Loving Jesus

Today’s reading is about surrendering all to Jesus. Yesterday’s sermon compared the supremacy of Jesus with trying to keep the Law of God. I say trying because I cannot do it. My efforts and ideas all fall short.

My plans also miss the mark. The past two weeks have been filled with interruptions to my agenda. Today I’m thinking that the interruptions are part of what God wants for me. Many of them were difficult: requests for prayer from a family in trouble, a relative in the hospital and his care-giver burned out, the death of an infant, threats to the well-being of a family member, people asking us to referee their feud with other people, my husband’s back injury still not healed, unexpected tasks added to my to-do list, and the pressure of not getting enough sleep.

All these added to the usual challenges to trust God with everything — yet as I pray and let Him interrupt my plans, there are lovely surprises: calls from loved ones, conversations with Christians young and older that were like tonic to my soul, words of affirmation, understanding and love, and enough energy to get the important chores done. Jesus is a faithful and wise ‘business manager’ for want of a better term, or perhaps ‘personal assistant’ — but more. He is Lord of life. I need to rejoice when He interrupts my schedule for He not only knows more and is wiser than I am, He wants to use me to somehow do what He wants done.

Yesterday a person that has seemed unteachable and stubborn asked me for help in three areas of life. A teen told all in hearing range that I am his favorite senior person. A couple about to move into a new home asked us come and pray for their life in that house before they enter it. In a long chat, a child asked me a dozen questions about life. One of our busy adult children called several times just to talk. We had a marvelous visit with a woman who is nearly 100, no dementia and delighted we came. Normally these would not seem huge, but with the other events, they were like a feast to a starving and very tired person.

Surrendering to Jesus means letting Him control life. I tried to do other things, but nothing happened that was not interrupted by His better plan. Now I see that He was using all this to affirm  that I can trust Him with the control of life’s events.

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”— yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin. (James 4:13–17)

I’ve not boasted about what I will do, but the Word of God makes it clear that even resenting those interruptions would not be right. When the Lord wants something from me, I should gladly say YES.

Today’s reading says: “Be generous in your self-surrender! Meet His measureless devotion to you with a measureless devotion to Him. Be glad and eager to throw yourself unreservedly into His loving arms and to hand over the control of your life to Him. Whatever there is of you, let Him have it all. Give up forever everything that is separate from Him. Consent to resign, from this time forward, all liberty of choice, and glory in the blessed nearness of union…”

PRAY: And Jesus, I say amen. Thank You for the ability to not only see that You are in the interruptions, but that You have more in mind than just teaching me to humbly surrender. You are blessing others too and gladly going along with Your will is my opportunity to love them and love You with all my heart, soul, mind and strength. Thank You.

What if lightning strikes or hail takes out my tomatoes?

Joshua 20–21; Acts 1; Jeremiah 10; Matthew 24

Today’s newspaper has photos of a tornado in our area that killed several people several years ago. Also printed were reminders of a bigger one that hit our city in 1987. While remembering lives lost is important, photos like this of horrible weather may not encourage people with astraphobia (fear of thunder and lightning) or lilapsophobia (fear of tornadoes). I know several who hide in the basement during storms and right now is the season for them. Hot days and humid air builds thunder clouds and furrowed brows!

A few years ago, I had a lovely vegetable garden. Hail was falling in nearby areas and I worried that my garden would be ruined. Finally I talked to the Lord and gave Him the garden. If He wanted to hail on it, it was up to Him. While He could have, He didn’t. The best part is that I stopped worrying; it was no longer my garden. I had to do the same yesterday with three little tomato plants. Everything fits under the eaves except them. Now that they are God’s, I’m not worrying. They were His all along!

This morning’s chapter in Jeremiah is right on target. It starts with this:

Thus says the Lord: “Learn not the way of the nations, nor be dismayed at the signs of the heavens because the nations are dismayed at them . . . .” (Jeremiah 10:2)

Right now, it seems God is throwing many signals to this messy world. Even ungodly people are saying the pandemic is His ‘reset button’ and certainly the pandemic and this weather makes us think beyond the ‘good life’ to more important topics, like what and who are we trusting?

Jeremiah goes on to speak of the uselessness of trusting idols that are like “scarecrows in a cucumber field” and the foolishness of putting our trust in things that are inert and without power. He says:

But the Lord is the true God; he is the living God and the everlasting King. At his wrath the earth quakes, and the nations cannot endure his indignation. Thus shall you say to them: “The gods who did not make the heavens and the earth shall perish from the earth and from under the heavens.” It is he who made the earth by his power, who established the world by his wisdom, and by his understanding stretched out the heavens. When he utters his voice, there is a tumult of waters in the heavens, and he makes the mist rise from the ends of the earth. He makes lightning for the rain, and he brings forth the wind from his storehouses. (Jeremiah 10:10–13)

This would be frightening if I didn’t know the goodness of God. He proves it repeatedly in my life, but His greatest proof is in Jesus Christ:

What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? (Romans 8:31–32)

Storms come and go. A storm might be the way God takes me home to be with Him forever, or a virus, or a truck could hit me, or a stroke. Whatever He chooses it will mean stepping from this messy world into perfection and into the fullness of knowing Him as He knows me. Settling this fear of dying issue means not just giving my garden and my tomatoes to Him but my heart and my life.

APPLY: Share this good news with someone who needs to hear it!

 

This is too hard for me . . .

Deuteronomy 20; Psalm 107; Isaiah 47; Revelation 17

I spent most of yesterday reading a stupid novel and doing very little. Not that it is wrong to read or rest but I felt the Holy Spirit nagging at me most of the day. Then the little prayer book reading for this morning placed me under greater pressure. A dream during the night was about saying goodbye to something important and the prayer in that book was about making Christ the ONLY thing important to me.

I’m thinking I cannot do this. I know myself. This is too challenging, definitely the best choice but I don’t have what it takes. It might be a bit of ‘I won’t do this’ also because I also have trouble with yielding total control. Then I read this:

“When you go out to war against your enemies, and see horses and chariots and an army larger than your own, you shall not be afraid of them, for the LORD your God is with you, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt. And when you draw near to the battle, the priest shall come forward and speak to the people and shall say to them, ‘Hear, O Israel, today you are drawing near for battle against your enemies: let not your heart faint. Do not fear or panic or be in dread of them, for the LORD your God is he who goes with you to fight for you against your enemies, to give you the victory.’” (Deuteronomy 20:1–4)

Jesus is my Savior and Defender. I cannot do anything without Him. He does not push me to a place of greater surrender without granting grace to do it. After all, He knows how; He surrendered to death for my sake!

A bit later this chapter describes how to approach those enemies. It says offer terms of peace to them and if peace returns, then let that ‘enemy’ serve me, but if not, besiege and destroy it. In my mind, God says if something is going cause a conflict, then put out of my life, but if it will serve me, then take and use it. In other words, whatever I value needs to be spiritually beneficial. If not, it is to be discarded. This puts all things under Christ, giving Him priority over everything.

God is not being a killjoy. He constantly guards my heart so that I do not worship His blessings rather than worship Him. Psalm 107:9 says, “He satisfies the longing soul, and the hungry soul he fills with good things.” (Psalm 107:9) He knows what I need and what is good for me. Yet I can be like the child who wants dessert before supper or to play Nintendo instead of doing my homework. A brat.

God knows the tendency of humanity to put ourselves and our own ideas in first place. When I think I should run my own life, He reminds me what happens to those who do. In Isaiah 47, He speaks to nations as if they are rebel women who have fallen into, “I am and there is no one besides me” and nothing bad will ever happen to them. But He says, “There is no one to save you.” I’m incredibly thankful that God saved me and keeps on saving me, mostly from myself.

Again in Revelation, the Bible personifies evil using a female figure. This one is immoral and drinks the blood of God’s people who have died because they believe in Jesus Christ. The description is almost X-rated and again makes me thankful that the Lord saved me. I don’t know what I would have been or done had He not, but all descriptions of what happens to those who reject Him are simply awful.

APPLY: I cannot feel sorry for myself because God asks me to let go of anything that serves no eternal purpose in my life. He is not asking me to give up flowerpots on the step, or making peanut butter cookies, or chatting with my neighbor about interior decorating. His desire is that nothing, whether good and proper or sinful and selfish, is given a place where I will ignore Him and focus on those things. The battle is not against real or spiritual enemies but against my own reluctance to yield control and say yes to Him. Confess this sinful selfishness and get on with growing in grace.