving at my car, I began to unload my backpack into the trunk when I noticed that a lady was opening the trunk of the car next to me. Just being polite, I turned towards her with a very generic, “How are you today?” When she turned towards me I could see the pain on her face as she answered, “I”m having a really bad day.” I offered to pray for her but she seemed hesitant to reveal any details of her trouble, yet my heart was moved with compassion for her and I knew I couldn’t just leave. I began to tell her of the One who loves with a faithful love, watching as her face softened. There were only a few moments that I had to speak to her before her companion joined her at the car, so I spoke all that was on my heart, threw my arms around her and prayed a brief prayer in her ear. Her name is Keisha. And as I drove away, I told her once again, “I will pray for you Keisha.”
I had thought the outreach was over. In reality, it never is.
Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life….” John 11:25
If there is one thing I’ve learned about religion, it’s that religion is satisfied with behavior modification. It generally goes no deeper that that, because it sees the problem of mankind as this: we are bad people who need to be made good. But the problem is much more desperate than that. We aren’t merely bad; we are dead. Dead in trespasses and sin. A bad man at least has the hope that he can become better. A dead man is hopeless and can do nothing for himself.
But Jesus can do everything for us…..and He has. Not only has He resurrected us (giving us freedom from the death that once held us) but He has also given us life. Not religion……LIFE!
When Jesus spoke these words, He was addressing Martha, whose brother Lazarus had died a few days earlier. Martha realized that her brother would rise again in the resurrection at the last day. I marvel at Jesus’ response to her. He didn’t say “I will be his resurrection and life on that day”. He said, “I am the resurrection and the life.” Life is never postponed to some future time or place. In Jesus, life is always present tense. He is the RIGHT NOW resurrection and life.
Tomorrow, Christians across the world will celebrate Resurrection Day, only to return on Monday to an existence that seems to fall short of the abundant life Jesus promised to His people. How long will we be content with this? When will we take hold of Him in faith and refuse to settle for an ordinary existence? Romans 6:4 says this: “….just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, EVEN SO we also should walk in newness of life.” That kind of life is anything but ordinary.
On this Resurrection weekend my prayer is that God would awaken us to the spiritual realities of LIFE in Jesus, that we would taste it, and be forever discontent with every lesser thing.
There is a man in my church who has been recently diagnosed and is currently undergoing treatment for leukemia. Even with treatment, the doctors give him just over a year to live. I saw him yesterday after church and stopped to inquire about his health. After he updated me on the status of various tests and procedures, I asked him this question: “With eternity looming before you as a near reality, what has become the most important thing in life?” Here is his response:
“I was saved when I was eight years old; that was 55 years ago. 20 years ago I moved to this city to go to Bible college. And then I just settled in to life. I pretty much lived the American dream. I have a nice house, a couple of nice cars and a savings account. And none of that means anything to me now. I have wasted my life. The only thing that matters is what I can do for the Lord Jesus with the time I have left.”
It makes me mindful that life is just a vapor for all of us and we will stand before the Lord Jesus and look into that glorious face. So much of what we currently think of as important will not matter at all on that day.
I pray that the Lord would help us all, His people, to wake up to what really matters……eternal things…..those things that bring the Lord Jesus glory in this earth and make Him known. The American dream is a tranquilizer that has numbed us to the fact that we are strangers and pilgrims on this earth. We are citizens of another country….a heavenly one. And unless we awake to this fact, we may all find that we have lived wasted lives.
A brother from church called me yesterday, telling me that the Lord had put on his heart to go door to door witnessing to the people in his condo complex. He wanted to get a few other people to come help him and asked if I wanted to come.
Last night’s witnessing had gone so well, and the people were attentive while we spoke to them, that I was very excited to have another chance to do it again so soon. We met together and prayed and then split up into pairs. Many people were not home. Two people shut the door in my face. And then there was the elderly man watering the grass as he puffed on his pipe. He had to be in his eighties. Two of us walked over to talk to him and when he heard the name of Jesus he became very agitated. He insisted that he had a relationship with the Lord, but when we told him the Bible said Jesus is Lord, he became angry. “He’s not my Lord. He said a lot of things, but He’s never done anything for me.” And he walked away.
Jesus is Lord. This man will one day be convinced of that. My heart has been breaking for him all day. I pray that the Holy Spirit will convince him of it before he meets Christ in eternity.
Have you ever felt that stirring in your heart that seemed to indicate that the Lord was changing the way you thought or felt or reacted to certain things? Sometimes it can feel like your entire soul is in upheaval during the process. I have been living in this condition (more or less) for about two years.
I have wondered what it all meant. Why was I so restless? I would tell the Lord in prayer, “If You would just tell me what this is all about, and what it is that You want me to do, I’ll do it”. It was a sincere prayer that I thought I meant. However, now that He has begun showing me what all these stirrings mean I realize that I was not ready to respond. For the past two years He has been working in my heart to get me ready for this.
Not long ago I was reading the story of when Jesus called Matthew the tax collector to be His disciple. It says in Luke 5:27-28:
“After these things He went out and saw a tax collector named Levi, sitting at the tax office. And He said to him, “Follow Me.” So he left all, rose up, and followed Him.”
My attention was drawn to what seemed to be an unusual word order in verse 28. If I was telling the story I would have written it like this: “So he rose up, left all, and followed Him.” After all, don’t you have to actually get up before you can leave something?
But I think the Holy Spirit wanted to show me what He has been doing in my heart for the past two years. Before anyone can truly rise up and follow Christ, there has to be a leaving all that happens in the heart. Our possessions possess us. The familiar gives us a sense of security. Having something of our own allows us to feel independent. And all of these things need to be stripped away. For Christ would have us be possessed by Him, and find all our security in Him, and depend upon Him. But we are so tethered to this world, that unless He loosed us from these earthly shackles we would spend all our life desiring to rise up and follow, but never actually able to do it.
He has been in no particular hurry with me. Two years seems like an eternity to me, but the Lord has been willing to take this long to do such a work in my heart. He hasn’t asked me to leave my home and family, or to sell everything I have. But I do believe now (as I did when I was first born again), that this life of mine is no longer mine, and I cannot expect that it will be lived in a way that the world calls “normal”.
There is a battle, and for too long I have watched it from afar, fearful of the danger. But I have discovered that the safety of my hiding places is only an illusion and could possibly be the most dangerous place of all.
I thank the Lord for His patience with me and for His loving kindness and for the great blessedness there is in being a follower of His. And I look forward to what lies ahead………
The word of God is a living word that speaks to my life. When I slow down and listen, He speaks to me through it. And many times He confronts and challenges me with it. Yesterday was one of those days. I was reading Luke 21:1-4:
“And He looked up and saw the rich putting their gifts into the treasury, and He saw also a certain poor widow putting in two mites. So He said, “Truly I say to you that this poor widow has put in more than all, for all these out of their abundance have put in offerings for God, but she out of her poverty put in all the livelihood that she had.”
It is as though Jesus is contrasting two different kinds of people. Both groups are at the temple. Both groups are giving to the Lord. But one group gives God gifts and the other gives God themselves.
The word “livelihood” caught my attention. It is the word “BIOS”, which means life. This widow gave her life. She kept back nothing for herself. She had no way to sustain herself or to meet her own needs. She was utterly cast upon the Lord. This kind of giving is uncomfortable….fearful even. But sometimes it seems that there is no alternative. The working of God upon the soul will bring us all eventually to the settled conviction that it is unreasonable and even impossible to continue with life as is. All must be laid on the altar, tossed into the treasury, placed at His feet.
Have you ever felt that way? What is one to do when it seems that God is requiring a surrender of everything comfortable and familiar for…..something unknown, unrevealed and almost certainly unexpected?
Surrender. For the servant of the Lord is there really any other answer?
After God created Adam and Eve, His first command to them was “Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it….” But we find that the only thing they were able to produce was sin. As then, so now. We are born into this barren wasteland of sin and we add our own barrenness and our own sin to it. Inevitably there comes a day when we realize that we are barren and it becomes first troublesome, then heart-breaking and finally unbearable.
Proverbs 30:16 says there are 4 things that are not satisfied and never say “Enough”. One of those is the barren womb. I was reminded of Rachel’s agonized cry to Jacob – “Give me children or I die!”
But this is not just the cry of a barren womb. It is also the cry of the barren life. Aren’t there those moments when time seems to stand still and you see your life, so much of it foolishly squandered, and you realize that it may be that more of it is behind you than lies ahead of you……and it is barren. What a panic and mad scramble this can create as we try to dig deeply into every crevice of ourselves to find something, anything that we can offer to the Lord, only to realize that there is nothing – not so much as a crumb. Our life is barren because we are barren. We are all in the same barren condition, but we have learned how to not notice that there is no fruit from our lives. How easy it is to become content with producing that plastic wax-like fruit that is created to display in some sort of centerpiece. Nice to look at but not suitable to eat. But at least it is something we can point to as evidence that we are producing something…….
Isaiah 54:1 says “Sing, O barren, you who have not borne”. Why would a barren woman sing? Her greatest desire has been withheld from her. What cause for rejoicing could she have? But the passage continues “for more are the children of the desolate than the children of the married woman, says the Lord.” We labor so diligently to be fruitful, striving, trying, working….but true fruitfulness can only come out of the admission of our utter barrenness and our dependence upon Another to produce the fruit.
What joy there is in realizing that our barrenness is not the enemy of fruitfulness, but the platform for it!
Hosea 14:8 says “Your fruit is found in Me.”
And thus we come to the conclusion of our study and where else could it conclude but in Christ Himself! John 15:4-5, 8
Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in Me. I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing……by this My Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit.
Shall we remain contented in this unnatural state of barrenness when Christ has made the promise of much fruit, and such fruit that is pleasing to the Father? Oh will we not come to that holy place of abiding communion with Jesus, where we have realized that all we can offer Him is our barrenness, but also that He is able and so very, very willing to produce lasting and God glorifying fruit in us.
Let the barren who trust in Christ rejoice, for the fruit of His life in us is guaranteed.
Hannah was a woman who seemed to suffer greatly from her barrenness. Unlike Elizabeth, we meet Hannah when she was a young woman still in her childbearing years. Not only did she endure the sorrow of her barrenness, but also the provocation of her husband’s other, fertile wife, Peninnah. Not content to merely enjoy the blessing of motherhood, Peninnah entertained herself by provoking Hannah to an intense emotional state over her barrenness. 1 Samuel 1:6 says that her adversary (Peninnah), “provoked her severely to make her fret”. Interestingly, that word fret is also translated thunder. Peninnah didn’t just make Hannah cry, she made her angry!
Regardless of what her exact emotional state was, because of what she lacked and the continual harassment of her adversary, Hannah couldn’t enjoy what was set before her. And in the house of the Lord the shame of it all must have pressed upon her even more. Her husband, Elkanah, was a Levite, which meant his sons would also serve the Lord as Levites. Peninnah had many sons to offer to the service of the Lord, but Hannah had none. Nothing to give to God. And so we come to her prayer, as she pours out her heart before God. Could I just summarize it like this – “Oh God, would you please give me something that I can offer to You?”
The soul that realizes it has nothing to offer the Lord but that which He Himself gives, is the soul that is only a hairs breadth away from great blessing.
You know the story…..she has a son whom she gives into the service of the Lord. He is Samuel, a mighty prophet used greatly by the Lord. And on that day when she brings Samuel to the house of the Lord her heart cannot contain her joy. Her prayer of triumph is recorded for us in chapter 2. One verse in particular caught my attention:
“The adversaries of the Lord shall be broken in pieces; from heaven He will thunder against them. The Lord will judge the ends of the earth.” 1 Samuel 2:10
No longer does Hannah speak of her adversary for the Lord has vindicated her. No longer does Hannah thunder from vexation because the Lord has thundered in judgment. She smiles at her enemies because she rejoices in the salvation of the Lord, for He has rendered the weapons of her enemy powerless against her.
He is my Delight 