How can I “work up” enough faith today?

BIBLE MEDITATION:

Looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God. Hebrews 12:2

DEVOTIONAL THOUGHT:

How do you have faith? You look to Jesus, and faith is produced in your heart.

You don’t have to “work up” faith.

Suppose I needed to cross the Mississippi River and I wasn’t sure whether the bridge could hold me up or not. I could do one of two things: 

• Stand on the bank and try to work up enough courage to believe in the structural integrity of that bridge, then timidly walk over it. 

• Or look at the semi-trucks traveling across the mighty steel and concrete of that bridge, believe, and boldly walk across in faith!

In this case, faith is the by-product of seeing the strength of the bridge itself. In the same way, it’s not great faith in God that you need; it’s faith in a great God!

When you see who Jesus Christ is, when you become acquainted with Him, when you look unto Jesus, who is our chief example, He gives you strength for the race. Not only is He the Author of our faith, He’s also the Finisher of our faith.

"Finisher" means He is the one who completes and perfects our faith. He gives you the strength to run the race. He puts us in the race, then He gives us the strength for it.

ACTION POINT:

Pray: Father, I have been a lazy spiritual athlete. Help those of us who have not known discipline, determination, and direction, to learn them. And, Lord, help us always to be looking unto Jesus.

LWF Dr. Adrian Rogers 

The Mystery of Marriage

Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. (Ephesians 5:31–32)

Here in Ephesians 5:31 Paul is quoting Genesis 2:24, which Moses spoke — and Jesus said God spoke through Moses (Matthew 19:5) — “A man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” Paul says this word of God, spoken before the fall into sin, is a reference to Christ and the church and contains therefore a great mystery.

What this implies is that when God engaged to create man and woman and to ordain the union of marriage, he didn’t roll the dice or draw straws or flip a coin as to how they might be related to each other. He patterned marriage very purposefully after the relationship between his Son and the church, which he had planned from all eternity.

Therefore, marriage is a mystery — it contains and conceals a meaning far greater than what we see on the outside. God created man male and female and ordained marriage so that the eternal covenant relationship between Christ and his church would be imaged forth in the marriage union.

The inference Paul draws from this mystery is that the roles of husband and wife in marriage are not arbitrarily assigned, but are rooted in the distinctive roles of Christ and his church.

Those of us who are married need to ponder again and again how mysterious and wonderful it is that God grants us in marriage the privilege to image forth stupendous divine realities infinitely bigger and greater than ourselves.

This mystery of Christ and the church is the foundation of the pattern of love that Paul describes for marriage. It is not enough to say that each spouse should pursue his or her own joy in the joy of the other. That is true. But it is not enough. It is also important to say that husbands and wives should consciously copy the relationship God intended for Christ and the church. That is, each should seek to live after the distinctive model of God’s pure and glad design for Christ and the church.

I hope you will take this seriously whether you are single or married, old or young. The revelation of the covenant-keeping Christ and his covenant-keeping church hangs on it.

John Piper

Something you can never scrub clean

BIBLE MEDITATION:

Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. Psalm 51:7

DEVOTIONAL THOUGHT:

I heard of a missionary whose wife was very fastidious. They moved into a small hut, and soon she noticed that the floor was filthy. The first thing the wife wanted to do was to scrub that floor, so she scrubbed and scrubbed but to no avail. She began to wonder if she would ever get the floor clean. Finally, somebody told her the problem. It was a dirt floor! The more she scrubbed the more dirt she scrubbed up.

In the same way, we can never scrub off our sinful nature. All we do is reveal more of what is there.

I hate to tell you this, but we’re rotten to the core.

Jesus said, “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3).

ACTION POINT:

How dirty are you this morning? How clean must you be before you can talk with your heavenly Father? Claim the blood of Jesus and commune freely with your Father who loves you.

LWF Dr. Adrian Rogers 

Prayer’s First Priority

Pray then like this: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.” (Matthew 6:9)

In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus teaches that the first priority in praying is to ask our heavenly Father to cause his name to be hallowed. In us. In the church. In the world. Everywhere.

Notice that this is a petition, a request. It is not a declaration or acclamation. It is not an expression of praise, but petition. For years I misread the Lord’s Prayer as if it began with praise: “Praise God, the Lord’s name is hallowed, revered, honored!” But it is not acclamation. It is supplication. It is a request to God that he would see to it that his own name be hallowed.

It is like another text, Matthew 9:38, where Jesus tells us to pray to the Lord of the harvest that he would send out laborers into his own harvest. It never ceases to amaze me that we, we laborers, should be instructed to ask the owner of the farm, who knows the harvest better than we do, to add on more farm hands.

But isn’t this the same thing we have here in the Lord’s Prayer — Jesus is telling us to ask God, who is infinitely jealous for the honor of his own name, to see to it that his name be hallowed, which means honored, revered, exalted as supremely precious?

Well it may amaze us, but there it is. And it teaches us two things.

One is that prayer does not move God to do things he is disinclined to do. He has every intention to cause his name to be hallowed. Nothing is higher on God’s priority list. But we should ask anyway.

The other is that prayer is God’s way of bringing our priorities into line with his. God wills to make great things the consequence of our prayers when our prayers are the consequence of his great purposes.

Bring your heart into line with the jealousy of God to hallow his name, and you will pray with great effect. Let your first and all-determining prayer be for the hallowing of God’s name, and your prayers will plug into the power of God’s jealousy for his name.

John Piper 

To understand miracles, you must become one

BIBLE MEDITATION:

Jesus answered and said unto him, “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” John 3:3

DEVOTIONAL THOUGHT:

Nicodemus was so impressed with the miracles Jesus had done that he wanted to find out more. He asked Jesus about miracles, and Jesus began to talk to him about births. It’s as if Jesus were saying, “Nicodemus, if you want to understand miracles, you’re going to have to become a miracle.”

When you are born again, there is a direct creative act of God. “Therefore if any man be in Christ he is a new creation…” (2 Cor. 5:17). Someone new comes into existence.

Now Nicodemus was an intelligent man, a ruler of the Jews, and a member of the Sanhedrin. Yet with all his learning, he heard Jesus say to him, “Except you are born again, you cannot see the kingdom of God.” People simply can’t understand spiritual things until the Holy Spirit of God turns the light on in their souls.

ACTION POINT:

A miracle can take place in you today as the Word of God and the Spirit of God meet your will, and you bow your head, and you say to God today, “Oh God, be it done unto me according to Your word. Do you know someone who has a lot of education but no salvation? I challenge you to share this same Good News with him or her today.

LWF Dr. Adrian Rogers 

Love’s Greatest Happiness

No one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body. (Ephesians 5:29–30)

Don’t miss that last phrase: “because we are members of his body.” And don’t forget what Paul said two verses earlier, namely, that Christ gave himself for us “so that he might present the church to himself in splendor.” So in two different ways, Paul makes plain that Christ pursued his joy in pursuing the holiness and beauty and happiness of his people.

The union between Christ and his bride is so close (“one flesh”) that any good done to her is a good done to himself. Which means that the clear assertion of this text is that the Lord is moved to nourish, cherish, sanctify, and cleanse his bride because in this he finds his joy.

By some definitions, this cannot be love. Love, they say, must be free of self-interest — especially Christlike love, especially Calvary love. I have never seen such a view of love made to square with this passage of Scripture.

Yet what Christ does for his bride, this text plainly calls love: “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church . . . ” (Ephesians 5:25). Why not let the text define love for us, instead of bringing our definition from ethics or philosophy? According to this text, love is the pursuit of Christ’s joy in the holy joy of the beloved.

There is no way to exclude self-interest from love, for self-interest is not the same as selfishness. Selfishness seeks its own private happiness at the expense of others.

Christlike love seeks its happiness in the happiness of others — not at their expense. It will even suffer and die for the beloved in order that its joy might be made full in the life and purity of the beloved.

This is how Christ loved us, and this is how he calls us to love one another.

John Piper 

The Impact of a Liberated Soul

BIBLE MEDITATION:

“Come now, and let us reason together,” saith the Lord. “Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow . . .” Isaiah 1:18a

DEVOTIONAL THOUGHT:

I heard of a man giving his testimony at a Salvation Army meeting. There was a heckler in the crowd shouting, “Would you shut up? You’re just dreaming!”

The heckler felt a tug at his coattail and a little girl said, “That’s my daddy up there. He used to be a drunkard and beat up my mommy. We didn’t have enough food to eat. But then he got saved, and my daddy’s life is changed. See that woman over there? See how happy she is? That’s my mommy. Mister, if my daddy’s dreaming, don’t wake him up!”

It’s not a dream; it’s real. It’s what’s happened to millions of people around the world and what happens to each one of us when we receive the Lord Jesus. It’s real. He changed me. He saved me. I became a new creature.

What a Savior who can take a poor lost sinner, wash him, save him, and make him new. Hallelujah!

ACTION POINT:

When was the last time you shared Christ with a homeless person? Avail yourself and allow God to use you to shine His light in that direction.

LWF Dr. Adrian Rogers