Heard this on the way home from church tonight.
Listen to the radical way Paul puts it in 2 Corinthians 12 . . . You remember the situation. He’s got a thorn in the flesh. We don’t know what it is, but it is causing him pain. He says, “Christ, please take it away.” Three times. And Christ says, “No.” And then Paul says, verse 9 . . .And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. . . .
There’s more of Christ. Do you see that? Do you want more of Christ? Christ’s grace. Christ’s power. Christ’s fellowship. Do you want more and more and more because he is your treasure? Paul did, and therefore he said . . . Most gladly . . . Don’t miss that amazing counter-intuitive word . . . Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.
For the sake of Christ, then, I’m content . . . . I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ’s sake: for when I am weak, then am I strong.
Magnifying Christ by being satisfied in him in pain, in calamity, in suffering, in insult, and weakness was the passion of Paul’s life. His passion was not the American Dream of escaping insult, calamity, pain, suffering. His passion was any life and any death that enables me to know you better, see you more, and magnify your greatness more. Bring it on, Jesus. All I want in my life and in my death is to make your worth more vivid for the world to see.
So, I ask you tonight. Are you going to throw away your life? Are you going to buy into the American Dream, minimize suffering, maximize comfort, maximize ease, maximize security, build bigger barns, work for the bread that perishes, lay up treasure on earth, covet the praise of man, and be happy for 80 years, and PERISH? Is that the way that you’re going to waste your life?
Or are you going to see Christ crucified and risen and reigning and bearing your sins as the infinite treasure in your life that he really is and then make life choices that display to the world his value?
My sister found this one somewhere.
| Your Power Bird is a Cardinal |
 You believe that each day is precious, and you spend your times as best as you can. You see the wonder in small things, and you are often content with what you have. You live an interesting, colorful life – and you bring color to those around you. Confident and expressive, you believe you know how to live a good life. You’re living it! |
I think most people looking at my life from the outside might think it’s not so interesting except for some major highlights here and there, but I’m having a blast, so I’ll go with it. 
The original plan was to take the tax refund and get my husband a cheap beater car for work. Well, with the prospect of putting 400 dollars into a 600 car, and with gas prices nearing 3.50 a gallon today, we decided that the only thing that made economic sense was to get a car with exceptional gas mileage and use the van as little as possible. With that approach, the car will very nearly pay for itself. So, say goodbye to the grandma car.
One more thing that sticks out in my mind from this brief trip. Most of the time I never see the people who clean the hotel room, but this time because I was working my usual schedule I got to speak with "Mary" several times. She seemed to be about my age, but maybe a lot harder life than I've had to deal with. On Sunday, I had a little more chance to talk to her. What she told me in that conversation has lodged in my brain.
The first thing she said was that she knew I would be nice when she saw my Bible in the room. I guess a lot of hotel guests aren't. She told me a couple of stories. But the thing I reallly want to remember about her is what she said next.
She said, "My goal is to learn to read so I can read the Bible." As we talked some more, it was clear that she had placed her faith in Jesus, but now she wanted to be able to read his words for herself. I thought about how saturated we are with Bibles in the churches in this country, and about how little we sometimes value these riches. I thought about how many people there are in the world — and right here in this country — who would love to have a Bible to read or who have set themselves the goal of learning how to read so that they can read the words of God for themselves. And I wondered if this was how education became a thing for the common people. I've read somewhere that where the Gospel has come to an illiterate culture, education isn't far behind.
A week from today I'll have the great privilege of taking God's word to people who can read, but don't have the ready access to Bibles that we do. I'm grateful for the opportunity to share my blessings.
What goal have you set for yourself?
Visiting with my husband’s youngest daughter this week. Of course any time you leave Ohio to the south or the east you have to cross the mighty Ohio River. One of my favorite road trips of all time was when we were headed home one time, and we followed the river all the way from the southernmost point of Ohio up to around the Youngstown area before cuttting back across the state to home. Lots of neat things to see along the way.
Got to meet Rigsby, who we nearly didn’t get to meet because he had a bad go with some Parvo not too many weeks back.
Car shopping. Can’t you just see the JOY oozing out of their pores! (NOT! LOL)
Friday night dinner. Neat place. Three guys from New York got to North Carolina and couldn’t find a decent pizza. Imagine that! I loved the decor. Lots of old oil cans, gas pumps. An old soap box derby car hanging from the ceiling. Plenty of atmosphere along with a pretty good piece of pizza.
I think the highlight of this trip is going to be the worship service I attended this morning. I always enjoy my visits at other churches when I’m away from home – no matter how silly the reason I have for picking one church over another. One year coming back from mom and dad’s I went to the only church that had an early service because I needed to get on the road so I could get the rental car back on time. Today’s silly reason? This was the closest church to the hotel we’re staying at.
It’s always great to meet other believers and see what God is doing outside of my little corner of the world. Today, I got to meet Seb. He sang a couple songs for the Sunday School class, but I really enjoyed the story he told first about 50 years ago in the North Carolina mountains there weren’t any phones, so when his friend got saved, he couldn’t just picked up the phone and call his mom who had been praying for him all those years. He had to sit down and write a letter. The song was about a mom who had gone on to heaven without knowing that her boy was saved, and asking that his name be called so mom would know he was there (in heaven). Neat.
The Sunday school class was a blessing. I hope I always remember the picture the teacher told of running his first marathon and the struggle to make it to the end and the mental battle to make it all the way to the finish line that was even more of a struggle than the physical battle. He told how upon seeing the finish come into view he started to cry and asked for his wife. I guess that’s not an unusual reaction to have. What’s that got to do with anything? The topic today was the last 24 hours of Jesus’ life. As he talked about all that Jesus had gone through for us and the sheer agony of the physical torture that my sin and yours caused him to have to go through, I could just about hear him saying “It is finished” with the tears of a marathon runner who has just made it to the end of an agonizing race. I told the teacher that if I got nothing else today, that one picture made the entire trip worth it.
Of course, that wasn’t the only thing I received from the Lord today. I also got to meet “Squeak” and her husband (who gave up his seat next to his wife for the entire service so I could sit down). It was a real blessing to hear their excitement about the things going on in the church.
And what’s a visit to church without some heavenly manna – food for the soul. I think today’s sermon was just what I needed to hear before heading off to Africa later this week. The text was Mark 2:1-12, where four friends bring their paralyzed friend to Jesus to be healed. These guys were absolutely determined to get their friend to Jesus, and NOTHING was going to stop them.
“It was the faith of the four friends that brought about the miracle. . . . There was no way they were leaving that day without putting their friend right in front of Jesus. . . . They didn’t have another day, and they weren’t going to wait for Jesus to get done.”
I want to remember those words when I’m away, because I won’t have another day, but I want to remember them when I’m back home too. There are lots of paralytics in my life on this side of the pond who need me to bring them to Jesus, and who knows if I’ll have another day.
What’s really neat about today’s message is that the preacher gave me such a picture of Jesus that I felt motivated, not just guilted out. That’s one thing I’ve been blessed by in all my road visits to different churches. No matter how inconsequential my reason for going to a particular church, I’ve always managed to find a place where Jesus Christ is exalted. That’s all I need, and it’s really all I want.
Because he says it like it is.
It is doubtful whether we can be Christian in anything unless we are Christian in everything. To obey Christ in one or two or ten instances and then in fear of consequences to back away and refuse to obey in another is to cloud our life with the suspicion that we are only fair-weather followers and not true believers at all. To obey when it costs us nothing and refuse when the results are costly is to convict ourselves of moral trifling and gross insincerity….
Ouch!
Obviously, he’s not talking about the person who out of ignorance of the scriptures doesn’t obey Christ, but the one who knows and refuses when the cost of obedience is more than they are willing to pay.
Obedience in the Christian life is interesting, especially in this culture. We’ve had it so ingrained into our fiber that “No one’s going to tell me what to do!” that even when it is God Almighty himself doing the telling we question his right to guide our lives. Forget that he might know better than us what is actually good for us! I know I’ve spent the majority of my life operating from that perspective. It really is a wonder and a work of God’s grace that I would be obedient to anyone ~~ even him! I’m so thankful that every time I begin to balk, he reminds me of where I was before he came along. It’s like he’s saying, “Okay, you can have it your way if you want, but this was the result last time. Are you sure you want to go there again?” Sometimes I need that reminder.
Obedience is also interesting because often I’m not the only one who pays the price for my obedience. My husband will be without his wife for two weeks because of my obedience. My daughter will not have a parent at her graduation from paramedic school because of my obedience. I’m grateful to both of them, but it is costly at times to obey the Lord. All I can say there, though, is that he is worthy of anything he might ask of me. He gave his all for me. How could I give any less? That would be the height of ingratitude, wouldn’t it?
Obedience is interesting too because sometimes I don’t see what God is doing in my life until AFTER I obey. In other words, it’s a faith thing, and obedience is really the proving ground of faith – so much so that in the scriptures belief and obedience are nearly identical. This fascinates me for lots of reasons. Like where exactly is the dividing line between belief and unbelief. There seems to be lots of scriptural indication that the dividing line is obedience. I can say that I believe God until I’m blue in the face, but until that belief comes out of my life in obedience, I’m really just fooling myself.
But be ye doers of the word,
and not hearers only,
deceiving your own selves.For if any be a hearer of the word,
and not a doer,
he is like unto a man
beholding his natural face in a glass:For he beholdeth himself,
and goeth his way,
and straightway forgetteth
what manner of man he was.But whoso looketh
into the perfect law of liberty,
and continueth therein,
he being not a forgetful hearer,
but a doer of the work,
this man shall be blessed in his deed.If any man among you seem to be religious,
and bridleth not his tongue,
but deceiveth his own heart,
this man’s religion is vain.Pure religion and undefiled
before God and the Father is this,
To visit the fatherless
and widows in their affliction,
and to keep himself unspotted from the world.
Today, the ladies’ class discussed one of the most fascinating single verses of scripture we’ve arrived at to date.
Now is my soul troubled; and what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour: but for this cause came I unto this hour. Father, glorify thy name. Then came there a voice from heaven, saying, I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again. The people therefore, that stood by, and heard it, said that it thundered: others said, An angel spake to him. Jesus answered and said, This voice came not because of me, but for your sakes. John 12:27-30
I still remember the instant in December 1997 when I went from not believing there even was a God outside of anyone’s immagination to being so sure he was actually in my car with me and had just changed my radio station that my whole life took an INSTANT 180 degree turn that hasn’t changed direction since. My response to this God that day was, “Alright, you’re there. Now what?” (Real reverent, I know. LOL)
It has occurred to me more than once over the years that the biggest miracle that day was not my radio station changing, but rather that my heart was changed. Had I arrived at that day with the same heart that led me to disbelieve in God in the first place, I would have done just what the Jews in John 12 did – explained it away – looked for a natural explanation like the weather – dismissed it as too much pizza the night before or a good imagination. I doubt if I would have called the angels out, since they were just as much a figment of the imagination as God was.
This fascinates me. So many times I have heard people (even said it myself):
1) Why doesn’t God just speak from heaven? Then I’ll believe, or
2) People back then were really gullible and didn’t know all that we do today about science and things.
The problem with both of those is, they weren’t any more gullible than people today. They resorted to exactly the same explanations we do, and I/they/you most likely wouldn’t believe it if God spoke from heaven anyway. Jesus put it fairly strongly when he suggested that if someone wouldn’t believe the scriptures that had already been given, they wouldn’t believe if someone was even raised from the dead. Still just as true 2000 years later as it was the day he spoke those words.
I remember Khoa, an exchange student who stayed with one of the families at my church for the year. The country he was from is fairly atheistic, and so for that year he came to church with his American family kind of like an observer/scientist. Then one day in the spring, there was a day when something happened at church that was totally arranged and orchestrated by God. He was in the room, I was in the room. Everyone who had any concept of God knew that God had showed up that day and that his presence had filled the room in a way that even we knew was special. No one was unaffected — except Khoa. Another lady asked him if he had noticed anything different, and he just looked back with a blank stare. She said to him, “You just saw God.” Well, I beg to differ, but I don’t think he did. I think he saw someone talking to the air and a bunch of other people standing around with their eyes closed. Thankfully, God soon opened the door for some serious discussions, and he did go home believing in this God that people had been telling him about all year.
This afternoon listening to the radio, Ravi Zacharias told about a non-theistic Buddhist mathematics professor who in courtroom testimony gave the odds of evolution actually happening totally based on natural processes as in the 10:40,000 exponent neighborhood. In other words, though he didn’t attribute anything to any kind of invisible God, he certainly wasn’t willing to chalk up to chance and natural selection something that is clearly totally outside the realm of reasonable probability – our universe. Fascinating that when asked how he explained the existence of life on earth he said that this world must have been seeded by another extraterrestrial civilzation.
Who has the greater faith?
Ravi made an excellent point in conclusion. It’s not the believer in God who is demonstrating a will to believe against all evidence. The resurrectiton of Jesus from the dead is one of those things that happened in history and can be looked at historically and rationally. Someone who believes that he was raised from the dead, especially someone who once did not believe, is not doing so AGAINST rational evidence but in concert with it. On the other hand, sometimes it is the unbeliever who is demonstrating a will to disbelieve despite all evidence to the contrary. This is really crystal clear in the verse above. The Jews who attributed the voice of God to natural processes – the thunder – had just seen Jesus restore sight to a blind man (John 9), and raise another man from the dead who had been in the ground four days (John 11), and had just been welcomed into Jerusalem as the King and Messiah of Israel – the one who had been prophesied to come for hundreds of years – and when he spoke of his coming death on the cross, God the Father spoke audibly from heaven to demonstrate his approval, and they said it sounded like the thunder. They didn’t deny that these things had happened. They denied that they — and Jesus — were from God.
Fascinating.
