Category: Uncategorized

I’ve been offline for a couple of weeks now and it has been a nice break. December for working adults and parents tends to be a frantic race of ‘to-do’ lists, schedules, deadlines, etc. There’s a scarcity of time, or in other words, there’s just way too many things to get done within the confines of a normal 24 hour day. So it has been for me, especially with my work, so I have had to pick my battles of what I could and couldn’t get done, and frankly, with exams in early December and being out of school for Christmas, I’m sure you have enjoyed the break from our routine.

I wanted to close out 2016 to talk about “TIME”. The Lord has impressed upon me some thoughts about time; our time here on earth, our time together, our use of time, our waste of time, our stress over time, our importance around time. So please indulge me one last time in 2016 and take your time to read below and let me know your thoughts…

Moses leads the Israelites from captivity in Egypt, but they’ve got a problem; Pharaoh and his armies are on their heels and there’s a sea of water in front of them. There are no boats waiting, no bridge to cross, they are facing the end of the road, with no way out. They need a miracle, and (as we know from the Charlton Heston movie) Moses calls upon the Lord, and the Lord parts the sea by instructing Moses to hold his staff over the water. With a wall of water on either side, the caravan of Israelites crosses over the previously submerged bed of the Red Sea into the desert. As the Egyptian army’s chariots enter the seabed, God causes confusion upon them, and as the last of the Israelites reach the other side, the walls of water on each side collapse and drown the Egyptian soldiers.

Now there are a lot of object lessons in this story, but the one I want us to contemplate is this; the Israelites saw a clear, physical representation of God. They saw Him, the creator of the universe, at work, conducting miracles to get the Israelites out of their bind and to fulfill His purpose. He saved their lives and there was no doubt that He did it!

Having seen God at work to save them, how do the Israelite’s respond? Exodus 15:31 gives us their initial reaction, “And when the Israelites saw the mighty hand of the Lord displayed against the Egyptians, the people feared the Lord and put their trust in him and in Moses his servant.” So impressed were the Israelites, they even wrote and sang a song of praise to the Lord. But that was short-lived. In fact, the bible (Exodus 16:3) says it was exactly forty-five days later when the Israelites complain to Moses, “If only we had died by the Lord’s hand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death.”

Now, thirty-five hundred years later, it’s sure easy for me to be an armchair quarterback, but really?! God has delivered them from bondage, and when faced with certain destruction at the hands of Pharaoh and his army, he parts the Red Sea and wipes out the Egyptian army. Yet a mere forty-five days later, they have lost their belief that God will take care of them! On and on, the complaints come to Moses and Aaron, and God provides, continuing to take care of their needs. You would think the Israelites would be worshiping God day and night, but no, in fact, they end up making their own idol gods to worship. By Exodus 20, Moses is coming down the mountain with the Ten Commandments.

They witness God in action. They see God take care of their needs. They see a pillar cloud hover over them by day and a pillar of fire by night, and yet they decide instead of believing in I AM, it makes more sense to believe in a god figurine made from their own hands. No wonder God let the Israelites roam the desert for forty years! Despite all of the physical, eye-witnessing signs of God, they simply didn’t believe and trust in the Lord.

Hebrews 11:1 “Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.”

So, what does this have to do with time? Time is our marker. Remember, God doesn’t wear a watch, He is ageless, beyond the realm of time, but He gives us time, and free will to choose how we decide to use our time. When time is all said and done for you and me, what will really matter in the end is how we used our time. I have come to believe that God’s purpose for each of us for this brief, vapor of time on earth is to learn to love Him. He tangibly showed the Israelites His love for them, and yet they chose not to love and worship Him. He sent His son on the ultimate rescue mission to save you and me from our own destruction. Yet we tend to be like the Israelites, we spend our time worshiping other things and don’t spend time worshiping and growing to know Him. But, via our free will, we can choose to do a “reset”, and recommit our time and focus on learning how to love Him.

I’m challenging myself, and offering the same challenge to you, to start 2017 with a fresh fire and renewed purpose to focus on loving Jesus; learning the truths of His teachings and applying His witness to our lives. You may feel you are tracking along in this walk already, and that’s awesome! But I know for me; I could stand to go deeper in His Word, I could stand to be more giving, I could stand to be more compassionate, I could stand to be more prayerful for the lost, I could stand to be more honest with myself and those I love and care for the most, I could stand to let go of my priorities and focus more on His priorities.

We have 21 days of prayer and fasting beginning next week, and my hope is you will join me in taking a stand to love God that much more! Let’s stand together during those 21 days and I believe God is going to reveal Himself in ways we can’t imagine and that much more…

Love you! I pray for you and your family to have an incredibly blessed 2017!

Jim

 

“But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah,
though you are small among the clans of Judah,
out of you will come for me
one who will be ruler over Israel,
whose origins are from of old,
from ancient times.”

This prophecy in the book of Micah was written sometime between 750 and 686 B.C. To fully appreciate the importance of this verse, you have to step back 2,000 years and understand the Jewish culture of the time. Jews in first century A.D. were very aware of the prophecies of a Messiah. They believed the prophecies would be fulfilled, but in my observation, they had a different depiction of how their Messiah would come to Earth.

To make my point, read the verses below from Matthew 2:

“1 After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem 2 and asked, “Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.”

3 When King Herod heard this he was disturbed, and all Jerusalem with him. 4 When he had called together all the people’s chief priests and teachers of the law, he asked them where the Messiah was to be born. 5 “In Bethlehem in Judea,” they replied, “for this is what the prophet has written:

6 “‘But you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah,
are by no means least among the rulers of Judah;
for out of you will come a ruler
who will shepherd my people Israel.’ ”

The priests and teachers of the law knew exactly where Jesus was to be born, as it had been prophesied 700 years before. The Messiah would be born in Bethlehem, but they didn’t expect He would be born in a manger…

 

 

“Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.” Philippians 4:8

What consumes your thoughts? We’re studying Philippians 4:6-7, but above is the next verse. Why do you think Paul placed these words as his closing words of the Final Exhortations in the letter to Philippi?  I haven’t read any commentary, but this verse spoke to me today. I think it speaks to each of our lives in the challenges we face and the negative influences that the world places in our path. I believe Paul’s audience, the Philippians, faced a harsh life and many daily struggles. We face the same, and I believe our daily thought life needs to focus on the truth, the noble, the things that are right and just, pure, lovely and admirable.

This isn’t an escapist mindset. It is a mindset of putting things in proper perspective and not letting the negative and ugly of the world consume us. What do you think?

“But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved.”

It was apparent last night at Fuel that most of you are reading the text each day, which is awesome! However, it was also apparent that the verses are not sinking in with many of you, as no one could tell me the scripture reference for our current verse. So, this is what I call an OTI (Opportunity to Improve). Please read the following and let’s start a dialogue on how we make this better for all of us:

1. Timing of the text – Is there a better time of the day/night to send the text? Some of you said you don’t have time to read in the morning and then forget about it later in the day.
2. Repeating the verse – Would it help to repeat the whole verse each day, or every other day?
3. Reading the posts – I also realize most of you are not reading the posts. The reason for these posts is that I can a) repeat the verse here each day, b) pose some thoughts and questions that may help all of us connect better with the meaning of the verse and thus be able to memorize it.

Please reply and comment, so we can all make this a more meaningful experience!

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart
    and lean not on your own understanding;
     in all your ways submit to him,
    and he will guide your paths.”

This is one of my favorite verses and I hope by now it is one of your’s too. Please take a few minutes and read the post below.

This is my weekend post and I have felt the Spirit prompting me to delve deeper into our verse this week – “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will guide your paths.” Please take a few moments to read this post. Yes, it’s a long one, but I pray it will speak to you.

Here is a great example of listening and waiting on the Lord to speak. If you were at Metro today, you heard Pastor Joe’s message, “Hearing God”. Now I was wrestling with what God had for me to say, and frankly, yesterday during my quite time, I wasn’t hearing anything. Then Pastor Joe gave me, and you who were there, the message I was looking for! Wow! This got me excited and I hope it gets you excited! I didn’t know that Joe was preaching today, much less that his message was about “Hearing God”. He and I didn’t script this, God used Joe to be His vessel for helping us decern how we hear from God.

So let me recap Joe’s message today:

1. How do we know that it is God who is talking? Joe outlined at the end of his message that we can discern God’s spirit because His word is instructive and encouraging, not destructive or discouraging. It may not always be what ‘we’ want to hear, but His word is constructive, and always in our best interest.
2. He will never ask us to do what is forbidden in His word. Hearing from God rests solidly on His Word.
3. It will always be consistent in His Word. We must incorporate God’s Word into our process of hearing from Him.

How we should react when God speaks:

1. Believe that God wants to speak to you – This ties into our verse- “Trust in the Lord”
2. Position your heart to hear His voice – This ties to our previous verse, Psalm 46:10 “Be still and know that I am God” You have to put aside Instagram and Netflix and all the other distractions and put yourself in a position to hear from Him.
3. Learn the art of listening – It’s easy for us to request God’s help through prayer. It’s not as easy to sit back and wait to hear from Him. We must have receptive hearts in order to hear His voice. This is part of the transformation of our minds in Romans 12:2.
4. Spend more time with God. Bottom line, you are not going to accomplish items 1,2, and 3 unless you spend more time with Him.

“IN ALL YOUR WAYS SUBMIT TO HIM”. I wrote about being submissive and dying to self; tough words for us to process. Both conjure up negative, maybe painful thoughts. But I want you to understand that being submissive and dying to ourselves is God’s blessing to us! Being submissive is being receptive to hearing from Him. Dying to self is leaning on His instruction and not leaning on our understanding. It’s not our nature to do these things, but our Father loves us so much He doesn’t want us to trust our own understanding because He knows it will harm us. Jesus spoke in John 10 about the Good Shepherd. The Good Shepherd takes care of his sheep and the sheep trust him and know his voice.

When we begin submitting ourselves to Him and dying to our own self-interests, we start to discern God’s will and purpose for our lives and we begin bearing fruit in our actions. You will create an atmosphere – you create your own atmosphere and you project the Spirit through your receptiveness to God’s word and His love and His guidance on your life.

My prayer is that we begin being receptive to hearing from God. Take a moment and listen to the words in “I surrender” by Hillsong and let God speak into you.

I thank God for His message to us today through Joe and through His Word. We love you!

Jim

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart
and lean not on your own understanding;
in all your ways submit to him,
and he will make your paths straight.”

Today we move on to our next part of the verse – “IN ALL YOUR WAYS SUBMIT TO HIM”. We’ve covered this already, but today let us pray about submission. By definition, submit means to accept or yield to a superior force. We don’t like to submit. Our human nature is to resist submitting. I found this definition that I thought was good –  “It means to arrange oneself under the command of God’s viewpoint rather than to live according to one’s old way of life, based on a human viewpoint. It is a process of surrendering our own will to that of our Father’s.”

Being submissive means being humble. Humility is a process of dying to self. In Matthew 16:24 Jesus says to his disciples, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” Dying to self is at the core of our Christian walk. Dying to self means we aren’t the star, we aren’t the lead actor of the story. God is. It is His story and He’s the star and He’s the lead actor, and we are humbly blessed to be part of His supporting cast. I am not, but I know I AM.

Hope you are have a relaxing weekend and catching up on some well-needed rest. My weekend post today is a further summarization of where we have traveled together thus far. Since some of you have recently joined the group, I hope this brief summary is helpful. (For a more detailed summary, scroll down to the posts on Sept. 25th and 26th.)

First, let me clarify something. All of the verses we have studied were not verses I scrolled through the Bible searching for. To the contrary, they were all verses that the Holy Spirit placed on me. I thought I was at the end of the path we’ve been going down last weekend until Sunday night when the Holy Spirit placed 2 Corinthians 4:18 on me via a testimony by a lady who had just attended her Tres Dias retreat. Her testimony was powerful and centered around the context of 2 Corinthians 4:18 sharing that she has come to a place where she is changing her focus and fixing her eyes on things eternal, not temporary.

So to summarize, the verses we’ve studied thus far clearly point to the eternity of the Word, the fact that the Word (Jesus) came to earth to make his dwelling among us and that our power and our total dependence rest upon Him. I hope you are seeing the progression and connection of these verses as I am.

Next week will journey down a new path. My hope is that we have laid a foundation centered around Christ that we will build from as we move forward in the weeks ahead.

Have a great weekend and I will text you Monday!

Jim