Building a Beautiful Home

“But the mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear Him, and His righteousness to children’s children, to such as keep His covenant, and to those who remember His commandments to do them.”

PSALM 103:17-18

 

PONDER THIS

We have much to learn about how to make a home beautiful. We must be intentional about our time in the home. We must be mindful of the legacy we will leave. We need to teach the next generation. We need to learn to love our families even when it is challenging. It is easy to come to a place where we think we are smarter than God. We start to point the finger about what should be done instead of asking how God needs to work in our lives. We stop looking for what God says about things and start making decisions based on what we want, but that will never prosper.

We need to pray that our homes will not be just places where people congregate or come and go but that they will be Christ-centered. I am thankful for God’s grace that has enabled us to have godly homes. We make our homes beautiful by prayerful submission to God. It is not by manicuring our image or giving our family earthly success. We make our homes beautiful by keeping them centered on the Lord.

What would it look like to keep your days focused on the Lord? How does that impact your family and the people around you?

Who are some families for whom you are praying? How can you encourage them?

PRACTICE THIS

Encourage the members of a family that is special to you as they grow in the Lord.

LWF Dr. Adrian Rogers 

Lincoln’s Providence

Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! (Romans 11:33)

Abraham Lincoln, who was born on this day in 1809, remained skeptical, and at times even cynical, about religion into his forties. So, it is a most striking thing how personal and national suffering drew Lincoln into the reality of God, rather than pushing him away.

In 1862, when Lincoln was 53 years old, his 11-year-old son Willie died. Lincoln’s wife “tried to deal with her grief by searching out New Age mediums.” Lincoln turned to Phineas Gurley, pastor of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington.

Several long talks led to what Gurley described as “a conversion to Christ.” Lincoln confided that he was “driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I have nowhere else to go.”

Similarly, the horrors of the dead and wounded soldiers assaulted him daily. There were fifty hospitals for the wounded in Washington. The rotunda of the Capitol held two thousand cots for wounded soldiers.

Typically, fifty soldiers a day died in these temporary hospitals. All of this drove Lincoln deeper into the providence of God. “We cannot but believe, that He who made the world still governs it.”

His most famous statement about the providence of God in relation to the Civil War was his Second Inaugural Address, given a month before he was assassinated. It is remarkable for not making God a simple supporter for the Union or Confederate cause. God has his own purposes and does not excuse sin on either side.

Fondly do we hope — fervently do we pray — that this mighty scourge of war might speedily pass away. . . .

Yet if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid with another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago so still it must be said, “the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.”

I pray for all of you who suffer loss and injury and great sorrow that it will awaken for you, as it did for Lincoln, not an empty fatalism, but a deeper reliance on the infinite wisdom and love of God’s inscrutable providence.

John Piper 

High Wages Paid with Counterfeit Money

“And say: ‘How I have hated instruction, and my heart despised correction! I have not obeyed the voice of my teachers, nor inclined my ear to those who instructed me! I was on the verge of total ruin, in the midst of the assembly and congregation.’”  PROVERBS 5:12-14

 

PONDER THIS

When we look at God’s way in His Word, we may question what He is keeping us from but because God’s way is the way to life, His way is always best. One example of this is God’s design for marriage. God has designed marriage to be more than a passing relationship. He designed it to be a unified union. Two individuals become one. Sometimes I teasingly say to Joyce that if she ever leaves me, I’m going with her. Don’t get the idea that if you live according to God’s design for marriage, you are going to miss out. God has designed the relationship of marriage to reflect Him, and it is beautiful and joyful to live in His design.

Without God, you’re going to believe many ways lead to life, but they only end in death. The Living Bible translates this verse this way, “Oh if I had only listened! . . . Oh, why wouldn’t I take advice?” (vv. 12-13). Satan offers high wages, but he pays in counterfeit money. There is only disappointment. You may get what you want, but you’re not going to want what you get.

What makes it easy to believe the lies of Satan?

How can you seek to trust God’s ways over what your eyes can see?

PRACTICE THIS

Make of list of benefits of following God’s way and then pray and ask God to help you remember those things.

LWF Dr. Adrian Rogers 

Drawing Near to God

PRAY OVER THIS

“He made known His ways to Moses, His acts to the children of Israel.” Psalm 103:7

 

PONDER THIS

You can know about God, or you can know God. To know about God is to see God’s works. To know God intimately is to know God’s ways. Most people know God on the first level. All they know is the works of God. They know what God does, but they don’t know the ways of God. They don’t know who God is.

God made known His ways to Moses. He made known His acts, or His works, to the children of Israel. Moses knew God in a way the rest of the people didn’t. The rest of the people saw the works of God, but Moses knew the ways of God. We need to look beyond the works of God to see the ways of God. Now that brings about a question. Does God have favorites? No, but He does have intimate relationships with His people. How would you like to be on intimate terms with God? When you know the ways of God, that will bring peace to your troubled soul and stability to your life.

We need to know God intimately. To know God intimately will give you tranquility. It will give you rest when you not only look for Him to work and answer prayers but draw near to Him and know His ways and His heart.

What do you feel more familiar with, God’s works or God’s ways?

When have you determined to know God intimately? How can you do this continually?

PRACTICE THIS

Spend time in prayer and silence to draw near to God and ask Him to help you know Him intimately.

LWF Dr. Adrian Rogers 

Church Growth God’s Way

It is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of the promise are counted as offspring. (Romans 9:8)

Picture the Old Testament Abraham as a pastor. The Lord says, “I will bless you and prosper your ministry.” But the church is barren and bears no children.

What does Abraham do? He begins to despair of supernatural intervention. He is getting old. His wife remains barren. So he decides to bring about God’s promised son without supernatural intervention. He has sex with Hagar his wife’s handmaid (Genesis 16:4). However, the result is not a “child of the promise,” but a “child of the flesh,” Ishmael.

God stuns Abraham by saying, “I will give you a son by her [your wife Sarah]” (Genesis 17:16). So Abraham cries out to God, “Oh that Ishmael might live before you!” (Genesis 17:18). He wants the work of his own natural, human effort to be the fulfillment of God’s promise. But God says, “No, but Sarah your wife shall bear you a son” (Genesis 17:19).

But Sarah is 90 years old. She has been barren all her life, and she has already passed through menopause (Genesis 18:11). Abraham is 100. The only hope for a child of promise is stunning, supernatural intervention.

That is what it means to be a “child of the promise” — to be born “not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:13). The only children that count for children of God in this world are supernaturally begotten children of promise. In Galatians 4:28 Paul says, “You [Christians], like Isaac, are children of promise.” You are “born according to the Spirit,” not according to the flesh (Galatians 4:29).

Think of Abraham as a pastor again. His church is not growing the way he believes God promised. He is weary of waiting for supernatural intervention. He turns to the “Hagar” of mere human devices, and decides he can “attract people” without the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit.

However, it will not be a church of Isaacs, but Ishmaelites — children of the flesh, not children of God. God save us from this kind of fatal success. By all means work. But always look to the Lord for the decisive, supernatural work. “The horse is made ready for the day of battle, but the victory belongs to the Lord” (Proverbs 21:31).

John Piper 

Do You Know the Ways of God?

PRAY OVER THIS

“‘Now therefore, I pray, if I have found grace in Your sight, show me now Your way, that I may know You and that I may find grace in Your sight. And consider that this nation is Your people.’ And He said, ‘My Presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.’” Exodus 33:13-14

 

PONDER THIS

Moses said, “Lord I want to know your ways.” In reply, God promised to give Moses rest. When you know God’s ways, it is the difference between rest and relapse. You can know God’s works without knowing God’s ways. The land of Canaan represents the believer’s rest. They were to have rest, but they never found rest. Those of us who know God’s ways will live in a perpetual Sabbath, not a seventh-day Sabbath, a 365-day-a-year Sabbath. Every day can be a day of rest if you know the ways of God.

Now, why don’t we know this? Why don’t we have this blessing? There is no blessing without obedience. And there is no obedience because there is no trust. There is no trust because there is no love. And there is no love because there is no knowledge. You can’t trust someone you do not know. And you cannot know someone if all you see is their works and you don’t know their ways. You have to know an individual. You have to know their ways to love them. You have to love them in order to trust them. And you have to trust them in order to obey them. Israel saw the works of God. They saw the miracles of God. They saw the plagues on Egypt. They saw the Red Sea opened. They saw all these things, but they never understood the ways of God, and they never found rest. The difference between knowing the works of God and the ways of God is the difference between rest and relapse.

How would you describe the difference between knowing God’s works and knowing His ways?

How can you seek to learn more of God’s ways this week?

PRACTICE THIS

Spend time with God in His Word and in prayer, seeking to learn His ways and not just His works. Make a list that compares God’s works and His ways.

LWF Dr. Adrian Rogers 

God’s Point of View

PRAY OVER THIS

“If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all liberally and without reproach, and it will be given to him.” James 1:5

 

PONDER THIS

Do you know what wisdom is? Wisdom is seeing life from God’s point of view. When you pray and you have the Spirit of God and the Word of God in you, you will begin to have wisdom. Knowledge comes by looking around, but wisdom comes by looking up. God will lead you and give you wisdom. When a person is walking in the Spirit, he can say, “I have the mind of Christ.” He’s not afraid to trust what the Spirit says. That is not natural; it is supernatural.

Wisdom is not a feeling like getting teary-eyed and warm around the heart. It is having a mind that is fixed on God, full of the Word of God, and led by the Spirit of God. The Bible says God will guide you with wisdom.

How have you measured wisdom in the past?

What does it look like to seek God’s wisdom? How can you do that today?

PRACTICE THIS

Share with someone the value of godly wisdom.

LWF Dr. Adrian Rogers 

We Wait, He Works

From of old no one has heard or perceived by the ear, no eye has seen a God besides you, who works for those who wait for him. (Isaiah 64:4)

Only a few things have gripped me with greater joy than the truth that God loves to show his God-ness by working for me, and that his working for me is always before and under and in any working I do for him.

At first it may sound arrogant of us, and belittling to God, to say that he works for us. But that’s only because of the connotation that I am an employer and God needs a job. That’s not the connotation when the Bible talks about God’s working for us. That’s not at all in Isaiah’s mind when he says, God “works for those who wait for him” (Isaiah 64:4).

The proper connotation of saying God works for me is that I am bankrupt and need a bailout. I am weak and need someone strong. I am endangered and need a protector. I am foolish and need someone wise. I am lost and need a Rescuer.

God works for me means I can’t do the work. I am utterly in need of help.

And this glorifies God not me. The Giver gets the glory. The Powerful One gets the praise.

Listen to the way the Bible talks about God working for you, and be freed from the burden of bearing your own load. Let him do that work.

“No eye has seen a God besides you, who works for those who wait for him” (Isaiah 64:4).

God is not “served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything” (Acts 17:25).

“The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45).

“The eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to give strong support to those whose heart is blameless toward him” (2 Chronicles 16:9).

“If I were hungry, I would not tell you. . . . Call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me” (Psalm 50:12, 15).

“To your old age . . . I will carry you. I have made, and I will bear; I will carry and will save” (Isaiah 46:4).

“I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me” (1 Corinthians 15:10).

“Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain” (Psalm 127:1).

“Whoever serves, [let him serve] by the strength that God supplies — in order that in everything God may be glorified” (1 Peter 4:11).

“Work out your own salvation . . . for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work” (Philippians 2:12–13).

“I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth” (1 Corinthians 3:6).

John Piper 

A Future for Failures

“Do not be afraid; you have done all this evil. Yet do not turn aside from following the Lord, but serve the Lord with all your heart. And do not turn aside after empty things that cannot profit or deliver, for they are empty. For the Lord will not forsake his people, for his great name’s sake, because it has pleased the Lord to make you a people for himself.” (1 Samuel 12:20–22)

When the Israelites have been brought to fear and they repent of their sin of demanding that Samuel give them a king to be like the other nations, then comes the good news: “Do not be afraid; you have done all this evil.” Do you hear how backward that sounds — how wonderfully backward? You might expect him to say, “Fear, for you have done all this evil.” That’s a good reason to fear: you have done the great evil of demanding another king besides God! But that’s not what Samuel says. “Do not be afraid; you have done all this evil.”

He goes on, “Yet do not turn aside from following the Lord, but serve the Lord with all your heart. And do not turn aside after empty things that cannot profit or deliver, for they are empty.”

This is the gospel: Even though you have sinned greatly, and terribly dishonored the Lord, even though you now have a king which it was a sin to demand, even though there is no undoing that sin or its painful consequences that are yet to come, nevertheless there is a future and a hope. There is mercy.

Fear not! Fear not!

Then comes the great ground — the basis and foundation — of the gospel in 1 Samuel 12:22. Why don’t you need to fear, even though you have done all this evil? “For the Lord will not forsake his people, for his great name’s sake, because it has pleased the Lord to make you a people for himself.”

The ground of the gospel is God’s commitment to his own name. Did you hear it? Don’t fear, though you have sinned, “The Lord will not forsake his people, for his great name’s sake.” This should have two effects on you: heart-breaking humility and toe-tapping happiness. Humility because your worth is not the foundation of your salvation. Happiness because your salvation is as sure as God’s allegiance to his own name. It can’t get more sure.

John Piper 

Lincoln’s Providence

Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! (Romans 11:33)

Abraham Lincoln, who was born on this day in 1809, remained skeptical, and at times even cynical, about religion into his forties. So, it is a most striking thing how personal and national suffering drew Lincoln into the reality of God, rather than pushing him away.

In 1862, when Lincoln was 53 years old, his 11-year-old son Willie died. Lincoln’s wife “tried to deal with her grief by searching out New Age mediums.” Lincoln turned to Phineas Gurley, pastor of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington.

Several long talks led to what Gurley described as “a conversion to Christ.” Lincoln confided that he was “driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I have nowhere else to go.”

Similarly, the horrors of the dead and wounded soldiers assaulted him daily. There were fifty hospitals for the wounded in Washington. The rotunda of the Capitol held two thousand cots for wounded soldiers.

Typically, fifty soldiers a day died in these temporary hospitals. All of this drove Lincoln deeper into the providence of God. “We cannot but believe, that He who made the world still governs it.”

His most famous statement about the providence of God in relation to the Civil War was his Second Inaugural Address, given a month before he was assassinated. It is remarkable for not making God a simple supporter for the Union or Confederate cause. God has his own purposes and does not excuse sin on either side.

Fondly do we hope — fervently do we pray — that this mighty scourge of war might speedily pass away. . . .

Yet if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid with another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago so still it must be said, “the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.”

I pray for all of you who suffer loss and injury and great sorrow that it will awaken for you, as it did for Lincoln, not an empty fatalism, but a deeper reliance on the infinite wisdom and love of God’s inscrutable providence.

John Piper 

Are You Planning God’s Way?

PRAY OVER THIS

“Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, spend a year there, buy and sell, and make a profit’; whereas you do not know what will happen tomorrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away.”

(James 4:13-14)

 

PONDER THIS

The man in this passage seems productive and successful. He’s doing all of this planning. It doesn’t look like he’s doing anything wrong. The Bible certainly doesn’t condemn business; it encourages it. Neither does the Bible condemn planning; it encourages it. The Bible is not against making a profit. These things are not wrong.

Look at this man and you’ll find out what was wrong with him. He left God out of his plans altogether. He’s not consulting with God. He’s not seeking the will of God. He’s like so many today. Your worship life is one thing; your business life is another thing. You’ve divided your life into the secular and the sacred. And so you come to church and worship, and then you plan your life as if there were no God. And the biggest fool is not the man who says there’s no God; the biggest fool is the man who says there is a God and then doesn’t live like it. Have you really taken God into your plans?

How much do you factor God into your plans each day?

What would it look like to do this faithfully?

PRACTICE THIS

Take out your schedule for the week. Consider what it would look like to plan your entire week with God in mind and adjust as you feel prompted by the Holy Spirit.

LWF Dr. Adrian Rogers 

Receiving God’s Gift God’s Way

PRAY OVER THIS

So David sent and inquired about the woman. And someone said, “Is this not Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite?” Then David sent messengers, and took her, and she came to him, and he lay with her. …And the woman conceived; so she sent and told David, and said, “I am with child.”

(2 Samuel 11:3-5)

 

PONDER THIS

When God says don’t commit adultery, He’s not trying to keep us from sex. He’s trying to keep sex for us. It is God’s gift. Therefore, it is to be used in its proper context. Rightfully used, it is wonderful. Wrongfully used, it is horrible. You may tell me, “there’s a fire in your house.” If the fire is in the walls, that’s horrible. But if it’s in the oven, and making biscuits, that’s wonderful. Likewise, you may say, “There’s some sod where you live.” If it’s in the front yard, that’s wonderful. If it’s on the living room rug, that’s horrible. What is beautiful in the front yard is just plain dirt on the rug. In the same way, sex can be a beautiful gift from God or a twisted distortion. For Christians, sex is not something to cast aside, but rather something to be received in the way that God intended. When we do this, we will receive the full benefits of the gift.

What are some ways the world wrongly receives the gift of sex?

How have you witnessed the brokenness of receiving this gift of God in the wrong way?

PRACTICE THIS

Take time today to pray and ask God to help you receive all of the gifts He gives in a way that honors Him and not according to your own desires.

LWF Dr. Adrian Rogers 

Church Growth God’s Way

It is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of the promise are counted as offspring. (Romans 9:8)

Picture the Old Testament Abraham as a pastor. The Lord says, “I will bless you and prosper your ministry.” But the church is barren and bears no children.

What does Abraham do? He begins to despair of supernatural intervention. He is getting old. His wife remains barren. So he decides to bring about God’s promised son without supernatural intervention. He has sex with Hagar his wife’s handmaid (Genesis 16:4). However, the result is not a “child of the promise,” but a “child of the flesh,” Ishmael.

God stuns Abraham by saying, “I will give you a son by her [your wife Sarah]” (Genesis 17:16). So Abraham cries out to God, “Oh that Ishmael might live before you!” (Genesis 17:18). He wants the work of his own natural, human effort to be the fulfillment of God’s promise. But God says, “No, but Sarah your wife shall bear you a son” (Genesis 17:19).

But Sarah is 90 years old. She has been barren all her life, and she has already passed through menopause (Genesis 18:11). Abraham is 100. The only hope for a child of promise is stunning, supernatural intervention.

That is what it means to be a “child of the promise” — to be born “not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:13). The only children that count for children of God in this world are supernaturally begotten children of promise. In Galatians 4:28 Paul says, “You [Christians], like Isaac, are children of promise.” You are “born according to the Spirit,” not according to the flesh (Galatians 4:29).

Think of Abraham as a pastor again. His church is not growing the way he believes God promised. He is weary of waiting for supernatural intervention. He turns to the “Hagar” of mere human devices, and decides he can “attract people” without the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit.

However, it will not be a church of Isaacs, but Ishmaelites — children of the flesh, not children of God. God save us from this kind of fatal success. By all means work. But always look to the Lord for the decisive, supernatural work. “The horse is made ready for the day of battle, but the victory belongs to the Lord” (Proverbs 21:31).

John Piper 

How Well Do You Know God?

“Behold, God is great, and we know him not; the number of his years is unsearchable.” (Job 36:26)

It is impossible to know God too well.

He is the most important person who exists. And this is because he made all others, and any importance they have is owing to him.

Any strength or intelligence or skill or beauty that other beings have comes from him. On every scale of excellence, he is infinitely greater than the best person you ever knew or ever heard of.

Being infinite, he is inexhaustibly interesting. It is impossible, therefore, that God be boring. His continual demonstration of the most intelligent and interesting actions is volcanic.

As the source of every good pleasure, he himself pleases fully and finally. If that’s not how we experience him, we are either dead, or blind, or sleepwalking.

It is therefore astonishing how little effort in this world is put into knowing God.

It’s as though the President of the United States came to live with you for a month, and you only said hello in passing every day or so. Or as if you were flown at the speed of light for a couple of hours around the sun and the solar system, and instead of looking out the window, you played a computer game. Or as if you were invited to watch the best actors, singers, athletes, inventors, and scholars perform their best, but you declined to go, so you could watch the TV season’s final soap.

Let us pray together that our infinitely great God would incline our hearts, and open our eyes to see him as fully as we can and seek to know him more.

John Piper 

He Does All That He Pleases

Our God is in the heavens; he does all that he pleases. (Psalm 115:3)

This verse teaches that whenever God acts, he acts in a way that pleases him.

God is never constrained to do a thing that he despises. He is never backed into a corner where his only recourse is to do something he hates to do.

He does whatever he pleases. And therefore, in some sense, he has pleasure in all that he does.

This should lead us to bow before God and praise his sovereign freedom — that, in some sense, he always acts in freedom, according to his own “good pleasure,” following the dictates of his own delights.

God never becomes the victim of circumstance. He is never forced into a situation where he must do something in which he cannot rejoice. He is not mocked. He is not trapped or cornered or coerced.

Even at the one point in history where he did what in one sense was the hardest thing for God to do, “not spare his own Son” (Romans 8:32), God was free and doing what pleased him. Paul says that the self-sacrifice of Jesus in death was “a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God” (Ephesians 5:2). The greatest sin, and the greatest death, and the hardest act of God was, in some profound way, pleasing to the Father.

And on his way to Calvary, Jesus himself had legions of angels at his disposal. “No one takes [my life] from me, but I lay it down of my own accord” (John 10:18) — of his own good pleasure — “for the joy that is set before him,” as it says in Hebrews 12:2. At the one point in the history of the universe where Jesus looked trapped, he was totally in charge doing precisely what he pleased — dying to glorify his Father in justifying the ungodly, like you and me.

So, let us stand in awe and wonder. And let us tremble that not only our praises of God’s sovereignty, but also our salvation through the death of Christ for us, hang on this: “Our God is in heaven; he does whatever he pleases.”

John Piper