Serve God with Your Thirst

So whether we are at home or away, we make it our aim to please him. (2 Corinthians 5:9)

What if you discovered (like the Pharisees did) that you had devoted your whole life to trying to please God, but all the while had been doing things that in God’s sight were abominations (Luke 16:14–15)?

Someone may question this and say, “I don’t think that’s possible; God wouldn’t reject a person who has been trying to please him.” But do you see what this questioner has done? He has based his conviction about what would please God on his idea of what God is like. That is precisely why we must begin with the character of God revealed in Scripture.

God is a mountain spring, not a watering trough. A mountain spring is self-replenishing. It constantly overflows and supplies others. But a watering trough needs to be filled with a pump or bucket. So, the great question is: How do you serve a spring? And: How do you serve a watering trough? How do you glorify God the way he really is?

If you want to glorify the worth of a watering trough, you work hard to keep it full and useful. But if you want to glorify the worth of a spring, you do it by getting down on your hands and knees and drinking to your heart’s satisfaction, until you have the refreshment and strength to go back down in the valley and tell the people what you’ve found.

My hope as a desperate sinner hangs on this biblical truth: that God is the kind of God who will be pleased with the one thing I have to offer: my thirst. That’s why the sovereign freedom and self-sufficiency of God are so precious to me: they are the foundation of my hope that God is delighted not by the resourcefulness of bucket brigades, but by the bending down of broken sinners to drink at the fountain of grace.

By all means we should seek to please God, now and forever. But woe to us if our whole life proves to be based on a false view of what pleases God. The Lord is pleased not by those who treat him as a needy watering trough, but as an inexhaustible, all-satisfying spring. As Psalm 147:11 says, “The Lord takes pleasure . . . in those who hope in his steadfast love.”

John Piper 

What legacy are you leaving behind?

BIBLE MEDITATION:

And when thy son asketh thee in time to come, saying, ‘What mean the testimonies and the statutes and the judgments which the Lord our God hath commanded you?’ Then thou shalt say unto thy son, ‘We were Pharaoh’s bondmen in Egypt and the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand… And He brought us out from thence that He might bring us in. Deuteronomy 6:20-23

DEVOTIONAL THOUGHT:

Fathers, you’re going to leave a legacy. The most important thing in your life, other than your relationship with God, is your family. God brought you out of your bondage, sorrow, and night, that He might bring you into His land of glorious fruitfulness and light.

The best thing most of us fathers could do is ask, “Oh, God, teach me how to walk in victory. Lord, get me out of this wilderness. I want to be a Spirit-filled Christian living in victory.”

May I tell you what’s wrong with many of our families? They’ve come out of Egypt but they haven’t “gone into Canaan.” They’re saved; they’re going to Heaven. But I’m convinced the reason the devil gets most of the kids out of good families is they’ve come out, but they’ve never gone in. They’re dumped in the desert, and they’re going around in circles. And the child never sees in them victory.

ACTION POINT:

Do your children see in you victory? Is there the principle of possession? Have they seen the corn and oil, the grapes, figs and pomegranates that Canaan represents: the fullness of the Lord Jesus Christ? Or do they just hear sermons about it on Sunday?

LWF Dr. Adrian Rogers 

The Honeymoon That Never Ends

As the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you. (Isaiah 62:5)

When God does good to his people, it is not so much like a reluctant judge showing kindness to a criminal whom he finds despicable. It is like a bridegroom showing affection to his bride.

Sometimes we joke and say about a marriage, “The honeymoon is over.” But that’s because we are finite. We can’t sustain a honeymoon level of intensity and affection. But God says that his joy over his people is like a bridegroom over a bride. And he doesn’t mean it starts out that way and then fades.

He is talking about honeymoon intensity and honeymoon pleasures and honeymoon energy and excitement and enthusiasm and enjoyment. He is trying to get into our hearts what he means when he says he rejoices over us with all his heart. Jeremiah 32:41, “I will rejoice in doing them good, and I will plant them in this land in faithfulness, with all my heart and all my soul.” Zephaniah 3:17, “The Lord your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing.”

With God the honeymoon never ends. He is infinite in power and wisdom and creativity so that there will be no boredom for the next trillion ages of millenniums.

John Piper 

Defeat your enemy just like Jesus did

BIBLE MEDITATION:

For in that He Himself has suffered, being tempted, He is able to help those who are tempted. Hebrews 2:18

DEVOTIONAL THOUGHT:

After Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist, He was “led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil” (Matthew 4:1). He did not overcome Satan as God, but as man anointed by the power of God. There’s an important distinction here for us to understand.

Jesus could have said, “Satan, I want you to know that because I am God, I will obliterate you this moment.” Had He asserted His power as God, then when He asks us to overcome the devil, we’d be saying, “Sure, it’s easy for You to say that! You’re God! Don’t expect me to do what You did.” 

But Jesus didn’t pull rank on us. Instead, God anointed Jesus as a man to do what we, as humans, can also do by His anointing. You and I have what we need to face any temptation, for we are in Christ, and He is in us.

ACTION POINT:

You have the same Father to call upon and the same Word of God to use against the enemy. You do not have to yield, give up, or give in. Instead, you can have the victory over him, just as Jesus did. Remember, “Greater is He that is in you than he that is in the world” ( 1 John 4:4).

LWF Dr. Adrian Rogers 

How Much God Wants to Bless You

“The Lord will again take delight in prospering you.” (Deuteronomy 30:9)

God does not bless us begrudgingly. There is a kind of eagerness about the beneficence of God. He does not wait for us to come to him. He seeks us out, because it is his pleasure to do us good. God is not waiting for us; he is pursuing us. That, in fact, is the literal translation of Psalm 23:6, “Surely goodness and mercy shall pursue me all the days of my life.”

God loves to show mercy. Let me say it again. God loves to show mercy. He is not hesitant or indecisive or tentative in his desires to do good to his people. His anger must be released by a stiff safety lock, but his mercy has a hair trigger. That’s what he meant when he came down on Mount Sinai and said to Moses, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love” (Exodus 34:6). It’s what he meant when he said in Jeremiah 9:24, “I am the Lord who practices steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth. For in these things I delight, declares the Lord.”

God is never irritable or edgy. His anger never has a short fuse. Instead he is infinitely energetic with absolutely unbounded and unending enthusiasm for the fulfillment of his delights.

This is hard for us to comprehend, because we have to sleep every day just to cope, not to mention thrive. Our emotions go up and down. We get bored and discouraged one day and feel hopeful and excited another.

We are like little geysers that gurgle and sputter and pop erratically. But God is like a great Niagara Falls — you look at 186,000 tons of water crashing over the precipice every minute, and think: Surely this can’t keep going at this force year after year after year. Yet it does.

That’s the way God is about doing us good. He never grows weary of it. It never gets boring to him. The Niagara of his grace has no end.

John Piper 

What God will do for you if you let Him

BIBLE MEDITATION:

Now He which establishes us with you in Christ, and hath anointed us, is God. 2 Corinthians 1:21

DEVOTIONAL THOUGHT:

What will God do for you if you will allow Him? He will establish you. In other words, He will make you stable, steadfast, dependable, and unmovable so that you will not be blown about by every wind of doctrine.

This verb “establishes” in Greek is in the present participle, which means it’s a continuing action. There’s no “once and for all” here. God is in the process of establishing you.

Now, where is He establishing you? In Christ. He is moving you closer and closer to Christ the Rock of your salvation. When you are saved, God puts you into Christ and then, day by day, He moves you closer to Him.

ACTION POINT:

Thank God today for the continuous work God is doing in your life, establishing you in Christ, the Solid Rock.

LWF Dr. Adrian Rogers 

Who Killed Jesus?

He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? (Romans 8:32)

One of my friends who used to be a pastor in Illinois was preaching to a group of prisoners in a state prison during Holy Week several years ago. At one point in his message, he paused and asked the men if they knew who killed Jesus.

Some said the soldiers did. Some said the Jews did. Some said Pilate. After there was silence, my friend said simply, “His Father killed him.”

That’s what the first half of Romans 8:32 says: God did not spare his own Son but handed him over — to death. “This Jesus [was] delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God” (Acts 2:23). Isaiah 53 puts it even more bluntly, “We esteemed him stricken, smitten by God. . . . It was the will of the Lord to crush him; he (his Father!) has put him to grief” (Isaiah 53:4, 10).

Or as Romans 3:25 says, “God put [him] forward as a propitiation by his blood.” Just as Abraham lifted the knife over the chest of his son Isaac, but then spared his son because there was a ram in the thicket, so God the Father lifted his knife over the chest of his own Son, Jesus — but did not spare him, because he was the ram; he was the substitute.

God did not spare his own Son, because it was the only way he could spare us and still be a just and holy God. The guilt of our transgressions, the punishment of our iniquities, the curse of our sin would have brought us inescapably to the destruction of hell. But God did not spare his own Son; he gave him up to be pierced for our transgressions, and crushed for our iniquities, and crucified for our sins.

This verse — Romans 8:32 — is the most precious verse in the Bible to me because the foundation of the all-encompassing promise of God’s future grace is that the Son of God bore in his body all my punishment and all my guilt and all my condemnation and all my blame and all my fault and all my corruption, so that I might stand before a great and holy God, forgiven, reconciled, justified, accepted, and the beneficiary of unspeakable promises of pleasure forever and ever at his right hand.

John Piper