Empowerment Comes From God

“«[A Psalm] of David.» Blessed [be] the LORD my strength, which teacheth my hands to war, [and] my fingers to fight:” (Ps 144:1 AV)

The two words, ‘teacheth’ and ‘fight’ could be understood as mere instruction.  But that is not what the Hebrew words mean.  The first means to goad.  The second means engagement.  In other words, skills for battle are useless unless a battle is undertaken.  David shares with us that God not only gave him skills and strategy, but also motivation and strength.  This statement is both surprising and obvious.  When we think of David the warrior, we think of someone who was naturally acclimated toward battle.  He killed the lion and bear with his own hands.  He killed Goliath with a slingshot.  He killed tens of thousands of Philistines.  And the list goes on and on.  One would think that David’s ability and zeal for warfare was who he was.  One would think he would not need much motivation or added ability.  Yet, the statement is necessary because God made him that way, but also empowered him to be that way.  In other words, David may have had some of what he needed because God created him to be a warrior.  Yet, his warrior personality was not sufficient.  God had to empower him and motivate him to be what God created him to be.

Sometimes, the responsibilities of are calling are overwhelming to the point we lose all strength to face them.  We may have some knowledge, yet there still remains a few missing pieces.  Our training can solve some of the challenges, but not all.  Even if our knowledge could carry us through, the sheer volume of what we face becomes discouraging.  Our strength is sapped by the knowledge of what lies ahead.  That does not change a thing.  The mountain is not moving.  It is still there.  It must be climbed.  It must be conquered.  I remember a time when the Tennessee River, the Cumberland River, Mississippi River, and the Ohio River were all at flood stage.  We lived a mile south of the Tennessee.  As the waters rose, there were several counties that were under a flood watch.  The emergency management services asked churches if they would be willing to fill sandbags.  You would think there would be more people than work.  I went to a friend’s church to help out, and it was just me and my son.  The dump truck had dumped sand.  All we had to do was to fill and tie bags.  How are two people supposed to stop the floodwaters of four major rivers?  Especially when one of those two was approaching the later years of middle age.  Outside of the LORD, I don’t know how we did it.  Just the two of us filled all the bags and used up all the sand in our two-hour block of time, for which we signed up.  What seemed impossible was done by the strength of God’s power.

It doesn’t matter who are or what we are facing.  Our challenges are always more than we can manage.  We could be David looking at an enemy that outnumbers him, or Peter who is asked to walk on water.  We could be a Moses who is asked to lead a great nation without all the answers or sufficient strength to do so.  The Bible is filled with people who accepted what God asked them to do regardless of their ability to do it because they trusted in the LORD to both guide and enable.  David was a great man not merely because he did great things.  David was a great man because he believed in and relied upon a great God.  This verse is encouraging.  It should be.  When we are faced with something we do not think we can overcome, then we must remember that we cannot without God’s strength.  Then we must pray for it and rest upon it!

Why Does He Bother

“What [is] man, that thou shouldest magnify him? and that thou shouldest set thine heart upon him? And [that] thou shouldest visit him every morning, [and] try him every moment?” (Job 7:17-18 AV)

We often use these words as humble words of gratitude toward a God who bestows blessings.  However, the context of them is just the opposite.  Job had lost much.  We know very little of the details of his entire life.  What we do know of his life was manifested in what he lost.  He was a successful businessman who owned vast holdings.  He has three thousand employees.  He had ten children who lived nearby.  And he was in relatively good health.  He lost all of this because Satan charged Job with being shallow.  He assumed that if God allowed tragedy upon Job that Job would deny God.  His accusation was meant to condemn all of mankind.  If men obeyed and trusted God because of the wonderful benefits that result from it, then their relationship to their Creator is shallow at best.  If Satan were right, then God had no expectation of any depth of relationship with His precious creation – man.  Upon this context, we find the words of Job.  He wonders what it is about mankind that intrigues the Creator so much.  Why is it that God cares to visit mankind and lay upon him tragic events that lead to personal maturity?  What is it about mankind that causes the God of the universe to be so intimately involved with them?  What potential worth does mankind have that God wished to invest His hand upon them?

Some of us go through this.  Often, regularly.  We wonder what our Savior and God sees in us that He would even bother with us.  We take stock in what we are and conclude that what we are is polar opposite of what God wants us to be and scratch our heads wondering why the Creator ever bothered.  Knowing how much trouble we must be for a Creator who has far more important things to do; like operating the infinitely complex universe; to be concerned for us boggles the mind.  Why bother?  Why does He care?  To take that to the extreme, why does God care about the smallest of details?  What cosmic reason does He have to concern Himself with some minor flaw like fear and anxiety that inhabits the human heart?  Why bother?  The complex nature of His creation makes our existence almost infinitely negligible.  Like one grain on all the beaches of our world, if it were to disappear, not one person but God would notice.  That is how insignificant we are compared with all that God has created.  Why bother?

To answer the question is to see the motive.  Because He does care!  Why bother?  Because He cares!  A wondrous truth regarding God is that His attributes are infinite.  That means His capacity to care and be involved in the lives of every individual with equal concern is infinite.  He cannot run out of mental ability needed to know the details of every human soul.  He has infinite love.  Therefore, His capacity to sacrifice and provide is without limit.  He involves Himself with the individual life of every soul because He can and He wants to.  The fact that He does is the stamp of value He places on us.  He cares and He bothers because we are.  Nothing more, nothing less.  He bothers because He made us and we exist.  There is no other worth we bring to Him that motivates the Creator to love His creation.  He bothers because we are an extension of His creative nature.  His imagination and desire are why we exist.  We exist so that He can care.

God Knows and Will Know

“When my spirit was overwhelmed within me, then thou knewest my path. In the way wherein I walked have they privily laid a snare for me.” (Ps 142:3 AV)

I’m intrigued by the little word, ‘then’.  In a cursory reading, the word might imply that God did not know the path of the writer until the writer was overwhelmed.  For a God who knows all things actual and possible, this seems like a theological contradiction.  But there is more than one way to understand the word ‘knewest’ and there is more than one way to understand the omniscience of God.

There is a great debate is the now much the Son of God ‘knew’ and didn’t know.  When the gospels speak of Jesus becoming aware of something, there is an idea out there that Jesus restrained His omniscience in the same way He restrained His omnipresence.  There is a problem with that position.  His willing restraint of His omnipresence was required in time and space to fulfill the requirement of death for every soul.  He did not need to restrain His omniscience to do the same.  Yet, there is support for the above position.  Scriptures referring to the Christ child growing in wisdom are a good argument.  However, there is a better understanding of the omniscience of God.  That is, the difference between knowing something as a fact or future fact, and knowing it as an experience.  In other words, God knew from eternity past that I would be created and born.  But He didn’t know as an event in time my birth until it happened.  He knows all things factually.  He will know all things experientially.

This understanding is crucial.  If all that God knows are facts, then He is disconnected from my experiences.  If He only knows things as they happen, then He does not know the future nor can He plan for it.  Rather, He knows all things as facts that have happened, are happening, or will happen.  As they happen, He experiences them and is vested in the entire experience of the event.  When the psalmist tells us that God knows the path that I take, it is far more than information alone.  He knows the path that I take as an event in time and an experience to be witnessed.  So, when our writer tells us that God knew his path when he was overwhelmed, it is more than merely knowing he would be overwhelmed from eternity past.  It is much deeper than that.  When God came to know the overwhelming condition of the spirit of the writer, God experienced his child’s troubled heart in real time and empathized with it.  In short, God may know everything about us from a factual standpoint.  But He will also know everything about us from an experience standpoint.  What we feel, He will feel.  When we are troubled, He is troubled.  When we are overwhelmed, He knows our distress.  This is the God whom we love and hope in.  Praise be to God!

Sweet Sleep

“I will both lay me down in peace, and sleep: for thou, LORD, only makest me dwell in safety.” (Ps 4:8 AV)

I noticed that the statement of David above is both a statement of fact and a vow to himself.  The Holy Spirit also reminded me of another significant truth.  Represented by the word ‘only’, the truth of the matter is, God is the only stable and unchanging force in my life.  People come and go.  Health fails.  Circumstances change.  God always remains the same.  We are anxious and sleep evades us because our dependence relies on unstable things.  Our security rests on shifting sands.  We can continue to fight like a shadow boxer; trying to hit a knockout punch on a target that comes and goes.  Or, we can rest in God who never leaves nor forsakes.  If one wants a biblical example, just look no further than the human author of the words above.  For more than a decade, David ran from one place to another.  He was evading the envy of his father-in-law.  David tried to find stability among his own tribe and people.  That didn’t work out so well.  The only friend he could find was the king of the Philistines.  Yet his lords threw David under the bus.  It got so bad that just before he took the throne, the men who had served him turned their backs on him.  It didn’t stop there.  During his forty years on the throne, there were ups and downs.  It took seven years before the entire nation would accept him.  Those serving under him would often go rogue.  David’s world was a bit chaotic.  This is why he makes the promise above.  He promises himself, based on the truth that God is the only stable influence in his life, that he will lay down in peace of soul and sleep.

Life is changing and unpredictable.  It is like riding a rollercoaster for the first time while blindfolded.  Just when you get used to a new normal, things change.  Some of us enjoy the challenge.  Most of us do not.  Especially when we get older, we want our lives to be more stable and predictable.  We can wish for that all we want.  But it will never be that way.  God does not promise a predictable life of unchanging serenity.  We would never mature.  Without changing circumstances, we would remain the same.  Change forces us to grow.  It forces us to trust the LORD more than we have in the past.  Change forces us to adapt from the person that we are to the person God wants us to be.  David could not remain the person he was and successfully lead God’s people.  He has to accept change as from the hand of God, and because it was, life would change, too.

Sleep comes to those who have learned to lean on the only influence that does not change.  GOD!  God has been and always will be.  He loves us with an everlasting love.  He knows who and what we are.  He knows what we can face.  He knows what we need.  He knows what He must cause or allow.  The key to peace and sleep is how deeply we believe the second part of the verse.  David can say that he will lay down and sleep all he wants.  He can promise it as such to his soul and mind.  But unless he deeply believes that God and God alone makes him dwell in safety, sleep and peace will not come.  If we want those sleepless nights to cease, then we have to surrender to the sovereign hand of God.

Perfect Timing

“And the king’s servants said unto him, Behold, Haman standeth in the court. And the king said, Let him come in.” (Es 6:5 AV)

Timing is everything.  Context tells us just how close Haman came to dying that day and that in His sovereignty, Haman was extended an opportunity of grace to which he was completely unaware.  Prior to this event, two significant events occurred.  First, Haman moved his king against the Jews because Mordechai would not worship Haman.  Haman was given funds and an opportunity to exterminate the Jews.  The second event happened the night prior to this meeting.  Haman’s family convinced him to build gallows upon which Mordechai was to be hanged.  At the same time, God causes Ahasuerus to stay awake all night and have the chronical of the kings read before him by which he discovered Mordechai’s faithfulness in exposing a conspiracy against the king.  Now we pick is up at the above event.  Haman had come to the court to petition the king for Mordechai’s life, and the king was about to honor Mordechai for his heroism.  If Haman petitions the king before the king assigns honor to Mordechai, Haman could have lost his life.  The timing of this was God’s extension of grace to his enemy.  But His enemy never saw it.  Rather, the grace of God is despised, and the enemy of God doubles down in his hatred toward Him.

What I can’t seem to get past is the incredible timing of events and the benefit one man had but never realized.  At the exact time that Haman was conniving the death of his nemesis, the LORD struck Ahasuerus with insomnia.  Of all the things the king could have done, he chose to read the record of the kings.  Then, to have Haman in the court at the exact time that the king was looking for an administrator to honor Mordechai.  And to have Haman lose and the opportunity to petition the king before the king called him is not coincidental.  This was all by the hand of God.  God is never mentioned by name in the book of Esther.  Not once.  But the timing of all the events was so specific and perfect that God cannot be ignored.  Haman will eventually lose his life on the very gallows he built for Mordechai.  Ether, the queen, would see to that.  Before that happened, he has a chance to repent and change the course of his envy.  But he missed it.

Today’s devotion is necessarily about missed opportunities or unseen grace.  Rather, how impressive God’s timing truly is.  The planning and orchestration of God’s plan with men is just, if not more, impressive than the creation of it all.  In six days, God created the spiritual and material universe.  He created spiritual beings and material worlds.  He set it all in place, and by Him it all continues to function.  To me, what is more impressive is the perfect order of events.  In particular, the perfect order of events while using the free will choices of the very beings He created.  He does not force His will on anyone.  We are free to make right or wrong choices.  It is all in His control.  It all works out exactly as He wishes.  This is the wonder of who and what God is.  What does that mean for us?  It means we must learn to trust the plan and timing of God.  He has it all in perfect balance.  Hi way is not obscured to the point of fatal ignorance.  Yes, it takes faith to see it.  But it can and is seen.  We have to learn to trust it.  God’s ways and timing are perfect!  Glory!

HELP

“For I the LORD thy God will hold thy right hand, saying unto thee, Fear not; I will help thee.” (Isa 41:13 AV)

Sometimes we don’t know exactly what to pray for.  So, we pray for help.  This is a great answer to a very genuine need.  I was reminded of this verse upon last night’s prayer time.  Asking for help comes with an understanding, though.  At least it did for me.  We pray for things is all sorts of ways.  Sometimes we pray for an expected end. We want the LORD to do certain things or solve certain problems in certain ways.  At other times, we pray and seek the LORD’s wisdom in how or what to pray for.  There are times when every avenue of prayer is exhausted, but we know we still need to pray.  We extrapolate the consequences of answered prayer and realize that maybe we simply do not know how to pray or for what outcome we seek.  It is at those times when asking for help in whatever form God may offer it is the proper prayer to pray.  That was the case for me last night.

Help can be a fluid thing.  Help offered is contingent on the circumstances one faces.  Those circumstances change.  I cannot begin to tell you how much this verse means to me.  And it was very timely.  We are facing major changes of life.  A lot of unknowns.  Lisa has cancer and complications from her initial surgery.  We are at the point where benefits are a bit too far away, but the ability to provide our own is becoming a challenge.  This is extra concerning because of healthcare costs.  We are not alone.  Millions of people face the same thing.  Life does not get easier as one ages.  It gets far more complicated.  We are approaching the age when options become limited and needs tend to grow.  There are choices that must be made, and the horizon seems impossible.  The race you are running gets ever narrower and there seem to be far less off-ramps.  It is so complicated that answers seem fleeting.  The petitioner doesn’t know exactly how to fix it, so he or she doesn’t know what to ask for.  That, or the challenges seem so daunting that even if the answers come, it is beyond the ability of the seeker to apply them.  This is why a simple four-letter prayer is so effective. H-E-L-P

Sometimes assurance of help promised is more precious than the help that actually comes.  I don’t know exactly what the LORD will do.  According the promise above, there is a commitment on God’s part to care for those whom He loves.  He will help.  Not just because He can.  It is deeper than that.  He promises to help because He desires to and He takes pity on those who trust in Him.  The promise alone is sufficient for the moment.  Since help above is framed as a future act of God, the consolation isn’t in the assistance, but in the promise of it.  All I needed to hear from my parents was the word of promised help.  As I struggled with my homework, all I needed to hear was my father calling from afar the words, “just a minute and I will help you.”  It didn’t immediately solve the math problem I faced.  Rather, it gave me peace and patience.  Often, the promise of help quiets the heart enough to realize the help was always present.  Like the promise of my father’s help and a solution was on the way, cleared the mind of confusion so the answer could be seen all along!  God will help.  He loves to help.  That is His nature.  So, we must rest in the promise of that help because it is on the way.

Praise At All Times

“And both the singers and the porters kept the ward of their God, and the ward of the purification, according to the commandment of David, [and] of Solomon his son. For in the days of David and Asaph of old [there were] chief of the singers, and songs of praise and thanksgiving unto God.” (Ne 12:45-46 AV)

The captivity caused Israel to forget the songs of praise.  In fact, Psalms tells us that while in captivity, their captors required them to sing songs of praise and mirth.  “For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us [required of us] mirth, [saying], Sing us [one] of the songs of Zion.” (Ps 137:3 AV) It was cruel enough that they were forced to reside far away from their home in the service of a pagan king.  Now, they required them to live as though nothing untoward had happened.  Seventy years later, they were back in Canaan.  They rebuilt the wall and repaired the temple.  Still under pagan rule, it was important that they reestablish the songs of praise.  For the next five hundred years, they would be under different Gentile nations or kingdoms.  Because they were center to all the conflicts between these Gentile kingdoms, Israel would know no peace.  Yet, the songs of praise must go on!

One of the fondest memories of ministry happened a few years back.  It was a Sunday morning, and there was a phone call during our morning service.  Usually, we ignore it unless it rings and rings and rings.  I left the pulpit area and answered to phone.  It was a member of our church who was calling for her son.  He was my songleader.  She said something had happened to her husband and her son needed to call back right away.  In the middle of our song service, my friend and fellow laborer called his mom to find out that Dad had collapsed and was taken to the hospital.  My songleader immediately left for the hospital.  We concluded our service as normally as we could, and I immediately left for the hospital.  When I found the family with their patriarch in bed, it was told me that he had a condition that could not be treated and that his departure was at hand.  This family was a musical family and a very spiritual one.  They surrounded the bed as their loved one passed, praying and singing familiar songs of old.  Each sang their part, but the newly departed.  His voice was a record-setting tenor voice.  They sang three-part harmony with the tenor part silent.  It was the most precious moment I believe I have ever witnessed.  Rather than mourn with wailing and weeping, they reacted in praise and joy. A life lived that touched all was worthy of songs of praise for a God who gave it.

It is easy to say, but hard to do.  When we are at our lowest, praise does not come easy from our lips.  When life is a challenge, to say the least, thanksgiving isn’t the first thought that comes to mind.  We do not visit this truth lightly.  Thanksgiving and praise are not natural when we are facing the battle of a lifetime.  Praise and thanksgiving are not the first thoughts when our life seems on a spiral that is out of control.  Or, as in Israel’s case, that do not come easy when there is a constant drip of discouragement around every corner.  Praise and thanksgiving may not change our circumstances, but they will change our perspective.  Besides, God is not worthy of both only when things are going well.  It takes humility, vision, and character for the saint to be thankful and praise the LORD in times of difficulty.  But praise and thankfulness are the key to surviving the hard times and flourishing in the good times.