Category Archives: Life

Yummy!

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Think of a favorite food.   Eating it is an amazing pleasure on many levels.  The look of it already excites you.  The smell fills you with anticipation.  Then the flavor as you bite, chew and swallow.  With some things, like crunchy ones, your hearing is even affected as you chomp away.  And the feeling in your mouth always adds to the experience.   What’s more, you can still taste whatever it is for some time even after gulping it down.   Forget brushing your teeth.  Let’s just enjoy this multi-sensory experience for as long as we can.  No wonder some people overeat when they’re depressed!  Eating just plain makes you feel good!

Now let’s switch gears:

If anyone ever needed something to cheer him up it was the prophet Jeremiah.  This was a man sent to deliver one message of gloom and doom after another.  And he did it without the slightest hint of a judgmental, fire-and-brimstone self-righteousness.  In fact we see him weeping over a people who had utterly lost their way, hating the fact that he never had anything good to say to them.  Moreover, his listeners hated him, repeatedly attacking the messenger because the message upset them – as if the the mail carrier were somehow responsible for their bills.

In the midst of his sorrow, Jeremiah resorted to eating to make himself feel better.  We don’t hear much about his diet, but he loved to devour God’s Word.  Listen to how he described it:

Your words were found, and I ate them,
And Your word was to me the joy and rejoicing of my heart;
For I am called by Your name, O Lord God of hosts.”
          – Jeremiah 15:16 (NKJV)

May the Lord increase our appetite for His delicious Word!

Iron Sharpening Iron

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About ten years back, when I first arrived with my family in Indiana, there were a number of people that were hugely supportive of us right from the beginning. Among those people were Barb and Randy Bills.  They blessed us, fed us, loved us, and said or did more random nice things for us than anyone really had to.

As Horizon Central started, Randy led a men’s group.  We’d meet every Tuesday for prayer, fellowship and a short time in the Word.  His heart to love and serve God’s people was evident at that time. 

Then after a few years, one bittersweet day Randy announced that he “sensed the Lord was moving him on,” or something like that.  Pastors (like myself anyway) dislike those inevitable moments when quality people walk out the door, though certainly it made perfect sense.  Besides, he and his wife both still worked downtown, so it didn’t alter our friendship in the least. 

They committed to Horizon Christian Fellowship South.  He and his family became a vital part of that church.  They stuck it out with several others even as their fellowship remained pastor-less for the last year.  But now all that has changed.  After a good deal of soul searching, stress, and seeking God’s face, Randy has taken the plunge.  He is now the pastor of Horizon South. I sense that our fellowship and friendship will be sweeter as a result. 

God bless you Randy, and may those people continually see Jesus every time they look at you.

As iron sharpens iron,
So a man sharpens the countenance of his friend.
– Proverbs 27:17 (NKJV) 

Keeping Secrets

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There is a lot that people don’t know about one another.  That’s not likely to change no matter how much each of us will ever be willing to share.  The sheer volume of data, combined with the emotional energy it would take to process it, would eventually send the most compassionate listener on earth into information overload.  Still, we should always strive to be better at compassionate listening.

God has a real advantage here.  He knows everything already.  Our deepest darkest secrets are as plain and obvious to Him as the bright light of day.  We see this in the New Testament Greek word for “confess” (homologeo), which literally means something like “same say” or “say the same as another”.   When we confess anything to God, we are only admitting what He already knows to be true.  We are finally saying what He has been saying all along.

Which brings us to a deeper problem, namely that of keeping secrets from ourselves.  There can be areas within our lives or beings that we don’t fully understand.  Sometimes that’s a willful ignorance; sometimes it’s more inadvertent.  In either case, the effect is the same:  We don’t know what we’re like or who we are.  It’s not that we won’t admit our fatal flaws or inner conflicts; we don’t even fully understand them.  We’ve yet to accurately identify these concealed culprits that hold back our personal and spiritual growth.

What a blessing to have an all-knowing Helper – a loving know-it-all who truly knows it all!  David came to grips with his self-ignorance and it led him to this useful, yet beautiful, prayer:

Search me, O God, and know my heart;
Try me, and know my anxieties; 
And see if there is any wicked way in me,
And lead me in the way everlasting.”
          – Psalms 139:23-24 (NKJV)

Let’s follow his example by praying it, letting the Lord reveal our secrets to ourselves.

God’s Plan for You

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Finding God’s perfect will for our lives is not an exact science.  Many people seem to constantly spin their wheels seeking “His Will”, all the while pursuing what amounts to a search for the Holy Grail or the Lost Ark of the Covenant.  In the meantime they are accomplishing very little, as anyone observing them can often see much more clearly than they can.  I know, because I’ve searched for this pot of gold myself, but never quite made it to the end of the rainbow. 

The message the Lord has for Jeremiah seems instructive:

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you;
Before you were born I sanctified you;
I ordained you a prophet to the nations.” 
                                                     – Jeremiah 1:5 (NKJV)

God had made His plans for Jeremiah well in advance.  One day, however, He decided to reveal to him that special calling, that role this young priest was to play in the unfolding intentions of the Almighty.  There is no indication that Jeremiah was really seeking this.  In fact, He argues the point a little, implying that God’s ideas were all wrong. 

Here’s where we find a great lesson – visible in Scripture and frequently reinforced by our own experience:

We don’t discover the “Will of God” by directly pursuing it. 
He reveals it to us through daily submission to Him. 

Some days that will seems pretty ordinary: You get up, get to work, and dutifully fulfill your duties.  This is God’s will and you can rest in peaceful contentment with it.  At other times it’s more dramatic: The whole course of your life can be altered through a career change, relocation, a death, a birth or a marriage.  But each of those big things normally happen step-by-step, or through something you never, ever had the opportunity to control. 

A balanced, daily combination of the Bible, prayer, examining your own desires or circumstances, and a bit of godly counsel will usually do the job.  If your heart’s desire is truly to become and remain submitted to God’s desires, God’s will cannot remain elusive for very long.