August 15, 2012

"Praise the Lord, O my soul; all my inmost being, praise his holy name.  Praise the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits—who forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit and crowns you with love and compassion, who satisfies your desires with good things so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s." Psalm 103:1-5

A country preacher sold a mule to a friend, and told him the mule was trained to go when the rider said "Praise the Lord," and to stop when the rider said, "Amen." The buyer mounted the beast and commanded, "Praise the Lord," and the mule shot off like a rocket. The startled rider panicked. "Whoa!" he screamed. The mule was headed straight for a cliff, "Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!" At the last second he remembered the minister’s instructions. "Amen!" he shouted, and the mule screeched to a halt right at the edge of the cliff. As the new owner peered over the precipice, he wiped his brow and sighed, "Praise the Lord."

That poor guy! He is one of the very rare cases of someone who got hurt because he praised the Lord. Most of us blow it by not praising God enough.

In this 103rd Psalm David makes it clear why he praises God! He also offers a clue to why we often don't praise Him. The end of verse 2 says, "forget not all his benefits".

I can only speak for myself but I find that when I forget to praise it is because I forgot His goodness to me. What say you?

How easy it is to get caught up in the immediate and lose sight of the eternal! I am prone to being distracted by the urgent and forgetting the eternal. I get busy making a living and forget to make a life. Those are the moments I tend to "forget all His benefits" and it is during those times I forget to praise.

So, how do I keep from forgetting God's benefits? By remembering to remember! If I remember that I am prone to forget, then I must choose to consciously and intentionally focus daily on how good He is to me!

 

 

That's right!

In Steven Covey's great book "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" he gives good insights about how to make productive use of your days. Or, you might say, how to remember what you don't want to forget each day.

According to Covey, the key is to distiguish the important from the urgent. Important things are those that are related to your purposes and priorities. Praising God is important! Starting your day out with Him in His Word is important. Living in fellowship with Him during the day is important. Eternal things are important.

To make sure you get the important things done you must schedule them! Remember to put them on your daily schedule. Then make sure you keep that schedule!

Urgent things are situations that arise to challenge your schedule. These unplanned interruptions often require immediate attention and can distract you from your schedule. When the urgent conflicts with the important you do the important first, then the handle the urgent. On the occasions when the urgent requires immediate attention, deal with it and then come back to the important. It is amazing how a focus on the important reduces the number of urgent situations and delivers you from the "tyranny of the urgent".

David was a King and a warrior and I am sure he had very busy and demanding days. No don't he faced urgent situations often throughout those days. And yet praising God was most important to Him and he remembered to make time every day! I doubt if you are any busier than he was.

"Don't forget all His benefits"! Give praise its proper priority and remember to remember!

August 14, 2012

The word for today is "preparation". Are you preparing? Are you prepared?

Reading this morning in II Chronicles and in John 10 the importance of preparation became obvious. Preparation for what? Preparation for the presence of God.

Solomon is fulfilling his destiny and the dream of his father, David, by building the Temple of the Lord. The first five chapters of this book go into great detail - painstaking detail of all the people, the plans, the contributions, the materials, and the procedures that went into preparing for the building of God's Temple. Why all the attention to detail? Because they were preparing for the presence of God!

When the building was done and the details completed, the significant moment arrived when the Ark of the Covenant was carried into the beautiful new Temple. With great joy and ceremony it was placed in it's specially prepared place. Here is the dramatic moment:

"The priests then brought the ark of the LORD's covenant to its place in the inner sanctuary of the temple, the Most Holy Place, and put it beneath the wings of the cherubim. The cherubim spread their wings over the place of the ark and covered the ark and its carrying poles. These poles were so long that their ends, extending from the ark, could be seen from in front of the inner sanctuary, but not from outside the Holy Place; and they are still there today. There was nothing in the ark except the two tablets that Moses had placed in it at Horeb, where the LORD made a covenant with the Israelites after they came out of Egypt. The priests then withdrew from the Holy Place. All the priests who were there had consecrated themselves, regardless of their divisions. All the Levites who were musicians—Asaph, Heman, Jeduthun and their sons and relatives—stood on the east side of the altar, dressed in fine linen and playing cymbals, harps and lyres. They were accompanied by 120 priests sounding trumpets. The trumpeters and singers joined in unison, as with one voice, to give praise and thanks to the LORD. Accompanied by trumpets, cymbals and other instruments, they raised their voices in praise to the LORD and sang: "He is good; his love endures forever." Then the temple of the LORD was filled with a cloud, and the priests could not perform their service because of the cloud, for the glory of the LORD filled the temple of God. II Chronicles 5:7-14

Wow! What a moment! How would you have liked to been there for that! All the hard work and planning paid off! It was well worth it!

In the second half of John 10, Jesus is being hassled by the religious elite questioning His miracles and his claims of being the Son of God. Despite ample evidence to the claims He was making, they refused to believe and continually challenged Him. Once they picked up stones to stone Him but He avoided them and later they tried to seize Him but He slipped away and got out of town.

The change of scenary made a significant difference. Here's the story:

"Then Jesus went back across the Jordan to the place where John had been baptizing in the early days. Here he stayed and many people came to him. They said, "Though John never performed a miraculous sign, all that John said about this man was true." And in that place many believed in Jesus." John 10:40-42

In one place Jesus had nothing but resistance, but in this place He had nothing but results. What was that about?

Simple, it's that "P" word again - "preparation" ! John the Baptist had preached and taught and ministered in that area and prepared the way for Jesus.

It seems obvious to me that God honors prepartion.

We crave the presence of God but we don't like the hard work involved in the preparation. We show up at worship or LIFE group and expect the leaders to produce the presence of God. While it is their responsibility to adequately prepare, it is incumbant on each of us to show up prepared.

Preparation is hard and tedious - but the payoff is well worth it! What are you doing to prepare for God's presence?

August 13, 2012

"Then some Pharisees and teachers of the law came to Jesus from Jerusalem and asked, "Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? They don't wash their hands before they eat!" Jesus replied, "And why do you break the command of God for the sake of your tradition? For God said, 'Honor your father and mother' and 'Anyone who curses his father or mother must be put to death.'But you say that if a man says to his father or mother, 'Whatever help you might otherwise have received from me is a gift devoted to God,' he is not to 'honor his father' with it. Thus you nullify the word of God for the sake of your tradition. You hypocrites! Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you:" 'These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are but rules taught by men.'" Matthew 15:1-9

I have to confess to a passionate love affair that has been happening in my life for a long time. I am madly in love with the local church. I have devoted my life to it. If I had a second life I would also devote that life. Healthy local churches are the hope of the world. If God is ever going to transform our world, it will happen through local churches. That is why I am still leading the charge in a local congregation after all these years.

However, true love never runs smoothly. The majority of heartbreaks I have experienced in my life have happened in the local church. I have seen it at its worst and grieved.

But, I have also seen it at its best and there is nothing like it! I have seen lives transformed through salvation, through being filled with the Spirit, and through miraculous healings and deliverance. When a church is unified and focused and Spirit-led, the gates of Hell cannot prevail against it.

What makes the difference?

Primarily, it is this issue of hypocrisy. That is why Jesus was so hard on the religious leaders of His day. He had a vision of what the Church would become and their attitudes and actions were destructive to that.

Jesus summarized the problem of hypocrisy this way, "These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me."

That is the climate which breeds hypocrisy. Where rules and rituals are allowed to trump relationships, there is an unhealthy atmosphere of judgmentalism and a noticable lack of love. The church degenerates into an organization rather than a living, breathing organism. Playing the part without having the heart will kill you and harm the church where you belong. Saying the right sounding things without sincerely believing them confuses people and hinders true fellowship.

If healthy local churches are the hope of the world, as I believe. And if hypocrisy is an illness that infects a church and threatens its health. Then it is no wonder Jesus was so aggressive in attacking it. We should be, too.

Your local church is made up of people like you. If you want to improve the spiritual climate of your church stop giving lip service to your faith and give it life service. Surrender your heart to God and allow His Spirit to fill it. Seek Him passionately and serve Him humbly. When you do, suddenly relationships will be a priority and rules will become servants of love.

Hypocrisy is an issue of the heart. If you want to defeat hypocrisy, let God do spiritual open heart surgery on you.

August 12, 2012

"Who is he, this King of glory? The Lord who rules over all. He is the King of glory." Psalm 24:10

I am not a great mathematician but there is something comforting about math. It is absolute and predicatable. 2 + 2 is always 4, always was and always will be. Once you learn your math tables you will have them for life and they will never let you down.

That is comforting news for those who operate on a budget and balance a bank account.

You might say the rules of math are sovereign over all of your calcuations. All you have to do is work the numbers and the numbers will work for you.

This week during VBS we taught our kids that they can always trust God. No matter how they feel they can trust God. No matter what others say, they can always trust God. No matter where they are they can trust God. No matter who they are they can trust God. No matter what happens they can trust God.

It was a basic introduction to the sovereignty of God. Sovereignty means God is in charge and you can always trust Him.

The sovereignty of God is not just an obscure doctrinal concept for theologians to debate. It is essential for you to understand Who God is and what it takes to know Him and please Him.

You wrestle with the issue of God's sovereignty multiple times each day. Every time you are tempted you are faced with a decision about God's sovereignty. You must decide if you are going to obey Him and resist the temptation or rebel against His sovereignty and act according to your will. In essence, you have to decide each time if you are going to trust Him in this situation.

If you are a follower of Christ, you should not willfully choose to disobey Him. You have made a commitment to submit to His sovereignty in all of your decisions.

The Psalmist declares that you are to have "clean hands" and a "pure heart".

Clean hands have to do with your conduct and behavior. The only way you can have clean hands is to have been forgiven by God for the sins you committed through wrong behavior. In other words, you have trusted God for salvation through His Son. When you confess your sins and repent of them you can receive the forgiveness of God and His moral cleansing through the blood of Christ.

 

A pure heart refers to your motives. What motivates you to do the things you do? A followers of Christ should be motivated by love for God and for others. When you love someone you will be kind and generous and helpful toward them. You would never choose to hurt them. That "perfect love" is given to you by the Holy Spirit when you surrender your selfish will to His sovereign will. Your sins are forgiven and your sinful nature is under the control of God's Spirit.

The evidence that you have clean hands and a pure heart is that you no longer struggle against the sovereign will of God because you are now surrendered to it. In a very real sense you have "opened up the gates (your will) and let the King of Glory come in".

Only when you have surrendered fully to the sovereign will of God and ceased struggling against it does trusting God really begin to add up!

Have you surrendered to His sovereignty?

August 11, 2012

^"The earth belongs to the Lord. And so does everything in it. The world belongs to him. And so do all those who live in it. He set it firmly on the oceans. He made it secure on the waters. Who can go up to the temple on the hill of the Lord? Who can stand in his holy place? Anyone who has clean hands and a pure heart. He does not worship the statue of a god. He doesn't use the name of that god when he makes a promise. People like that will receive the Lord's blessing. When God their Savior hands down his sentence, it will be in their favor."  Psalm 24:1-5

 

In 40 years of pastoring I have never had a parishioner plead with me, "Pastor, would you please preach about sovereignty?"

I probably won't in the next 40 years either. But even though this in not a burning issue on the frontal lobes of the average person, it IS a crucial concept for those who want to follow Christ. God's sovereignty is fundamental in understanding who He is and how He operates. It is a foundation stone upon which solid faith is built.

There has never been a time when this doctrine has not been important, but in these chaotic and unpredictable times IT IS REALLY good to be reminded your God is LARGE AND IN CHARGE! That is why I am devoting an entire week to it and a sermon about it Sunday.

Trust me, you need to know this!

God Is Sovereign because:

1)       He Is Creator, Vv. 1-2 - ^"The earth belongs to the Lord. And so does everything in it. The world belongs to him. And so do all those who live in it. He set it firmly on the oceans. He made it secure on the waters."

He is sovereign over nature! When you create something you get to be in charge of it! God created your world and your universe and He is the only One smart enough and powerful enough to rule over it. The precision He built into the universe was on full display this week when the space probe landed on Mars right on target.

He is sovereign over history. History, after all, is HIS story, the story of good and evil played out in time. History began with God and it will end with Him and it will be a happy ending for those who are on His side of history!

He is sovereign over morality. Morality is an essential element of His sovereignty. In time and space occupied by fallible people, it is absolutely necessary to know what is absolutely right and always wrong. There can be no peace, no social order without clear rules to guide the behavior of society. Not only did God establish those rules - He is the Ruler and you live by His rules or you answer to Him.

He is sovereign over His grace. Grace is God's mercy and goodness extended to people who don't deserve it and can't earn it but who desperately need it. It would not exist if He hadn't thought of it and offered it AND purchased it by the blood of His Son!

2) He Is Christ, V. 5 -   "People like that will receive the Lord's blessing. When God their Savior hands down his sentence, it will be in their favor"

He Is Savior. When the perfection of paradise was destroyed by the sin of Adam, God announced a plan to redeem His creation. It would cost Him His Son but the Second Adam would provide a second chance for a lost race of beloved people.

He is Sanctifier. This is the completion of God restoring His perfect creation. By the atonement of Christ's shed blood on the cross not only can sins be forgiven but the sinful nature can be cleansed! The heart and mind of God can be restored to you by appropriating His grace fully. 

He is Sustainer. As Paul told the Greeks on Mars Hill, "It is in Him we live and move and have our being." God did not just create the universe and check out on it, He is intimately involved in sustaining it every moment. Because God is an infinite, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent God, nothing happens without His awareness and His approval.

Sovereignty may not occupy your thoughts but it affects every moment of every day! It is the result of God's presence in your life. God is able to do what you wish you could do for your own children - be always present and always protecting.

Will you take a moment and thank God for His sovereignty in your life? Will you surrender to His sovereignty?

August 10, 2012

"Open wide, you gates. Open up, you age-old doors. Then the King of glory will come in. Who is the King of glory? The Lord, who is strong and mighty. The Lord, who is mighty in battle. Open wide, you gates. Open wide, you age-old doors. Then the King of glory will come in. Who is he, this King of glory? The Lord who rules over all. He is the King of glory. Selah" Psalm 24:8-10

If you have ever had a two-year old you have probably heard a question that went something like this, "Daddy, who's the boss of me?"

You answered, "Mommy and I are the boss of you."

"Daddy, who's the boss of you?"

Early in life we are concerned about this issue of sovereignty. We want to know who is in charge and who isn't. We want to know who we have to obey and who we can boss.

Even an alien doesn't want to mess with an underling, they demand that they be "taken to the leader"!

The significance of these verses is recalling the ceremony when the Ark of the Covenant was brought triumphantly back into Jerusalem. The Ark was the symbol of God's Sovereignty over His Nation. So, when the priests brought the Ark to the city gate they called out, "Open wide, you gates. Open up, you age-old doors! Then the King of glory will come in." And those inside would shout back, "Who is this Lord of Glory?" And so it went back and forth until the gates were opened dramatically and triumphantly.

The fact is, someone WILL be sovereign in your life. Everyone answers to someone. Everyone is accountable to someone. Whoever is ultimately sovereign will determine your eternity.  As for the Psalmist, he declared that God would be sovereign in his life. He recognized Him as the "Lord of glory" and he welcomed the King into his life. He gladly opened his will (gates, doors) to the "King of glory".

The question is, "Who will be the King of Glory" in your life? Who will you surrender your sovereignty to?

August 9, 2012

"The earth belongs to the Lord. And so does everything in it. The world belongs to him. And so do all those who live in it. He set it firmly on the oceans. He made it secure on the waters." Psalm 24:1-2

In the early hours of Monday morning, NASA pulled off one of its greatest accomplishments of its considerable impressive history when it landed the Curiosity rover safely on the surface of Mars.

After traveling 154 million miles in 8.5 months, the Curiosity then had to perform 14 complex operations to go from 13,200 miles per hour to zero in about seven minutes while entering the atmosphere of Mars. And because it takes 14 minutes for a radio signal to reach earth, these operations could not be controlled remotely from the earth but had to be computer-generated. It took 500,000 lines of computer code to make that happen and there was zero tolerance for error.

As you know, it all happened according to plan! Yeah, NASA! I am proud!

I am not as proud of the motivation behind this achievement. Basically, like most of science these days, this mission is designed in the hope that Divine Creation will be further under-minded. They are looking for evidence of life that will support their theories of spontaneous/random creation.

The fact is, it does exactly opposite! The only reason NASA can pull off such an impressive and intricate operation is because of the absolute predictability that is built into the universe. All the mathematical computations and engineering calculations would be impossible without an orderly and precise universe created by an infinite God.

What took humans thousands of years to accomplish happened because of what God did in mere seconds! At His command Mars and all the other planets, suns, stars and galaxies appeared in an instant.

But if there IS a God Who created the universe and Who keeps it running with such precision that mathematicians and scientists can make the accurated calculations required to put Curiosity on Mars on the predicted schedule and in the designated target. Then mankind would have to take that God seriously and become morally accountable to Him. There is something within the heart of man that doesn't want to be accountable to God. It is called the sinful nature.

How far will men go to avoid being spiritually and morally accountable to God? At least 154 million miles I guess.

Jesus came all the way from Heaven and gave up His sovereignty for you!

What about you? Have you surrendered to His sovereignty?

Will you?