When God is Your Whole World

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Friday, October 11, 2019

Praise the Lord!  I will thank the Lord with all my heart as I meet with his godly people.  How amazing are the deeds of the Lord!  All who delight in him should ponder them.  Everything he does reveals his glory and majesty.  His righteousness never fails.  He causes us to remember his wonderful works.  How gracious and merciful is our Lord!  He gives food to those who fear him; he always remembers his covenant.  He has shown his great power to his people by giving them the lands of other nations.  All he does is just and good, and all his commandments are trustworthy.  They are forever true, to be obeyed faithfully and with integrity.  He has paid a full ransom for his people.  He has guaranteed his covenant with them forever.  What a holy, awe-inspiring name he has!  Fear of the Lord is the foundation of true wisdom.  All who obey his commandments will grow in wisdom.  Praise him forever!  Psalm 111:1-10

The amazement, wonder, awe, and gratitude for and to God flowing from the Psalmist’s pen are a sum of that in which my heart wants to lose itself.  I have lived long enough, and sinned big enough to know the vast difference between who is God and who is not.  And yet, my heart aspires to immerse all of who I am in God’s love, compassion, strength, and wisdom.  In short, I desire to desire Him more than anything.  I want to be (as Charles Wesley wrote), lost in wonder, love, and praise.[2]  Paradoxically, there also exists a side of me that fears to come that close; God is awesome, and His power is without measure.  Should God decide to not receive me with open arms, the mere thought of being in His presence immediately leaps to what terrible fate would become of a poor sinner like me.  (Toasted like a pop tart comes to mind!)

But God’s Word disagrees with that “toast” deduction.  Consider the evidence:

To a wicked culture that only paid lip service to being God’s people he said through the prophet Malachi: 

Return to me, and I will return to you.(Malachi 3:7)

Before David was king he was hounded by Saul, chased into the wilderness, living in caves, an outcast, man without a country.  David considered his experience and wrote: 

Taste and see that the Lord is good Oh, the joys of those who take refuge in him!(Psalm 34:8)

To His dull-minded disciples who just could never quite get it, Jesus said: 

…those the Father has given me will come to me, and I will never reject them.(John 6:37)

To crowds listening Jesus offered:

“Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke upon you.  Let me teach you, because I am humble and gentle at heart, and you will find rest for your souls.(Matthew 11:28-29)

And, to anyone who ever did choose to come close, on bended knee, willing to allow God to make Him their whole life, He said:

…I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee.(Hebrews 13:5 KJV)

For You Today

It’s never smart to approach God casually, as if there is some slight chance that you can take Him or leave Him.  But, when you’ve made up your mind that you’re long overdue in getting things straight between your Creator and you…remember all those invitations to come close; God loves you too much to go back on that word!

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

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[1] Title Image:  Pixabay.com    Unless noted, Scripture used from The New Living Translation©

[2] Charles Wesley, Love Divine, All Loves Excelling, The United Methodist Hymnal, (1989, UMC Publishing House, Nashville), 384

When God is Captured

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                                                                            Friday, June 8, 2018                 

After the Philistines captured the Ark of God, they took it from the battleground at Ebenezer to the town of Ashdod.  They carried the Ark of God into the temple of Dagon and placed it beside an idol of Dagon.  But when the citizens of Ashdod went to see it the next morning, Dagon had fallen with his face to the ground in front of the Ark of the Lord!  So they took Dagon and put him in his place again.  But the next morning the same thing happened—Dagon had fallen face down before the Ark of the Lord again.  This time his head and hands had broken off and were lying in the doorway.  Only the trunk of his body was left intact.  That is why to this day neither the priests of Dagon nor anyone who enters the temple of Dagon in Ashdod will step on its threshold.  Then the Lord’s heavy hand struck the people of Ashdod and the nearby villages with a plague of tumors.  When the people realized what was happening, they cried out, “We can’t keep the Ark of the God of Israel here any longer! He is against us! We will all be destroyed along with Dagon, our god.”  So they called together the rulers of the Philistine towns and asked, “What should we do with the Ark of the God of Israel?”  The rulers discussed it and replied, “Move it to the town of Gath.”  So they moved the Ark of the God of Israel to Gath.  But when the Ark arrived at Gath, the Lord’s heavy hand fell on its men, young and old; he struck them with a plague of tumors, and there was a great panic.  So they sent the Ark of God to the town of Ekron, but when the people of Ekron saw it coming they cried out, “They are bringing the Ark of the God of Israel here to kill us, too!”  The people summoned the Philistine rulers again and begged them, “Please send the Ark of the God of Israel back to its own country, or it will kill us all.”  For the deadly plague from God had already begun, and great fear was sweeping across the town.   Those who didn’t die were afflicted with tumors; and the cry from the town rose to heaven.  1 Samuel 5:1-12^(NLT)

Because of Israel’s unrepentant sinfulness God allowed them to be defeated by the Philistines…badly!  In this defeat was the loss of the Ark of the Covenant, the symbol of God’s presence among the nation.  It was a big mistake for Israel to ignore God; it was just as costly for the people of Philistia to think they could capture God.

The Ark was placed in the Philistine temple of Dagon, the fish god.  In the morning Dagon was on his face before Yahweh’s ark.  They set poor Dagon up on his feet again, but the next night the same thing happened; only this time Humpty Dumpty was broken to pieces.  It’s a questionable thing to serve a god that can’t even stand up straight.

So, you have two nations with impotent, incompetent gods?  Israel’s nation gets clobbered and their God is taken prisoner; Philistia’s victory turns out to be a nemesis of tumors, humiliation, and death; so, is it better to be an atheist?  

That’s what many think in America today, except we have our own version of Dagon; we worship our gods:  money, sex, and national prowess of military might to set the world straight.  Our 21^st century vanity is the resurrected self-importance of Philistia, the world bowing at the feet of our manufactured nationalistic pride.  We are not much better than Israel carrying the Ark into battle, like a lucky charm, thinking God must be on our side.  God will not be carried with unclean hands, and Yahweh will not be captured without consequence.  If a carved, two-ton stone idol cannot stand before the presence of the Almighty, what makes any of us think sinful flesh and blood would fare better?

But, like the Philistines, we hardly ever learn.  This same temple where God was captured is the very place where the Philistines tried to humiliate Samson.  But Judges 16 recounts how that all worked out; Samson’s strength (taken by Delilah’s haircut) returned for one last battle, and he pulled down Dagon’s temple, killing many thousands who thought to capture God’s man.[2]  Many in the current generation have chosen to have done with the church, and the Lord of that church.  This is an unfortunate choice of eternal consequence based wrongly on present, temporary circumstances.  It’s similar to the argument for suicide – and just as deadly.  Like the Philistines figured the Israelite God had been captured, tamed, and neutralized, today’s culture has put aside any notion of fearing an Almighty Creator.  The consequence for that choice was monumental in Dagon’s temple; I fear for America if she doesn’t return to Christ.

For You Today

If you share this foreboding, but despair that you have no clue as to how to start the revival, remember that you cannot start a revival in a single other person’s heart.  But if YOU live revival, God can use it to move mountains.

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

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[1] Title Image:  Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

[2] Image via Wikimedia Commons