Intentional Faith

Today’s Text

Psalm 71:1-6 (NIV)
1 In you, O LORD, I have taken refuge; let me never be put to shame.
2 Rescue me and deliver me in your righteousness; turn your ear to me and save me.
3 Be my rock of refuge, to which I can always go; give the command to save me, for you are my rock and my fortress.
4 Deliver me, O my God, from the hand of the wicked, from the grasp of evil and cruel men.
5 For you have been my hope, O Sovereign LORD, my confidence since my youth.
6 From birth I have relied on you; you brought me forth from my mother’s womb. I will ever praise you.

Today’s Quote

Have you noticed how much praying for revival has been going on of late – and how little revival has resulted? I believe the problem is that we have been trying to substitute praying for obeying, and it simply will not work.

Author: A.W. Tozer

Today’s Thought

Excerpt from 1 Corinthians 2:6-16

“We speak God’s wisdom, secret and hidden, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. None of the rulers of this age understood this….these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.”

Quinn G. Caldwell

Is there anybody else out there who’s tired of a reasonable faith? Who’s exhausted herself trying to explain the miracles in the Bible rationally? Of saying, “Oh, I don’t believe in that” to every single element of our faith that wouldn’t stand up to the peer-review standards of a scientific journal? Anybody else who’s tired of trying to reassure people that he’s not crazy or stupid just because he believes in beautiful impossibilities?

Sometimes I feel like we – I – have spent so much time trying to not be like those other Christians (you know: the superstitious ones, the unreasonable ones, the ones who don’t have brains as awesomely powerful as mine) that we’re in danger of reducing God to the size of our own intellect. Don’t get me wrong: our intellect, especially collectively, is prodigious and should be brought fully to bear on our faith. It’s just that intellect isn’t quite enough. Intellect isn’t what makes me cry for no reason sometimes while singing a hymn. Rationality isn’t what made me believe that someone who died two thousand years ago came back to life – and oh, by the way, is God. And I sure didn’t reason my way into believing that white-bread croutons and shot glasses of grape juice have salvific power. And yet, all of those things are true enough that I’m willing to bend my life around them.

Is there anybody else out there who’s become convinced that the beautiful and impossible, the powerful and unprovable, the ineffable and untestable in our faith, far from being embarrassments, are actually the most important things about it?

Prayer

God, grant that I might always bring my brain with me to church. But don’t let me forget my heart, either. Amen.

Today’s Prayer

Father in heaven,
I lift my eyes to you and wait for your help.
I am your servant, entrusted with your gifts;
I am yours alone.

I lift my eyes to you who dwell in heaven.
Like a faithful servant, I wish to do your bidding.

Thoughts on Today’s Text

God’s providential rescue of Moses as an infant eighty years before (Exodus 2:1-10) preceded his commission. God likewise refers here to Jeremiah’s prenatal calling (Jeremiah 1:5; see Psalm 71:5-6). Like Moses, whose many objections include his own ineloquence (Exodus 4:10), Jeremiah protests that he does not know how to speak (Jeremiah 1:6).

As with Moses, God does most of the talking, describing sending Jeremiah and giving him words to speak, though not yet mentioning that, like Moses, Jeremiah would be addressing rulers. Like Moses, Jeremiah is appointed the task of nation building (4:10). Like Moses, he is given a preview of the rough path ahead. As with Moses, a foreign oppressor will figure prominently in the story. But whereas Moses’ God fought the Egyptians to free the Israelites, in Jeremiah’s time God will use the Babylonians as tools in a conflict with the Israelites themselves. Ultimately, though, Jeremiah’s calling, like Moses’, serves to bring the nation to a better place.

Today’s Text

Jeremiah 1:4-10 (NIV)
4 The word of the LORD came to me, saying,
5 “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”
6 “Ah, Sovereign LORD,” I said, “I do not know how to speak; I am only a child.”
7 But the LORD said to me, “Do not say, ‘I am only a child.’ You must go to everyone I send you to and say whatever I command you.
8 Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you and will rescue you,” declares the LORD.
9 Then the LORD reached out his hand and touched my mouth and said to me, “Now, I have put my words in your mouth.
10 See, today I appoint you over nations and kingdoms to uproot and tear down, to destroy and overthrow, to build and to plant.”

Do you wish to rise? Begin by descending. You plan a tower that will pierce the clouds? Lay first the foundation of humility.

Augustine

Today’s Devotional

2 Chronicles 34:1-7

“Josiah was eight years old when he began to reign; he reigned for thirty-one years in Jerusalem. He did what was right in the sight of the Lord, and walked in the ways of his ancestor David; he did not turn aside to the right or to the left.”

Matthew Laney

This morning I asked my eight-year-old what he would do if he were king. He said, “Make a law that says people have to eat pancakes every day!” (he was eating pancakes at the time) and “use the iPad whenever I want.” (He had just been barred from iPad usage to atone for a recent transgression).

What, if anything, can we deduce from this research sample? For one thing, putting absolute power and celebrity into the hands of one so young is a daring proposition. And how many child celebrities end up in free-fall as teens or young adults after rocketing to the A-list too fast too soon?

Not so with Josiah. His star continued to rise, at least in the memory of his sympathetic and admiring biographer. The secret of Josiah’s success was a sure and steady awareness that God was the true king.

We could all take a note.

We all need to surrender the throne to its proper occupant.

At first that looks terrifying until we realize there is nothing more liberating than letting God be God and nothing more terrifying than thinking we are up for the job. Giving up control looks scary until we admit we’ve never been in control for a day in our lives.

I used to recoil at the suggestion that Christ saves me from hell. But then I learned hell is little more than being my own King and getting my own way forever.

Prayer

Christ my King, help me to admit that without you, life is meaningless and unmanageable. Grant me nothing more than the faith to surrender everything to you.

Today’s Prayer

Lord, I thank you for the many times you gave me help,
always listening when I called.

In my darkest moments,
when all seemed to be lost,
there you were, at my side.

The Lord always listens and has pity;
the Lord always comes to our help.

Our mourning you change into dancing;
you always clothe us with joy. Psalm 30

Thoughts on Today’s Text

Paul makes effective use of one more rhetorical device in the imaginative conversation of talking body parts. The dialog underscores the absurdity of a body in which each of the parts were to go it alone, ignoring the importance of the body’s functioning as a unit or whole.

But then in an important move, “but as it is…” (12:18), Paul both brings us back to reality and develops the argument in a novel and compelling way. The arrangement of the one body with its many members is not simply an accident to be observed but has a divine origin and purpose. Here we meet a distinctive treatment of the body metaphor that is quite different in character and purpose from the elsewhere familiar “Christ as head” and “we as body” image of Ephesians.

Here instead a different point is being made by the focus on the conviction that “God has arranged the members of the body, each one of them, as he chose.” The implications of this conviction are asserted finally in the key culminating insight belonging the gift of oneness of the Christian community: “If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it” (12:26).

In order to stress this reality in community, Paul reinforces the three key words, “arrange” (12:24), “suffer,” and “rejoice” (12:26) by incorporating in them a typical and beloved unique Pauline prefix. The Greek preposition syn (meaning “with” or “together,” as in the words “symbiosis” or “symphony”) is prefixed to each of these key verbs. It is as if to underscore the assertion that our oneness is a matter of God’s design. From creation God has “mixed us all together,” that we might suffer and rejoice together in a mutual harmony.