Morning Prayer

Thursday, July 27, 2023

Your laws are wonderful.  No wonder I obey them!  The teaching of your word gives light, so even the simple can understand.  I pant with expectation, longing for your commands.  Come and show me your mercy, as you do for all who love your name.  Guide my steps by your word, so I will not be overcome by evil.  Psalm 119:129-133

Laws are meant to be broken!  So goes the twisted thinking of the outlaw.  Yet, those who perceive themeselves as uniquely qualified to judge the laws of God and man do not realize (or perhaps they do not care) that by ignoring how the Sovereign Lord has designed life to be a blessing, they are storing up misery for themselves, and anyone who will follow their lead.  Jesus, speaking to religious leaders who were largely hypocritical imposters, said they looked like big shots, parading around in their expensive robes, but on the inside they were lawbreakers; their hearts were set on their own will, not God’s:

 Outwardly you look like righteous people, but inwardly your hearts are filled with hypocrisy and lawlessness.  Matthew 23:28

The “law” the Psalmist characterized as “wonderful” was what we commonly call the Ten Commandments[1].  What makes them so wonderful is the power they contain to make life wonderful and a blessing to all who live within their parameters.  Consider the outcome when we live God’s way:

1.    No other gods – Life is better with focus…not a thousand different gods.

2.    Worship God, not what He has created – again focus…worship only God.

3.    Keep God’s name holy – think of life without Hollywood’s profanity!

4.    Sabbath reserved for worship – we often forget important stuff.  A routine that includes worship guards against slipping-away from good living.

5.    Honor father & mother – what you do is what you’ll also receive…honor.

6.    Do not murder – would our lives be better off with less homicide?

7.    Do not commit adultery – wouldn’t trust be better than constant suspicion?

8.    Do not steal – would life be better if we could do without locks on things?

9.    No false witness – if truth reigned, the courts would be empty.

10. No greed for what’s not yours – would life be simpler if we were people of glad contentment – both for what we have, and glad for what our neighbor has worked for?

Now that’s the short list of benefit tracks that could make life much sweeter.  There could be volumes written on all the side benefits associated with living like God designed it.  But the chief benefit of all is being able to approach God at any time of day with confidence that your prayers will be heard with Heaven’s favor.  The value of having an up-to-the-minute relationship with the King of the Universe is eternal joy.  Knowing He loves you is wonderful, but sensing His presence, because your heart is clean before Him is abundance in all that makes life worthwhile. 

For You Today 

My morning prayer, every morning tracks with the Psalmist’s thought:

Guide my steps by your word, so I will not be overcome by evil.

I want that more than life itself. 

If in this moment it was possible for you to have a house valued at $5-million, and a chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce, $3-billion in the bank, and be elected President of the United States – OR an up-to-the-minute, intimate friendship with God, which would you choose?

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!

Go to VIDEO (read by author)

There are about 2,600 devotional posts and 400 sermons in the Rocky Road Devotions library.  

 

Title Image:  via Pixabay.com   Images without citation are in public domain.   Unless noted, Scripture quoted from NLT^©  

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[1] Exodus 20:1-17

Good News - Bad News

Thursday, March 23, 2023

Then I saw another mighty angel coming down from heaven, surrounded by a cloud, with a rainbow over his head.  His face shone like the sun, and his feet were like pillars of fire.  And in his hand was a small scroll that had been opened.  He stood with his right foot on the sea and his left foot on the land.  And he gave a great shout like the roar of a lion.  And when he shouted, the seven thunders answered.  When the seven thunders spoke, I was about to write.  But I heard a voice from heaven saying, “Keep secret what the seven thunders said, and do not write it down.”  Then the angel I saw standing on the sea and on the land raised his right hand toward heaven.  He swore an oath in the name of the one who lives forever and ever, who created the heavens and everything in them, the earth and everything in it, and the sea and everything in it.  He said, “There will be no more delay.  When the seventh angel blows his trumpet, God’s mysterious plan will be fulfilled.  It will happen just as he announced it to his servants the prophets.”  Then the voice from heaven spoke to me again: “Go and take the open scroll from the hand of the angel who is standing on the sea and on the land.”  So I went to the angel and told him to give me the small scroll.  “Yes, take it and eat it,” he said.  “It will be sweet as honey in your mouth, but it will turn sour in your stomach!”  So I took the small scroll from the hand of the angel, and I ate it!   It was sweet in my mouth, but when I swallowed it, it turned sour in my stomach.  Then I was told, “You must prophesy again about many peoples, nations, languages, and kings.”  Revelation 10:1-11

There is good news, and there is bad news; when you confuse the two, or can’t see what’s coming, that is terrible news.  When that’s your condition you can’t appreciate the good, or avoid the bad.

Jesus told the Apostle to swallow the scroll.  He told him the good news would be the scroll would taste like honey in his mouth; the bad news…sour stomach.  I can identify!  I love Italian food…it is so tasty…but when it hits my stomach, it’s like the Vikings have landed and started a war down there. 

Centuries before, in Ezekiel’s day, God’s prophet had the same experience.  Eat the scroll, tastes like honey, but the message was gloom and doom for the enemies of God.[1] 

This tells us something that is overwhelmingly invaluable to anyone wanting to understand God’s ways.  Sweet-sounding messages aren’t always easy deals if you’re not inclined to obey God’s ways.  And conversely, harsh messages are only harsh if you don’t obey God’s ways.  The key ingredient of understanding God’s ways is always an obedient heart receiving God’s Word as truth!

For You Today 

That obedient heart thing, of course you’re aware it has little to do with paying respect to God with lips, then doing what you want to do with your life.  A disciple not only hears with his or her ears; there is that matter of following-through!

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!

Go to VIDEO (read by author)

There are about 2,500 devotional posts and 400 sermons in the Rocky Road Devotions library.  To dig deeper explore some of these:  Out of the Frying Pan; Into the Fire and Moving Shadows

Title Image: Pixabay.com    Images without citation are in public domain.

Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation^©  

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[1] Read Ezekiel Chapters 2-3

From WHAT to WHY and EVERYTHING In-Between

Wednesday, March 1, 2023

So Moses chiseled out two tablets of stone like the first ones.  Early in the morning he climbed Mount Sinai as the Lord had commanded him, and he carried the two stone tablets in his hands.  Then the Lord came down in a cloud and stood there with him; and he called out his own name, Yahweh.  The Lord passed in front of Moses, calling out, “Yahweh!  The Lord!  The God of compassion and mercy!  I am slow to anger and filled with unfailing love and faithfulness.  I lavish unfailing love to a thousand generations.  I forgive iniquity, rebellion, and sin.  But I do not excuse the guilty.  I lay the sins of the parents upon their children and grandchildren; the entire family is affected—even children in the third and fourth generations.  Exodus 34:4-7

There is a statement which, in essence, is deeply-ingrained in American culture, and is unquestionably anti-Christian.  It uncovers just how far we can drop from the tree of faith.  The statement (or its equivalent) is thus:

Nobody can tell me what to do; it’s MY life.

There are two responses to that statement which make it a logical non sequitur:

     1.    Your life would be yours alone if you didn’t belong to someone else.

     2.    Your life’s actions would have no consequences if the One who owns you didn’t connect you to everyone else, including your family tree.

The first response comes from the unquestionable fact that you didn’t create yourself.  Your parents had a hand in things, but it was God who formed you in the womb, and breathed the breath of a soul into your bones.  God said so in his meeting with Moses…Yahweh…the LORD; He is the Creator/Owner of all.

The second response is about consequences of what we do, which Yahweh also covered in the agenda with Moses.  The “document” he chiseled in stone covered the basic details of human behavior.  We call it the Ten Commandments; we venerate them, and, to a person, violate them.  And when we transgress those we set up misery for those who follow, even to the third and fourth generation.

Of course there is a positive side to view in this.  When we are obedient to God’s ways, we set up blessing to the generations that follow.  However, adopting the current culture’s mindset of I’m the only one that matters…I’ll do what I want, is hardly a formula for blessing.  Suppose that “what I want” is to become an alcoholic-addicted bank robber?  Think of the tentacles that reach into the wake of your actions for the many humans of the world’s population.  And imagine your children (and theirs) living with the fallout from that heritage of your behavior. 

When it comes to communicating a message of God’s love and our responsibility to respond with Godly living, people want to know why they should be subjected to living within so many rules.  Well, you have questions, and you want answers; God, the Sovereign Lord of the universe and all it holds has those answers, from the WHAT, to the WHY, and EVERYTHING IN-BETWEEN!

For You Today 

Do you remember what your father or mother (or both) said to you when you asked the why question as a little child?  They said:  Because I said so.

You didn’t like that…it wasn’t enough.  Now you understand…they were only repeating what God said.  He said to Moses, and all of us:  That stuff I wrote on those stone tablets…you do it…because I AM said so.

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!

            Go to VIDEO (read by author)

There are about 2,500 devotional posts and 400 sermons in the Rocky Road Devotions library.  To dig deeper on today’s topic, explore some of these: 

Trivial Pursuit  and  Rats      

Title Image:  Pixabay.com   Images without citation are personal property of the author, or in public domain.

Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation^©   

When the Beloved FALL

Wednesday, September 14, 2022

This message came to Jeremiah from the Lord, explaining why he was holding back the rain:  “Judah wilts; commerce at the city gates grinds to a halt.  All the people sit on the ground in mourning, and a great cry rises from Jerusalem.  The nobles send servants to get water, but all the wells are dry.  The servants return with empty pitchers, confused and desperate, covering their heads in grief.  The ground is parched and cracked for lack of rain.  The farmers are deeply troubled; they, too, cover their heads.  Even the doe abandons her newborn fawn because there is no grass in the field.  The wild donkeys stand on the bare hills panting like thirsty jackals.  They strain their eyes looking for grass, but there is none to be found.”  The people say, “Our wickedness has caught up with us, Lord, but help us for the sake of your own reputation.  We have turned away from you and sinned against you again and again.  O Hope of Israel, our Savior in times of trouble, why are you like a stranger to us?  Why are you like a traveler passing through the land, stopping only for the night?  Are you also confused?  Is our champion helpless to save us?  You are right here among us, Lord.  We are known as your people.  Please don’t abandon us now!”  So this is what the Lord says to his people:  “You love to wander far from me and do not restrain yourselves.  Therefore, I will no longer accept you as my people.  Now I will remember all your wickedness and will punish you for your sins.”  Jeremiah 14:1-10

Tough times, and no answers to your questions and prayers, make for an agony of time standing still.  God told Jeremiah to hold back the rain; Jeremiah prayed, and everything dried up like a desert.  And Heaven was silent.

Then Jeremiah spoke these words of explanation:  My people, you walked away from me; I’m still here, but you don’t give me a thought until you get in trouble.  Strap-in, beloved…it’s going to be a rough ride for you!

This passage, and many others in Scripture, answer the question:

Can you backslide?  Can you go far enough from God that He will abandon you?

This is perhaps the most difficult question I had to settle two decades ago.  I was on the verge of shifting from Calvinist to Arminian theology, and this was the breakpoint.  My Calvinist roots from the earliest proclaimed the security of the believer (once saved, always saved).  The chasm between that and my Wesleyan challenge which says you’re able to deliberately walk away from salvation is not a small gap.  For this small-town, former agnostic, often disobedient and wobbly Christian boy, admitting Christ is Lord, and then entertaining the thought that my actions were turning him into my judge, rather than my Savior and friend…well THAT was too big an elephant in my little room to ignore.

One of the more poignant Scripture verses that speak to the issue with which I was wrestling is:

And have you forgotten the encouraging words God spoke to you as his children?  He said, “My child, don’t make light of the Lord’s discipline, and don’t give up when he corrects you.  For the Lord disciplines those he loves, and he punishes each one he accepts as his child.”  Hebrews 12:5-6

The summary of what happens to a disobedient child is up to a parent; you can walk away, but He will never stop calling you back.  And that call is sometimes a hard thing to ignore, or bear.

For You Today

Take it from one who walked away, and is glad to be back.  Listen for the call.

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!

Go to VIDEO (read by author)

There are about 2,000 devotional posts and 400 sermons in the Rocky Road Devotions library.  To dig deeper on today’s topic, explore some of these: 

Wearing the Mess You Made and No More Tambourines

[1] Images:  via Pixabay.com   Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation^©   

Stubborn As a...Well, You Know

 

Thursday, May 12, 2022

Then he said, “Son of man, go to the people of Israel and give them my messages.  I am not sending you to a foreign people whose language you cannot understand.  No, I am not sending you to people with strange and difficult speech.  If I did, they would listen!  But the people of Israel won’t listen to you any more than they listen to me!  For the whole lot of them are hard-hearted and stubborn.  But look, I have made you as obstinate and hard-hearted as they are.  I have made your forehead as hard as the hardest rock!  So don’t be afraid of them or fear their angry looks, even though they are rebels.”  Ezekiel 3:4-9

A dear friend of mine recently said to me right after Sunday’s sermon:  I’d like to say I enjoyed the sermon, but my toes are really sore.  My response was:  When I was preparing that sermon, God’s Word broke MY toes to pieces before it got here to you today.  I’ve had to say that quite a few times over the years.

God gave Ezekiel a message, and, as a throwaway line, the Lord told him He had made the prophet as obstinate and hard-hearted as the people to whom he would preach.  Hmmmm. 

There are two thoughts that always come to my mind when the topic of a congregation’s sore toes comes up:

1.    I’m not sure many in the congregation understand how much it costs a preacher to deliver such a sermon.

2.    I’m not sure many in the pulpit understand how much the thought of how the sermon will alienate them to the congregation causes them to soften the blow, to the point of God’s Word being unrecognizable in Heaven.

These are human factors, indicators of our fallen nature, unwilling and stubborn to hear the corrective of God’s will.  It is the evidence of our pride of life which keeps us alienated from God, instead of that hoped-for intimate communion.

One of the harshest messages I’ve ever read was Jonathan Edwards’ Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.  Here is an excerpt of what he preached in 1741 to the congregation filled with people he loved:

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince; and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment. It is to be ascribed to nothing else, that you did not go to hell the last night; that you were suffered to awake again in this world, after you closed your eyes to sleep. And there is no other reason to be given, why you have not dropped into hell since you arose in the morning, but that God’s hand has held you up. There is no other reason to be given why you have not gone to hell, since you have sat here in the house of God, provoking his pure eyes by your sinful wicked manner of attending his solemn worship. Yea, there is nothing else that is to be given as a reason why you do not this very moment drop down into hell.[1]

For You Today

You may never have pictured your “just deserts” including being held over the flames of hell, roasted like a spider, dangling by a thread.  I’m certain there were those in the congregation that day who rather objected to the very idea.  Yet, historians hold that sermon was the kick-off incident that started the Great Awakening in America, a moral revival and turning to God we could certainly use today.  Words for a people as stubborn as a….well, you know.

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road with Jesus; have a blessed day!  

[1] Title image: Pixabay.com   Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation^©  

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[1] BlueLetterBible.org (Edwards’ sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, Enfield, July 8, 1741)

He Began to Weep

 

Wednesday, February 2, 2022

But as he came closer to Jerusalem and saw the city ahead, he began to weep.  “How I wish today that you of all people would understand the way to peace.  But now it is too late, and peace is hidden from your eyes.  Before long your enemies will build ramparts against your walls and encircle you and close in on you from every side.  They will crush you into the ground, and your children with you.  Your enemies will not leave a single stone in place, because you did not recognize it when God visited you.”  Luke 19:41-44

Jesus was close to finishing his journey to the cross.  As he approached Jerusalem, he wept for the sheep he would have shepherded…if they’d only been willing.  From the depths of his sorrow tears flowed, and the Lord of Glory poured out the pain of the coming recompense his family would suffer.  Jerusalem, the shining City of David, would be crushed, its walls and temple razed to ground-zero.  Men and women, along with their children would enter a trial that would leave them devastated and broken.  God had visited them from a manger in Bethlehem…and they put up a shield to ward Him off.  Instead, it would become a prison wall to an eternal sentence of death.  Peace rejected, destruction ensured, the tears flowed like a river from the Christ who would be Savior over the lambs who were blindly bleating their own destructive brand of independence…we don’t need YOU, God!

Frankly, it’s difficult to read those words of prophecy…senseless destruction of men, women, and children, broken, bloodied, crushed into the ground.  That is the awful truth about rebellion towards our Creator.  When we decide to go our own way, rejecting God’s loving hand, we do to ourselves the worst kind of judgment – an unnecessary suffering contrary to what God had planned for us. 

Rather than pain, anguish, and eternal death, the LORD holds for us eternal LIFE and joy.  In human understanding, we hardly begin to comprehend that loss.  It is like a little boy playing on the railroad tracks.  He enjoys hopping from one rail to the rocks and skipping-up to the other rail.  His dad calls, but the child is having too good a time, so he ignores the voice.  What a tragedy is coming; but the child cannot see the danger, so His father and mother weep for him.  He’s making the worst possible choice, and refuses to take his eyes off his game for a moment.

Jerusalem, God’s Holy City, is not the focus of this Scripture.  Jerusalem is a metaphor for everything God created.  All the earth, it’s people, animals, cities, rural areas, mountains, wilderness, and dry places, were created for God’s glory.  And all was placed in humankind’s care.  Some of us choose to play on the tracks, ignoring the train’s approaching destruction.  Some turn to the voice of God’s warning to come close for protection.  And, as the story of the Great Shepherd who left the 99 safe sheep[1], to look for the 1 lost sheep still playing on the tracks, the heart of the Father grieves just as Jesus’ weeping displays…because they would not.

For You Today

For some, the idea of getting right with God is not something by which they’re upset, or angered; they’re just buried in the distraction of living daily life.  They just don’t think about it.  Sadly, this was the case in Jerusalem; the king of glory visited, and they were too busy playing on the tracks.

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!  

[1] Title and Other Images:  Pixabay.com   Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation^©   

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[1] See Luke 15:1-7