Today’s verse is about putting things in perspective.
Imagine that you are behind on your rent. I mean seriously late. You are worried about being evicted any minute. Then you hear a knock on your door. You start sweating, and your heart is racing as you answer. It’s your landlord.
But she’s smiling.
She sees your grim face and says, “Do you not know? Have you not heard?”
Puzzled, you ask what she’s talking about.
She says, “Your father bought this entire apartment building! He runs it now, and your rent is free!”
You would be so relieved.
Just as I should be relieved no matter what issue I’m facing here on earth. Why? Because God “bought the building.” He owns everything. He knows all the ins and outs and how it all fits together. He forgave my debt and made me free. He has a beautiful plan for my life, and He works tirelessly to make sure everything goes as planned. No matter what it looks or feels like today, I can rely on the all-knowing, everlasting God of love to work things out for my good in the end.
How can I be worried when I know God owns the building?
Dear God,
Thank you for allowing me to live freely in your beautiful creation. Forgive me for worrying and stressing about things when I know who you are and all you are capable of. Remind me to turn my problems over to you and trust in your infinite power, love, and understanding. Teach me how to focus on praising and obeying you instead of being distracted by my problems.
I’ve never had a bodyguard — never needed one, fortunately — but I’ve seen people with them on TV and heard about celebrities and politicians and sports stars needing them to keep fans and haters alike at bay. The US Secret Service is a whole law enforcement agency with a goal of protecting our government’s leaders and their families.
Bodyguards and Secret Service agents can be very effective, especially when their protectee is cooperative. It’s much easier to take a bullet for the vice president if she stays close to her agent.
In today’s verse I learn that God faithfully guards me from the evil one. He’s taking bullets for me left and right. But just like with bodyguards, it’s important for me to stay close to God. If I go wandering off, the evil one may find a way past my security detail. Not because God can’t manage, but because He still wants me to have a choice.
If I want to lose my bodyguard, I have that right. But I will be vulnerable. If I shake off God’s guidance, I will be vulnerable to the devil’s whispered lies and temptations from my own desires.
If I choose to stick close to God instead, returning to His word and to prayer constantly, He will faithfully and vigilantly protect me from any and all attacks.
Dear God,
Thank you so much for your promise of protection! Remind me to stay close to you. Show me when I am straying too far and forgive me. Teach me how to remain under your loving guard at all times.
What is a “living hope”? And how am I born into it? These are churchy words and dense concepts that make it hard to read the Bible. Some translations try to take out all the churchy words. I’ve found this to be helpful but not necessary if I spend a little time contemplating the words and reading the surrounding verses for context.
Even though today’s verse sounded complicated to me when I first read it, the meaning is actually quite simple. And it basically distills the whole point of the Bible: even though I don’t deserve it, God reached out (His great mercy) and offered me the gift of a new, clean and perfect life (the birth part). He did this by giving His son Jesus to be perfect for me and to die in my place. But Jesus conquered death so He’s alive and well (the living hope).
New birth into a living hope. If I accept God’s great mercy, I am reborn into a new life. I may look the same and my circumstances are probably exactly the same too. But internally I am different. My priorities are different, what I value has changed, how I intend to treat other people and why is all new. Where I look for guidance, comfort, and strength has been refocused on God. And over time, these internal changes will start affecting my external life as well. Maybe how I spend my time and who I spend it with shifts. Maybe my new integrity is noticed, and I get a better job. Or maybe I find more peace with my current job instead.
Just because I’ve been made new like this doesn’t mean I will be perfect. Jesus was perfect for me. I will unfortunately make many mistakes even in this new life where my priorities have adjusted. Things will still go wrong. Temptation still exists. This is why it’s important that my hope is living. Jesus is alive and ready to remind me again and again of how I’ve been forgiven, how much He loves me ,and that He’s here with me.
We humans forget good things so quickly and easily. We remember the bad for a very long time. If Jesus died and stayed dead, taking my sins with Him, I’d always wonder if He got them all. Maybe He missed a few…?
But He came back. He conquered death entirely and came back. He knew I’d need reassurance. Yes, He says. I got them all. Even the sins you will commit later today.
Dear God,
Thank you for being my living hope! Thank you for giving me a new life where I can stand in your holy presence without shame. I don’t deserve it, but I love it. Thank you for removing every last one of the mistakes I have made and have yet to make. I’m sorry for my failure to obey you and love others. Reveal my failures to me so I can hand them over to you for disposal.
This is very mysterious. It always has been mysterious to me. I grew up going to church and Sunday school, but a lot of Christianity and the Bible is perplexing to a young mind. (And even an old mind.)
The concept of the Trinity is one of those things. It doesn’t make sense because there is nothing like it in this world. I can’t relate to it or understand it or even imagine it very well.
As a child I could grasp the idea of God because I was very familiar with powerful authority figures. I knew parents and teachers, police officers and shop clerks. Pretty much any adult had more power than me and did things I couldn’t begin to understand. My dad built our house so I could understand very well the concept of a loving father creating a good place for me to live, like God creating the universe for His children.
But when they tried to explain the Trinity to me, I was lost. I had no experience with three-in-one people. My dad was separate from my teacher who was separate from my mom. How could God include Jesus and the Holy Spirit as one Being while being three separate Beings as well? The closest I could come was a person with a split personality or conjoined triplets or some kind of job-share situation perhaps. There’s just nothing like it in all of creation.
Well, I guess that’s kind of the point. God is unique and mysterious and incomprehensible. I can’t begin to understand Him fully. If I could, He wouldn’t be much of a God.
The point of today’s verse isn’t to boggle the mind though. Jesus was simply trying to comfort His disciples. He had been explaining that He was about to be executed, which is understandably disturbing. After all, they had spent years following Him. They had put all their hopes in Him. Now He was “going away”?!
So Jesus said, hey don’t worry, another part of me will come and hang around right in your heart and be with you all the time. That part of me will never go away. In fact, that part will stick around until I come back.
They were very confused. And they stayed confused until Pentecost when it happened — the part of the Trinity that Jesus promised arrived and filled each of them.
Fortunately, part of the Holy Spirit’s job was to teach and remind the disciples about everything Jesus said and meant during His ministry. The disciples stopped being confused and started worshipping and teaching and preaching and healing and writing. They continued the ministry Jesus began. They loved. The fear left them, replaced by confidence in God, and they started Christianity.
The good news is that the same Holy Spirit that filled the disciples at Pentecost will also fill any believer in Jesus today. Today’s verse is for me and you. I don’t have to understand the Trinity or any of God’s wondrous mysteries to have access to God’s love. I just have to believe and accept His gift.
Dear God,
You are a confounding and marvelous mystery to me. Thank you for explaining what I need to know in a way I can understand it through Jesus. Thank you for promising to come live with me, teaching me and reminding me of your word. Open my ears to hear your voice today.I look forward to the day when you explain it all to me, and I can see you face to face.
The Day of the Lord is a phrase used often in the Bible. Its meaning changes slightly with the context. It either refers to a time in the past or a time in the future. But in either case it is a dreadful, scary time when God decides to enforce His will. He’s done being patient with sin and evil.
In the past there was a Day of the Lord when God sent the plagues on Egypt to free His people from slavery. And when He sent the Babylonians to conquer Jerusalem and drag His rebellious people into captivity. God is slow to anger when evil is allowed to reign, but His patience does eventually run out.
Today’s verse is talking about the Day of the Lord that is yet to come which is often referred to as Judgement Day. When this time arrives, God will conquer evil once and for all and make all things new. Everything evil will be destroyed forever. Everything belonging to Him will be cleansed and set right, as He originally intended them to be.
The reason for Joel’s alarm is that the destruction that occurs during the Day of the Lord will be pervasive and horrifying. Evil has a very strong foothold in this world because we have allowed it to thrive. So the remedy won’t be gentle.
Imagine a house inundated with deadly black mold. The mold is in the drywall, the studs, the floor joists, the roof rafters and the plumbing. It cannot be cleaned. It must be torn down to the foundation and rebuilt. All the moldy material must be removed and destroyed. Anything valuable that is contaminated must be thoroughly sanitized if possible or it too must be destroyed.
I know I would rather be sanitized than destroyed on the Day of the Lord, but either way, it will be scary. Fortunately because of Jesus, my sanitization is possible. God promises that those who choose Him and accept His cleansing will be saved and will get to enjoy the perfect (mold- and evil-free) beauty of the new world He creates afterward.
Dear God,
Thank you for warning us about the upcoming Day of the Lord. I am so sorry for the evil I have allowed to thrive in my life and in the world around me. Please forgive me and cleanse me so that I can be saved when you clean house. Reveal the things in my life I need to change now. Give me the wisdom, strength, and courage to change them. And protect me during the Day of the Lord.
When I read about Jesus’s ministry, I sometimes think, “Well, it would be easy to turn people to God if I could heal their diseases.” People tend to be easily convinced by something that affects them so obviously, so dramatically, and so positively. Without the ability to miraculously heal people though, I’m just another person saying stuff. So much less convincing and easy to ignore.
The reply I get from God is, “Have you tried?”
Um. No.
I have never gone all over teaching in synagogues (or churches or temples or assembly halls or conference rooms…) preaching the good news of the kingdom. And I have certainly never healed anyone’s disease or sickness.
It’s true that in the Bible Jesus tells His disciples more than once that their faith should allow them to heal people miraculously. And they do!
So why haven’t I? Is it a lack of faith? A lack of trying? Probably both!
I’ve seen on TV and heard stories of miraculous healings at tent revivals and things like that. Where a person in a wheelchair, for example, comes to the front of the tent during a frenzy of praise songs and waving arms. A preacher pushes his hand against their forehead and in a loud quavering voice cries, “Be healed in the name of Jesus!” The person stands tentatively from the wheelchair and starts to weep for joy as the crowd gasps and then cheers and applauds.
My reaction to those scenes and stories is always disbelief and dismissal. I assume there is a trick. The seemingly wheelchair-bound person must have been in on the scam with the traveling preacher, and both were aiming to make some quick bucks before leaving town.
While there certainly are plenty of con-artists using religious fervor to their advantage, the fact remains that Jesus does say that miraculous healing is available to His followers.
So how do I get there? How do I get enough faith to heal someone?
Maybe part of the answer is in today’s verse. The order that Jesus did things is go, teach, preach, and then heal. Healing wasn’t the first thing or the main thing. Maybe if I go around teaching and preaching, eventually God will lead me to the healing part. It would be a lot easier to start with the healing, right? But then I wouldn’t really need faith.
Dear God,
I’d love to have sufficient faith to heal anyone who came to me with a disease or illness. Your word says this is possible — everything is possible for you. Teach me what I need to do today to be your obedient child and faithful servant whether it ever includes healing or not. I want to believe in your infinite possibilities!
This is part of how Jesus said we should pray. (The whole thing is often referred to as “The Lord’s Prayer.”) This verse is simple, but the wording is a bit strange and brings up a few questions for me.
First, what is His “kingdom” and why am I praying for its arrival?
During Jesus’s ministry on earth, He spent a lot of time explaining how different things were supposed to be in His kingdom. Basically, everything is upside-down. The first will be last, the meek will inherit the earth, and I’m supposed to meet the needs of others before I meet my own and love my enemies…. Stuff like that. When God first created the world, this was how He intended it to be and how it was. Until He granted His people the gift of choice, and we chose selfishness, power and control. We put ourselves first, and at that moment everything turned upside down. It’s been that way ever since. Evil reigns here. Selfishness, greed, fear, loneliness, hunger…
When I pray for God’s kingdom to come, I’m praying for the world to be made right side up again, where love reigns. Generosity, peace, contentment, joy…
The second question I have is, if God is all-powerful, why do I have to pray for His will to be done on earth the way it is done in heaven?
The answer to this question is exactly the same as the first. God gave us choice. He could enforce His will here the way He does in heaven, apparently, but He decided He wanted His children to see the alternative to living His way. So He let us choose, and we chose not to do things His way. Adam and Eve chose to run things their way back in the garden. And every day since then, we humans have been choosing our way over God’s way. Over and over again.
Seeing the result of these choices, I’m happy to pray for God’s will to be done here instead . Why wouldn’t I want to follow the advice of the wisest Being that exists, the One who created everything, knows how everything works, is made of pure love, and stands outside of time and space?
Dear God,
I know your will is good, pleasing, and perfect. Doing things your way is the only way to have peace, joy and love reign on earth. Please bring your kingdom to earth. Turn everything right side up again! Teach me how to live as if your kingdom were already hereuntil you do. I choose your way over mine or any other human’s. Reveal your will to me every day and bring me back when I stray from it.
The Proverbs can be kind of like fortune cookie sayings. You never know what’s coming. Sometimes they are relevant. Sometimes they aren’t. But in general, they are often open to interpretation, so they are what you make of them.
In today’s verse I’m looking at the words “friend” and “brother”. I don’t think these are meant to contrast, as in, a friend does this but a brother does that. Instead, I think friend and brother mean the same thing here: a person who loves me even in difficult times, whether we’re related or not.
For one thing, not everyone has an actual brother. Some people only have sisters. Some people are only children. Other people may have a brother who is estranged or missing or unreliable or dead. For these people, this verse ends up not meaning much.
Many of Proverbs was written by a father to his son in an effort to teach him wisdom, to teach him the best way to live and thrive in this world. The intention of today’s verse isn’t to differentiate between relatives and non-relatives. The point is to explain how to be a good friend. To love. Always. In all circumstances including difficult times. To love people I’m related to and people I’m not related to.
This is wisdom. And it’s consistent with Jesus’s second most important command of God for His children. Love one another. Indiscriminately.
Dear God,
Teach me how to be a good friend to everyone you place in my life. Thank you for modeling this for me in the life of Jesus. Forgive me when I have been too selective about whom I love and when to love them. Guide me to the changes I need to make. Help me to see everyone as my friend and brother and every circumstance as being worthy of love.
Even though this verse is simple, it is hard to understand. Clearly, if I ask God for a million dollars, it’s not going to come plopping down in my lap from the sky. I just tried. No go.
So what did Jesus mean when He said this?
Looking closely at the wording here I notice that Jesus didn’t say, “Ask, and you will immediately get whatever you asked for.” (Or “Seek, and you will find exactly what you were looking for.” Or “Knock on any door, and that door will open up for you.”)
He said, “Ask, and it will be given to you.” There is no timeframe, and the “it” that I get isn’t specified.
The surrounding verses talk about how a good parent doesn’t give a snake to a child that asks for bread. And how God is more loving and wiser than even the best human parent.
God loves me and wants to give me good things. Things that make me strong and fill my life with joy, things that encourage me and challenge me to grow. He knows exactly what I really need.
But the thing I need the absolute most is Him. So my asking and seeking and knocking all takes place in the context of a relationship and a conversation with God.
In Jesus’s example of the good parent giving his child bread (a need), imagine instead this child walking up to a random stranger and asking for candy (a want). Do you think the child will get candy? Or maybe the stranger, if they are a decent person, will ask the child where her parents are. They may call the police about a lost child. They will take care of the child until the parent is found. Maybe she will eventually get bread and other food, maybe even some candy, but it will be a lot more involved.
In the same way, if I know God, I can ask Him for what I need, and He will provide it in the way and in the timing that is best for me. And He will talk to me about it. I know He loves me, and I can trust Him.
If I don’t know God but I ask Him for what I want, He will ask me who I am, where I belong, and why I’m asking Him. He will happily want to start a conversation with me. Maybe I will end up getting what I need from Him. Once that relationship has begun.
The asking part has everything to do with the seeking and knocking part. Am I asking for what I need from someone I know? Am I seeking to know God? Am I knocking on God’s door? God is the only one who can really provide. To get anything, He’s the one to ask and seek. And He promises to open the door and start a conversation about my wants and needs. He will freely provide the “it”, which is Himself and is all I need.
Dear God,
Thank you for being open to listening to my wants and needs. Thank you for promising to always provide what I need. Thank you for being available to open the door when I seek you. Remind me to always turn to you for what I want and need in this life. Teach me to trust that your answers and provision are always the best.
What is something you think is unmovable? Something you feel to be secure, permanent, and reliable.
I had always thought my health was one of those things. I was the healthiest person I knew.
As a child I was rarely ill and never missed school. When I started my career, I never used sick days for anything more serious than a cold or a sports injury.
My grandmother lived to her mid-nineties and that seemed to be the trend for women in my family. We had no history of chronic hereditary conditions. I thought I was going to live a long, healthy life.
But then I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. I was so perplexed. This was not at all consistent with the world I knew. Somehow, the mountains were moving.
A few years later I was diagnosed with breast cancer. What?! How can this be?
And a few years after that, I was diagnosed with a brain tumor.
By this point, I obviously no longer consider my health to be unmovable like a mountain. It is totally unreliable.
But at the same time, God showed me that He is reliable. He is here. He is always here. He will always be right here. He is unmovable, unchanging, and reliable in a way that nothing else is. My job isn’t reliable. My family won’t always be there. My house, the government, a functioning civilization… Even the sun shining for another day is no guarantee.
Through all my health crises, God showed me where He was. If I turned to Him, I didn’t have to look far. He was right beside me. And He pointed out to me that I had been a fool to rely on anything other than Him. I won’t make that mistake again.
Dear God,
Thank you so much for revealing yourself to me when I felt so lost and confused — when my mountains were moving. Thank you for the promise of your forever and always love!Show me if there is anything I am relying on more than you so that I can relocate my misplaced trust back to you.
CamDevo 