Important People We Never Heard Of -- #1

 

There was a farmer in North Carolina, in the 1930's, who greatly influenced history.

He was a Christian and excited about a revival going on near him. The preacher, Mordecai Ham, was well-known and great crowds were attending and many were receiving Christ as their Savior.

The farmer decided to invite his neighbors to attend the meetings with him and he loaded them into his pickup!

A sixteen-year old boy joined the group. Every night he went to the revival and the farmer kept praying for his salvation.

Finally, the last night, the lad went forward and received Christ as his Savior.

That young man was Billy Graham!

Just think how the world has changed, for millions of people, by that farmer's obedience to proclaim God's message. 

Today's challenge: we might not have a pickup, but we have a multitude of other ways to get out the joyous message of freedom in Christ. God loves us and invites us to co-partner with him to change people and so change the world. We don't have  to be famous, or rich, or powerful. God can use us just as we are! With or without a pickup! 

How can He use you today?

My Worst Day - Jerry Bridges

Try to discern what is pleasing to the Lord (Ephesians 5:10).


Does He care?

The good news of the gospel is that God's grace is available on our worst days.

That's true because Christ fully satisfied the claims of God's justice and fully paid the penalty of the broken law when He died on the cross in our place. Because of that, Paul could write, "He forgave us all our sins" (Colossians 2:13).

Does this mean God no longer cares whether we obey or disobey? Not at all. The Scripture speaks of our grieving the Holy Spirit through our sins (Ephesians 4:30).  And Paul prayed that we "may please God in every way" (Colossians 1:10).

Clearly, He cares about conduct and will discipline us when we refuse to repent of conscious sin. But God is no longer our Judge. Through Christ He is now our heavenly Father who disciplines us only out of love and only for our good.

If God's blessings were dependent on our performance, they would be meager indeed. Even our best works are shot through with sin--with varying degrees of impure motives and lots of imperfect performance.

We're always, to some degree, looking out for ourselves, guarding our flanks, protecting our egos. It's because we don't realize the utter depravity of the principle of sin remaining in us and staining everything we do that we entertain any notion of earning God's blessings through our obedience.

And because we don't fully grasp that Jesus paid the penalty for all our sins, we despair of God's blessing when we've failed to live up to even our own desires to please God.

Your worst days are never so bad that you're beyond the reach of God's grace. And your best days are never so good that you're beyond the need of God's grace.

Reshaping the Pot

                                           

                                                      Reshaping the Pot

Jeremiah 18:1-6  "...The pot he was shaping from the clay was marred in his hand; so the potter formed it into another pot, shaping it as seemed best to him."

God sent Jeremiah to visit a potter's house and he sees the potter shaping the "marred" clay with his hand, carefully handling the material and forming it into another pot.

The prophet reminds us that God is the skillful Potter and we are the clay.

He is sovereign and can use what He creates to both destroy evil and create beauty in us. God can shape us even when we are  broken. He, the master Potter, can and is willing to create  new and precious pottery from our shattered pieces. He doesn't look at our broken lives and mistakes them as waste to be thrown away.

Instead, He picks up our pieces and reshapes them as He sees fit.

Even in our brokenness we have immense value to our Master Potter.

In His hands, the broken pieces of our lives can be reshaped into beautiful vessels to be used by Him.

Something beautiful, something good

All my confusion He understood

All I had to offer Him was brokenness and strife

But He made something beautiful of my life!

Clarify Thy Son

A clarifying truth...

Look at Wycliffe's English translation of the Bible (directly from the Latin Vulgate and finished in 1382) and see how he expressed the word we use today -- glorify -- as clarify in his version of John 17.


I love reading it this way:


These things Jesus spake, and when he had cast up his eyes into heaven, he said, 'Father, the hour cometh, clarify thy Son, that thy Son clarify thee....


I have clarified thee on earth, I have ended the work that thou hast given to me to do...


and now, Father, clarify thou me...with the clearness that I had at thee, before the world was made...


Father, they which thou hast given to me, I will that where I am, that they be with thee, that they see my clearness..


And I have given to them the clearness, that thou hast given to me....


What a remarkable way to look at it -- when we truly glorify God we make Him clearly visible to those around us -- we should be making Him clear -- clearly seen and free of impurities -- I remember my mother teaching me how to clarify butter --

Prayer for today - that I will clarify the Person of Jesus Christ and the presence of our Father and the Holy Spirit in my walk and in my talk...
everywhere I go - that He will be clearly seen in me!

May the mind of Christ my Savior

Live in me from day to day

By His love and power controlling

All I do and say.

May the peace of God my Father

Rule my life in every thing

That I may be calm to comfort

Sick and sorrowing....

Or, another song we love..."Let Others See Jesus in You"!



I looked up "clarify" in the dictionary -- from Middle English and Latin -- to make illustrious, clear, bright, famous...1.  make or become clear and free from impurities  2. to make or become easier to understand....



Clarify is a great, spiritually functional word!

A Chosen People (Con't)

(con't. from yesterday, April 9)

Part 3

Read Zechariah, chapter 3 

  Satan is always standing by us, accusing us. His words are relentless. "You keep messing up. You won't be faithful! You won't obey Him! Remember yesterday? You are not worthy to be His child! You are a hypocrite  and everybody knows it. Just give it up!"

  The way we can silence and rebuke Satan is to face him and proclaim the gospel truth: "Yes, I sometimes fail, but He has forgiven me and will always forgive me and will always love me!" And immediately thank God for His grace and forgiveness! Even as Satan is speaking to you, begin to thank and praise God for His eternal faithfulness! Turn every accusation of Satan into a praise for our Savior!

  Yes! That's how we rebuke Satan -- we turn his curses of us into praises for our Savior Jesus! Yes, look  at Satan, but gaze at Jesus!

   Yes, glance at Satan, but gaze at Jesus!

   Look at verses 3 and 4.  The guilt of the high priest is demonstrated by the filthy clothes he wears. God, in His grace, has them removed and re-clothes him in righteous garments. Just like Jesus did at the cross. We gave Him all our filthy garbage and clothing and He exchanges it for His garments of righteousness: a vivid picture of forgiveness.

                                       ************************************

"I delight greatly in the LORD; my soul rejoices in my God. For He has clothed me with garments of salvation and arrayed me in a robe of His righteousness, as a bridegroom adorns his head like a priest, and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels" (Isaiah 61:10).

  Jesus wore our sins when He was on the cross so that we could wear His righteousness forever!

  What's more, He restores Joshua to his role as high priest, even placing the priestly turban with the words "Holy to the Lord", described in Exodus 28.

  What has Joshua done to deserve this or make it happen?

  Absolutely nothing!

  It is all an act of God's grace.

  Because of Jesus we didn't get what we deserved -- punishment for our sins. But also because of Jesus we got what we didn't deserve -- His mercy and forgiveness!

  Review chapter 3 and see what Joshua received. He was...

     Chosen!

     Rescued!

     Secured!

     Forgiven!

     Declared righteous and holy!

   All from God's amazing grace...

    And all a preview of what Jesus would do when He came! Zechariah's vision was truly a prototype, a preview of coming attractions -- of glorious times to come!

   And God allowed Zechariah to have a review of it!

   He was so blessed.  And we are even more blessed -- Because WE have been

     CHOSEN!

     RESCUED!

     SECURED!

     FORGIVEN!

     DECLARED RIGHTEOUS AND HOLY!

   And so the greatest evil in all of world history became the greatest gift in all of world history!!

                              "When He shall come with trumpet sound, 

                    O may I then in Him be found. 

                    Dressed in His righteousness alone, 

                    Faultless to stand before the throne."

                                --- From "The Solid Rock"