Fishrapper

Why Pray?

If God knows what I need before I ask, then why ask?

Consider Oswald Chambers' answer in My Utmost for His Highest, Aug. 6.

"The idea of prayer is not in order to get answers from God; prayer is perfect and complete oneness with God. If we pray because we want answers, we will get huffed with God. The answers come every time, but not always in the way we expect, and our spiritual huff shows a refusal to identify ourselves with Our Lord in prayer. We are not here to prove God answers prayer; we are here to be living monuments of God's grace."

I hope our prayer for Barbara has gone beyond the asking stage to worshipping.

"I Declare..."

It’s Friday!

Jesus hangs on the cross. His life appears to be ebbing away. He has been verbally abused, taunted, challenged, tantalized with the possibility of greatness, mocked, spat upon, and beat. It is now His time. With a legion of angels at his beck and call, Jesus turned His back on the world’s way and chose His Father’s will. Hanging there He cries out, “Into Thy hands I commit My Spirit.” He gave up His life. They didn’t take it away. Willingly Jesus jumped into the arms of His Father. Jesus put his postmortem future in the hands of His Heavenly Father.

Where is your trust?

Throughout our lives we rely on all sorts of things. We begin life fully dependent on our parents. Along the way we trust teachers, doctors, lawyers, pilots, spouses, presidents, police officers, friends, pastors, and, of course, our selves. But in the end there is only one place for ultimate trust. In God, and God alone, through His crucified and resurrected Son, Jesus Christ.

Manley Beasley, a Texas evangelist who for years suffered from three terminal illnesses while experiencing great pain, declared, “Sink, or swim, live or die, I commit myself to Jesus.”

The prophet Habakkuk declared, “Though the fig tree should not blossom, and there be no fruit on the vines, though the yield of the olive should fail, and the fields produce no food, though the flock should be cut off from the fold, and there be no cattle in the stalls. Yet, I will exult in the Lord, I will rejoice in the God of my salvation. The Lord God is my strength, and He has made my feet like hinds’ feet, and makes me walk on my high places. (Habakkuk 3:17-19)

And Job declared, “Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him.” (Job 13:15)

Sunday's coming! What’s your declaration?

How Much Pain Can I Take?

    A friend told me recently he was wrestling over a problem with Christian. God impressed him to talk to Steve, a wise friend who he hadn’t seen or heard from in months. Later that morning he pulled into a service station and there at the pump next to him was Steve. Steve was in a hurry and didn’t have time to do anything other than say hello. But as he drove away he shouted back, “If you can’t do it out of love, don’t do it.”

    As my friend meditated on Steve's comment he asked himself, “How much pain can I take and still love?”

    What a question?

    Doesn’t that point us straight to Jesus? At the very moment of his death, Jesus looked down on all those involved in bringing him to the point of death. He offered them forgiveness. Pardon! Clemency! Mercy! Absolution! Exoneration!

    The people may not have fully understood what they were doing, but we know what they did.

    They beat Jesus, spat in his face, humiliated him, forced a crown of thorns upon his head, made him carry his own cross, and then they executed him.

    The typical response of a condemned man dying on a cross was words of hatred and bitterness. But Jesus shouted words of forgiveness, “Father, forgive them...”

    By speaking forgiveness God treats all who repent as if the offense against Him never happened. We are to go and do likewise.

    How much pain can you take and still love?

I Need You, You Need Me

    I really don't care what you are doing. I should, but I don't! And if the truth were known, you don't care what I'm doing either.

    Sounds awful, doesn't it?

    Why don't I care? Two reasons!

• I don't really know you.
• Nor do I know what you are doing.

    And that is the same reason you don't care.

    By the way, this is the same reason most of our prayers go unanswered. We don't know the One to whom we pray.

    If we don't know one another, then it is impossible to know what each of us is going through and, generally, we don't care about what we don't know.

    This is true of our relationship with God. If I'm not intimate with Him then I won't really know His desires for me or the Kingdom, and therefore I will be unable to pray according to His will. That is why Jesus taught us to pray beginning with our relationship with God: "Our Father..."

    Three more thoughts:

1. No man is an island!
2. Hermitology is not in God's vocabulary.
3. I can't operate in isolation; neither can you.

The Value of Thanksgiving

    Thoughts from 1 Thessalonians 5:18 -- "In everything give thanks; for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus."

• God's will for me is to be a thankful person.
• Thanks is to God in the circumstance, not necessarily for the circumstance.
• Giving thanks is the right way to respond to the wrongs in our lives.
  • No matter what is going on.
  • For our lives.
  • For the circumstances surrounding us.
  • For the pain and difficulties.
  • For our griefs and sorrows.
• Giving thanks sets us free of our baggage and bondage.
• Giving thanks says God is in charge. He is sovereign.
• God rules!

   

God is Talking

    I tilted back in my lounge chair, eyes skyward. I saw the pine trees, the array of needles and small pinecones. They were beautiful and shady; perfect but, sadly, short term. Here today and gone tomorrow. The shape of every tree was unique. 

    And the sky! It was blue, one of those "on a clear day you can see forever" skies.

    The breeze was cool. Birds chirped. Bugs sounded off with synchronized madness.

    Everything worked as planned.

    Except me?

    And maybe (probably) you!

    You and I are the ones who have failed to function as created.

    And that's just another day on my spiritual retreat to the Arizona mountains.

First, and Foremost

    Henry Blackaby asked me an interesting question the other day (in his Day by Day Devotional and Journal). "Where is your treasure?"

    I'd like to say "God" or the "Bible." But other things came to mind too. Actually lots of stuff.

• Food
• Fishing
• Computer
• Travel
• Leisure time

    So, who (or what) comes first? The politically (or spiritually) correct answer is God. But does He?

What Should I Do?

    It is amazing how one week a truth passes you by and the next week the same truth slaps you up side the head. Which is what just happened to me!

    Ten days ago I taught a Bible study from 2 Peter 3. I'm not even sure what my points were, but they seemed right at the time. They obviously did not stay with me. Not so today.

    From the same passage today God got real specific:

• Don't get lulled into false security.
• Don't forget what is coming.
• People will say otherwise, mocking, questioning and influencing.
• Despite God's great patience the end is coming.
• It will be a surprise. A bang! A note of finality!

    The question, Peter writes, is "what sort of people ought you to be in holy conduct and godliness..." v. 11

    What should I do?

Imagination Determines Attitude

    My mother-in-law languished in a nursing home in deep depression, thinking she faced kidney dialysis. Imagining the worse and believing a lie, she just wanted to die. She didn't know the problem was not her health as much as it was her imagination.

    It was the prophet Isaiah who said perfect peace came from those "whose imagination is stayed" on God (Isaiah 26:3).

    We are not to let our relationship with God to be determined by our circumstances. Jesus told the woman at the well (John 4) that the place of worship was not geographical but spiritual.

    The apostle Paul was bound for Jerusalem. He didn't know specifically what he would be facing, but he knew it wasn't good humanly speaking. Certainly there was imprisonment and suffering. It didn't bother him. His only desire was that "I may finish my course with joy..." (Acts 20:24).

    My imagination must stay solidly on God.

Nothing Between Us

    Unity has always been important to me. I preached it once at an annual association meeting in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and had a pastor challenge me on it. "Nice idea," he said, "but impractical."

    But now I have been blind-sided by unity. As I read Jesus' words in John 17:22, "that they may be one as We are one," I was struck by the thought that unity means agreement, harmony, and accord. The picture I got was of nothing -- zilch -- between us.

    Nothing should come between God and me. Nothing! And there should be nothing between Shirley and me, either.

    God wants me to guard jealously the relationship I have with Him, and the one I have with my wife.

    So the question I face is "what am I letting come between God and me, or for that matter, between Shirley and me?"

     This relates to a similar thought. On what, or whom, do I depend? Is it Christ?

    God wants me to narrow my interests until my focus is on Him alone.