Whose wisdom do you seek first?

BIBLE MEDITATION:

Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct thy paths. Proverbs 3:5-6

DEVOTIONAL THOUGHT:

If Jesus Christ is Lord of your life, you will give Him the first consideration in every decision you make. You’ll ask, “What is God’s will in this? What is Jesus wanting to do in this? What will glorify my Father?”

Have you ever worked for a company and they decided to transfer you? So many people, because of their financial obligations, discuss it with family and friends, then make plans for the move. But the transfer happens so quickly, sometimes prayer is forgotten.

ACTION POINT:

Friend, if God wants you to go, then go. If God doesn’t want you to go, then you need to stay. But you’ll never know until you get alone with God and let Him tell you what He wants.

LWF Dr. Adrian Rogers 

Transformation: It’s an inside job

BIBLE MEDITATION:

Thou blind Pharisee, cleanse first that which is within the cup and platter, that the outside of them may be clean also. Matthew 23:26

DEVOTIONAL THOUGHT:

What happens when we try to help others? In today’s mindset, we start on the outside, thinking if we can change their environment (their home, clothes, food, education), then we can create a new person. It cannot be done. It was in the Garden of Eden—the most perfect environment—that mankind got into trouble in the first place.

Cleaning up the outside is just reformation. When you clean up the inside—the heart, mind, and spirit—the person is regenerated. Jesus is telling the Pharisees in this verse that they don’t need another bath, they need another birth—a new birth.

ACTION POINT:

It’s not that we ought not to help others. We should. But people need more than soap and soup; they need salvation. They need a birth from above, not merely a boost from below. Sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ with your neighbor is the best “social work” you can do.

LWF Dr. Adrian Rogers 

A People for His Name

“Simeon has related how God first visited the Gentiles, to take from them a people for his name.” (Acts 15:14)

It is scarcely possible to overemphasize the centrality of the name of God, that is, the fame of God, in motivating the mission of the church.

When Peter had his world turned upside down by the vision of unclean animals in Acts 10, and by the lesson from God that he should evangelize Gentiles as well as Jews, he came back to Jerusalem and told the apostles that it was all owing to God’s zeal for his name. We know this because James summed up Peter’s speech like this: “Brothers, listen to me. Simeon has related how God first visited the Gentiles, to take from them a people for his name” (Acts 15:13–14).

It’s not surprising that Peter would say that God’s purpose was to gather a people for his name; because the Lord Jesus had stung Peter some years earlier with an unforgettable lesson.

You recall that, after a rich young man turned away from Jesus and refused to follow him, Peter said to Jesus, “See, we have left everything and followed you [unlike this rich fellow]. What then will we have?” (Matthew 19:27). Jesus responded with a mild rebuke, which in effect said that there is no ultimate sacrifice when you live for the name of the Son of Man. He said, “Everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands, for my name’s sake, will receive a hundredfold and will inherit eternal life” (Matthew 19:29).

The truth is plain: God is pursuing with omnipotent delight a worldwide purpose of gathering a people for his name from every tribe and language and nation (Revelation 5:9; 7:9). He has an inexhaustible enthusiasm for the fame of his name among the nations.

Therefore when we bring our affections in line with his, and, for the sake of his name, renounce the quest for our own worldly fame and comforts, and join his global purpose, God’s omnipotent commitment to his name flies like a banner before us, and we cannot lose, even if we must walk through many tribulations (Acts 14:22; Romans 8:35–39).

John Piper 

What It Means to Love God

O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water. So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary, beholding your power and glory. (Psalm 63:1–2)

Only God will satisfy a heart like David’s. And David was a man after God’s own heart. That’s the way we were created to be.

This is the essence of what it means to love God: to be satisfied in him. In him — not just his gifts, but God himself, as the glorious person that he is!

Loving God will include obeying all his commands; it will include believing all his word; it will include thanking him for all his gifts. But all that is overflow. The essence of loving God is admiring and enjoying all he is. And it is this enjoyment of God that makes all of our other responses truly glorifying to him.

We all know this intuitively as well as from Scripture. Do we feel most honored by the love of those who serve us from the constraints of duty, or from the delights of fellowship?

My wife is most honored when I say, “It makes me happy to spend time with you.” My happiness is the echo of her excellence. And so it is with God. He is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.

None of us has arrived at perfect satisfaction in God. I grieve often over the murmuring of my heart when I lose some earthly comfort or convenience. But I have tasted that the Lord is good. By God’s grace I now know the fountain of everlasting joy.

And so I love to spend my days luring people into joy until they say with me, “One thing have I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple” (Psalm 27:4).

John Piper 

Insight—your reward for obedience

BIBLE MEDITATION:

Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of My Father I have made known unto you. John 15:15

DEVOTIONAL THOUGHT:

What is the blessing of obedience? Intimacy with God. You will come to know things that you could never know any other way when you become intimate with God. And yet people are still asking, “How do I understand the Bible?” Friend, you will have a knowledge that surpasses anything you could gain from a school of learning when you serve the Lord in obedience.

Jesus said that we become His friends when we become His servants. And a friend knows all things. Amos 3:7 says, “Surely the Lord God will do nothing, but He revealeth His secret unto His servants the prophets.”

ACTION POINT:

Have you stopped growing? Perhaps it’s because you’ve stopped obeying. The way to have insight into the heart of God is through obedience.

LWF Dr. Adrian Rogers 

Pleased with His Precepts

This is the love of God, that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome. For everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world — our faith. Who is it that overcomes the world except the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God? (1 John 5:3–5)

What is plain in these verses is that being born again — being born of God — turns the commandments of God from being burdensome to being our delight. How does that work?

How does being born of God make the commandments of God a delight rather than a burden?

The apostle John says, “This is the victory that has overcome the world — our faith” (1 John 5:4). In other words, the way that being born of God overcomes the worldly burdensomeness of God’s commandments is by begetting faith. This is confirmed in 1 John 5:1, which says, literally, “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God.”

Faith is the evidence that we have been born of God. We do not cause ourselves to be born again by deciding to believe. God creates our willingness to believe by causing us to be born again. As Peter said in his first letter, God “caused us to be born again to a living hope” (1 Peter 1:3). Our living hope, or faith in future grace, is the work of God through new birth.

So, when John says, “Everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world,” and then adds, “And this is the victory that has overcome the world — our faith” (1 John 5:4), I take him to mean that God enables us, by the new birth, to overcome the world — that is, to overcome our worldly disinclination to keep God’s commandments. The new birth does this by creating faith, which evidently includes a disposition to be pleased by God’s commandments, rather than put off by God’s commandments, so that they feel burdensome.

Therefore, it is faith that overcomes our inborn hostility to God and his will, and frees us to keep his commandments and to say with the psalmist, “I delight to do your will, O my God” (Psalm 40:8).

John Piper 

"Free love”—fact or fantasy?

BIBLE MEDITATION:

For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments: and His commandments are not grievous. 1 John 5:3 

DEVOTIONAL THOUGHT:

One of the most prevalent ideas of the 1960s was the idea of “free love.” That concept is a lie. There’s no such thing as “free love.”  Real love is a great and grand commitment.  Real love costs you dearly. It is self-sacrificing. It means doing what is best for the other person.

Sometimes a young man who seeks his own gratification will say to a young woman “I love you” as a means of getting something from her. Oh, he loves her all right. He loves her like a man who loves oranges. He takes an orange, cuts a section, squeezes the sweet juice from it, wipes his mouth, then tosses it away like garbage, and says, “Man, I love oranges!” Let me tell you, real love is not that way.

ACTION POINT:

Lust lives to get. Real love lives to give. Read 1 Corinthians 13, and as you do, compare the world’s idea of “love” to genuine love. 

LWF Dr. Adrian Rogers