Will you go the distance?

BIBLE MEDITATION:

Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us, Looking unto Jesus the Author and Finisher of our faith. Hebrews 12:1-2a

DEVOTIONAL THOUGHT:

Heaven is intently interested in what’s happening here on earth. Imagine a grandstand in Heaven filled with heroes of the faith, a “cloud of witnesses,” watching us and cheering us on. We are the runners; they are the spectators.

Many athletes have natural ability, but what is it that turns a mediocre athlete into a gold medal champion? One athlete is willing to hurt more than the others. When you can’t take another step, your muscles are sore, your body is aching—this is what it means to be running the race with perseverance, as Hebrews 12 says.

Today you may be hurting because a family member, coworker, or classmate has been unfair to you. A spouse has left. A friend walked away. Perhaps you were passed over for a promotion. You are bearing up under tremendous pressure. You are running to build endurance.

ACTION POINT:

Run with patience, as others have done before you—the  ones in that “great crowd of witnesses.” They testify to the fact that no matter how hard, it can be done. Look to Jesus. Building a faith that will go the distance takes both patience and time.

LWF Dr. Adrian Rogers 

Better Than Money, Sex, and Power

Do not throw away your confidence, which has a great reward. (Hebrews 10:35)

We need to ponder the superiority of God as our great reward over all that the world has to offer. If we don’t, we will love the world like everyone else and live like everyone else.

So, take the things that drive the world, and ponder how much better and more abiding God is. Take money or sex or power and think about them in relation to death. Death will take away every one of them. If that is what you live for, you won’t get much, and what you get, you lose.

But God’s treasure is vastly superior, and it lasts. It goes beyond death. It’s better than money because God owns all the money and he is our Father. We are his heirs. “All [things] are yours, and you are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s” (1 Corinthians 3:22–23).

It’s better than sex. Jesus never had sexual relations, and he was the most full and complete human that ever will exist. Sex is a shadow — an image — of a greater reality, of a relationship and a pleasure that will make the most exquisite sex seem like a yawn.

The reward of God is better than power. There is no greater human power than to be a child of the almighty God. “Do you not know that we are to judge angels?” (1 Corinthians 6:3). “The one who conquers, I will grant him to sit with me on my throne, as I also conquered and sat down with my Father on his throne” (Revelation 3:21).

And so it goes on and on. Everything the world has to offer, God is better and more abiding.

There is no comparison. God wins — every time. The question is: Will we have him? Will we wake up from the trance of this stupefying world and see and believe and rejoice in and love what is truly real, and infinitely valuable, and everlasting?

John Piper 

Encouragement for your race today

BIBLE MEDITATION:

Know ye not that they which run in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize? So run, that ye may obtain. 1 Corinthians 9:24

DEVOTIONAL THOUGHT:

God set one race before me. He set another race before you. Everyone must run their own race. We’re not in a race against each other; we’re in a pilgrimage together. I'm not trying to out-do you. You’re not trying to out-do me. God has set before me a race that is peculiar to me. God has a plan for my life. He has a plan for yours. God has a race He wants each of us to run. We’re to get on it and stay on it until it is over.

If the runners of that day were inspired when they ran their race, how much greater should our effort be today with all the saints who have gone before us and can testify of God’s faithfulness?

Do you feel inspired? I do! It encourages me to know I’m not alone out there in the race and that I have the testimony of men and women who have run the race, knowing the pitfalls that are out there.

ACTION POINT:

Friend, I hope you feel encouraged and inspired to run the unique race God has set for you today. At Love Worth Finding, we would be honored to hear how God is fulfilling your every need along the way.

LWF Dr. Adrian Rogers 

Are You Glad You Are Not God?

Ascribe to the Lord, O families of the peoples, ascribe to the Lord glory and strength! (Psalm 96:7)

Here’s at least part of the experience that the psalmist is referring to when he says, “Ascribe [= give] to the Lord strength.” What are we doing when we “Ascribe to the Lord strength”?

First, by God’s grace, we give attention to God and see that he is strong. We give heed to his strength. Then we give our approval to the greatness of his strength. We give due regard to its worth.

We find his strength to be wonderful. But what makes this wonder that we experience a “giving” kind of wonder — “Give to the Lord strength!” — is that we are especially glad that the greatness of the strength is his and not ours.

We feel a profound fitness in the fact that he is infinitely strong, and we are not. We love the fact that this is so. We do not envy God for his strength. We are not covetous of his power. We are full of joy that all strength is his.

Everything in us rejoices to go out of ourselves and behold this power — as if we had arrived at the celebration of the victory of a distance runner who had beaten us in the race, and we found our greatest joy in admiring his strength, rather than resenting our loss.

We find the deepest meaning in life when our hearts freely go out of ourselves to admire God’s power, rather than turning inward to boast in our own — or even think about our own. We discover something overwhelming: It is profoundly satisfying not to be God, but to give up all thoughts or desires to be God.

In our giving heed to God’s power there rises up in us a realization that God created the universe for this: so that we could have the supremely satisfying experience of not being God, but admiring the Godness of God — the strength of God. There settles over us a peaceful realization that admiration of the infinite is the final, all-satisfying end of all things.

We tremble at the slightest temptation to claim any power as coming from us. God has made us weak to protect us from this: “We have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us” (2 Corinthians 4:7).

Oh, what love this is, that God would protect us from replacing the everlasting heights of admiring his power with the futile attempt to boast in our own! It is a great gladness not to be, but rather to see, God!

John Piper 

What holds first place in your heart?

BIBLE MEDITATION:

Shall not God search this out? For He knoweth the secrets of the heart. Psalm 44:21

DEVOTIONAL THOUGHT:

Christian author and speaker S. D. Gordon said, “In every person’s life there is a throne. And when self is on the throne, Christ is on the cross. But when Christ is on the throne, self is on the cross.”

There’s something you believe to be the highest good that captivates your attention and controls your life. Your decisions are made in light of whatever this thing is. Is it Christ? Or something else?

God’s plan is not that Christ have “a place” in your life or that He have prominence in your life. Jesus Christ deserves and even demands preeminence in your life. That means there is no rebuttal, no refusal, and no rival.

ACTION POINT:

Ask God to reveal to you if there is anything is your life that is controlling your decisions, apart from the Lord Jesus Christ. Give Him permission to reveal that today.

LWF Dr. Adrian Rogers 

Eleventh-hour Breakthroughs

Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” (Luke 23:42)

One of the greatest hope-killers is that you have tried for so long to change, and have not succeeded.

You look back and think: What’s the use? Even if I could experience a breakthrough, there would be so little time left to live in my new way that it wouldn’t make much difference compared to so many years of failure.

The former robber (the thief on the cross next to Jesus) lived for another hour or so after his conversion. Then he died. He was changed. He lived on the cross as a new man with new attitudes and actions (no more reviling). But 99.99% of his life was wasted. Did the last couple hours of newness matter?

They mattered infinitely. This former robber, like all of us, will stand before the judgment seat of Christ to give an account of his life. “We must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil” (2 Corinthians 5:10). How will his life testify in that day to his new birth and his union with Christ? How will his life confirm his newness in Christ?

The last hours will tell the story. This man was new. His faith was real. He is truly united to Christ. Christ’s righteousness is his. His sins are forgiven.

That’s what the final hours will proclaim at the last judgment. He is changed! And his change mattered. It was, and it will be, a beautiful testimony to the power of God’s grace and the reality of his faith and his union with Christ.

Now back to our struggle with change. I am not saying that struggling believers are unsaved like the robber was. I am simply saying that the last years and the last hours of life matter.

If in the last 1% of our lives, we can get a victory over some long-standing sinful habit or hurtful defect in our personality, it will be a beautiful testimony now to the power of grace; and it will be an added witness (not the only one) at the last judgment to our faith in Christ and our union with him.

Take heart, struggler. Keep asking, seeking, knocking. Keep looking to Christ. If God gets glory by saving robbers in the eleventh hour, he surely has his purposes why he has waited till now to give you the breakthrough you have sought for years.

John Piper 

Moving beyond your 5 senses…

BIBLE MEDITATION:

But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you. Matthew 6:33

DEVOTIONAL THOUGHT:

Many Christians are so materialistic that they never look past the physical world to the transcendent Christ above. They only experience what their five senses (touch, taste, smell, sight, and hearing) bring to them.

When a problem arises, it blows out every candle in their souls, knocks the sun out of their sky, and they can’t enjoy the daily bread of life that Jesus promises.

ACTION POINT:

For some reading this, you’re in the midst of a gigantic problem that to the world has “disaster” written all over it. If you’re seeking first His righteousness, God will give you all you need. You have God on your side—the King of kings, the Lord of lords. Don’t you forget it.

LWF Dr. Adrian Rogers