Category: Devotionals

Hardened Humanity

Exodus 5:2 But Pharaoh said, “Who is the LORD, that I should obey his voice and let Israel go? I do not know the LORD

Read Exodus 5:1-7:13

Hardening of our Humanity

Have you ever been to the dentist and felt numb in the gums? This is a bit how Pharaoh felt about his heart.

If you worship things instead of the person of God, you will become less a person and more of a thing.

Ex 7:3 But I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and though I multiply my signs and wonders in the land of Egypt, 4 Pharaoh will not listen to you.

The worst thing God could do to Pharaoh is to simply give him over to the strongest desires of his heart. God makes us so free we are unable to not follow this freedom.

One of the descriptors the Bible often uses for the effects of sin is having a heart of stone (Ezekiel 11:19).  It is not that God is hardening our hearts actively he is passively allowing us to have the deepest and strongest desires of our heart. We play active part of  not listening (Ex 7:4).

The Knowledge of God

British satirist and author Jonathan Swift once said, “There Are None So Blind As Those Who Will Not See”(1738, “Polite Conversation”). There are moments in our lives when we will have Truth spoken to us and we will still refuse to see reality.

Pharaoh is approached by Moses and asked to liberate the people of Israel. What is Pharaoh’s response? “Who is the LORD… I do not know the LORD.” Pharaoh was not speaking as an atheist, he was speaking as a polytheist who was genuinely intrigued by the God of the Hebrews. Later on in the chapter he can no longer fit God into his box. Rather than revise his worldview  he decides to revise his understanding of the God of the Hebrews and reject the gracious overtures from the LORD.

Endless Wonder

God has filled our hearts with strong desires. We need to recognize it is not a matter of having weaker desires but having a greater object of our desire. The only thing that will melt our heart is to see Jesus as the greatest object of our affection. It is Jesus’ death on the cross that will gives us that greater object.

Ezek. 36:26 I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.

Inexhaustible Resources

Exodus 3:3 And Moses said, “I will turn aside to see this great sight, why the bush is not burned.”

Read Exodus 3:1-4:31

Have you ever discovered, learned or experienced something that changes your worldview? There are moments in our lives when things do not fit our worldview. We are prompted to either reexamine the evidence or reevaluate our worldview. Often times we refer to this text as the “burning bush” passage. However, it should more aptly be named the “non-burning bush” passage.

Moses had one of these moments. As he is tending his flock, he discovers the “burning bush.” His worldview tells him that bushes that are on fire should burn and within minutes they should be cinders. His curiosity leads him to investigate. Perhaps your understanding of God is undergoing one of these burning bush moments.

We all have burning bush moments.

We all have things that seemingly do not make sense in our life, but then we realize we may have been looking at life through an incorrect filter. Moses’ reappraisal of the natural world and the supernatural world leads him to encounter the Living God.  It is from this encounter that he is called to do exactly what God has wonderfully planned for his life.

The most important thing we learn from this passage is that “the bush is not burned.” This is a beautiful picture of what God does in our life. The bush that should be the very fuel for the fire, is not consumed. It has encountered the source of inexhaustible resources. God will give us never-ending resources to fulfill exactly what he has called us to do

Let us encounter the God who is all a burning joy and flame.

2Cor. 12:9 But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”

 

Divine Detours

Exodus 2: 15b Moses fled from Pharaoh and stayed in the land of Midian. And he sat down by a well.

Read Exodus 2:11-25

Have you ever felt like you are on a detour and your life actually should be going a different way?

One day, after Moses grew up he went to see the Hebrew workers. He saw his people being oppressed and impulsively decided to take justice into his own hands. He attacked and struck down the Egyptian who was beating one of his fellow Hebrews.

Moses’ impulsive act was both a metaphorical and literal “royal mess.” For the next 40 years Moses will live in exile in the desert of Midian. Moses probably felt like these 40 years were one large detour in his otherwise amazing story. Every detour in our life as we look back on it was part of a beautiful tapestry being woven by the Master Weaver. Even the snags and threads show that our life is a carefully woven and handcrafted piece of work.

Years later Moses would realise that his 40 years in the desert were part of his story and a growing of his skill set. He would learn about the One True God from his father-in-law and priest of Midian, Jethro. He would learn to live in the desert and be able teach and guide the people of Israel and teach them how to live a thriving and nomadic life in what would otherwise have been an inhospitable climate. If it had not been for the so called detour, Moses would never have met his wife Zipporah, and even more importantly the Living God at the burning bush.

Remember that you are not on a detour. God has a plan for your life and wants to meet with you. He will even help you discover that the detour was actually the intended route all along. Don’t flee from your detour, it is in the wilderness that God encounters his people time after time in the Old Testament. It was in the desert that God then propelled his own Son into the spotlight and spoke the most amazing words any human being will ever hear, “This is my Son in whom I am well pleased.” (Mark 1:11)

Out of the Strong, Sweetness

Exodus  2:1-10

3 When she could hide him no longer, she took for him a basket made of bulrushes and daubed it with bitumen and pitch. She put the child in it and placed it among the reeds by the river bank.

Have you ever wondered if Pharaoh found it ironic that every action that he took to destroy the Hebrews resulted in exact opposite of his intent? The river which the king wanted the boys thrown into would be the very river that would preserve a Hebrew boy and lead him to become their greatest leader. The court that was meant to inculcate Egyptian values and learning becomes the very vehicle for the beginnings of Hebrew scripture.

What topsy turvy events do you have in your life that the adversary would use for your downfall, yet God is using it to make you into a glorious person of character? Do you see these events as frustrating or do you embrace the goodness that God will bring out of it?

Just as the story of Samson and the Lion. Do you see God bringing sweetness out of the strong? Do you see God working behind the scenes accomplishing a beautiful and sweet mercy in your life?

Gen. 50:20 As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.

Nameless, Faceless

Ex. 1:1 These are the names of the sons of Israel who came to Egypt with Jacob

Names are very useful, they define objects and subjects. They tell us what things are or what they are not. Exodus is the greek name for this book. The Hebrew title of this book is “Names.”

These are the names….

Shiprah, Puah, Jocheved, Miriam, Aaron, Moses, Pharaoh, Jethro, Zipporah, and YHWH, the LORD. One by one the writer of Exodus introduces us to each succeeding character. In majestic fashion he unfolds the cast, character by character. The remarkable thing about all these names is that Pharaoh alone is the one name that is not personal. It could roughly be translated as “king” (literally “the great house”). He is only his title his very identity is only what he does.

By introducing all the characters the writer wants to immortalize their deeds and identities. The Pharaoh remains unknown, to this day commentators debate as to whether he was Seti I or Ramses II. We will never know, but we know the bravery of Shiprah and Puah.

Shiprah and Puah were two midwives—not the most particularly most glorious profession in the ancient near east. Nearly 3,300 years later we still tell their story and have no idea who Pharaoh is.

Pharaoah, who struggles to build great treasure cities for himself, remains incognito for eternity, whilst the Shiprah and Puah are sung through the ages.

Tucked into this passage is the secret of these faceless and nameless midwives, “because the midwives feared God, he gave them families.”(Ex 1:21) What a telling story. Women who had no name and no future are forever remembered by God and granted families. To not have children was considered the end of your family name. Women who did not have names were relegated to helping other women have children but never have their own.

God miraculously rescues both the children of Israel and the midwives. They get to see their offspring in the land of the living and rejoice.  It is the fear of the Lord that assures their name forever. Paul speaks of this fear, “Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name,”(Phil 2:9) when he speaks of Jesus choosing to fear God and obey. It is Christ’s obedience that guarantees we will never be forgotten.

The Psalmist speaks of this One, True Hero:

Psa. 22:22    
I will tell of your name to my brothers;
in the midst of the congregation I will praise you:
23  You who fear the LORD, praise him!
All you offspring of Jacob, glorify him,
and stand in awe of him, all you offspring of Israel!

 

The Cockroach in the Room

Psalm 112

1 Praise the LORD!
Blessed is the man who fears the LORD,
who greatly delights in his commandments!
…
7 He is not afraid of bad news;
his heart is firm, trusting in the LORD.

A Fearing Man

Often we hear the words “fear of God” and “fear of man” and our minds are triggered as though by some pavlovian response to indulge in religious jargon and lose the very nature of the “fear of God.”(v.1) Have you ever been afraid of insects, or known someone who is afraid of insects. I remember walking into a room with someone who was afraid of cockroaches. As we turned the light on, their only and chief concern in the room was the cockroach. My friend could not fuction, think or do anything else than think about the cockroach. This is a much more helpful illustration with regards to the fear of God than any religious jargon or vocabulary can offer.

Such is the story of this “Blessed Man” who fears the Lord.

 A Fearless Man

The Psalm goes on to enumerate all the other things that may be in the “room” of his life, but do not fill his attention span. We see family (v.2), wealth, success and money (v.3), personal morality and business ethics (v.5), or piety (v.9). Most of the furniture in this “Blessed Man’s” room is good. We should think focusing on this would not be a bad thing. Surely a little bit of fear with regards to how one’s family runs, how successful one is, or how one conducts business and life in an all-around moral way is not a bad focus fear.

What is it that makes this “Blessed Man” afraid of God but not afraid of failure or bad news?

The fearless man fears God. In other words he worships God, not success. He worships God, not family. He worships God, not success. The Psalmist tells us that this blessed person is utterly fearless with regard to bad news, because he does not worship success.

So what is the source of his fearlessness?

A Feared God

God is the only object of worship who when you fail him he will forgive you. All other objects of worship can become hard task masters. The reason why the Psalmist is fearless is that he knows his great debt has been paid. You can almost hear this Psalm echoing these words “with you there is forgiveness [therefore] you are feared.”(Psalm 130:4) V8.

God is feared, not because of his power, but because of his mercy. That is the awe inspiring truth. Jesus had no reason to go to Golgotha and suffers the scars of the scourge, except to bring about our forgiveness. Once the Psalmist experiences forgiveness, his only response is awe.

Come Thou Long Expected Jesus

Come, Thou long expected Jesus
Born to set Thy people free;
From our fears and sins release us,
Let us find our rest in Thee.
Israel’s Strength and Consolation,
Hope of all the earth Thou art;
Dear Desire of every nation,
Joy of every longing heart.

Born Thy people to deliver,
Born a child and yet a King,
Born to reign in us forever,
Now Thy gracious kingdom bring.
By Thine own eternal Spirit
Rule in all our hearts alone;
By Thine all sufficient merit,
Raise us to Thy glorious throne.

Christy Nockels

 

 

 

 

 

 

Come Thou Long Expected Jesus performed by Christy Nockels.

In most Christian Calendars we have a season of five weeks known as Advent. These are the weeks leading up to Christmas in which we sing about our once and future king. Advent derives its name from the Latin “ad + venire” “to come.” This Advent Hymn’s words were penned by Charles Wesley.

One of the earliest Christian expressions was the word Marantha. Greeks, Romans, Jews, Scythians, and barbarians left this word untranslated. (see 1 Cor 16:22) Such was the early Christian expectation in 56AD. Jesus would return to fix His broken world. It encapsulates the hopes, dreams, fears, aspirations and longings of every human being. Christ’s first and second coming bring the wiping away of tears, no more sickness and no more war. Maranatha! Our Lord, Come!

Each advent song speaks of our exile from a perfectly running world, a longing for a True King, and a hope that all will be set right. The Christian doctrine of Advent offers this in one fell swoop. God, in Christ, came to redeem us from slavery of sin, become our True King as he was crowned with thorns, and deliver us from darkness into the kingdom of light.

These next weeks let us reflect on what it means to have a Once and Future King.

Collect for the First Sunday of Advent

Almighty God,
give us grace to cast away the works of darkness
and to put on the armour of light,
now in the time of this mortal life,
in which your Son Jesus Christ came to us in great humility;
that on the last day,
when he shall come again in his glorious majesty
to judge the living and the dead,
we may rise to the life immortal;
through him who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

Amen

 

 

Liquid Courage

Psa. 108
A SONG. A PSALM OF DAVID.
1 My heart is steadfast, O God!
I will sing and make melody with all my being!
2 Awake, O harp and lyre!
I will awake the dawn!
…
5 Be exalted, O God, above the heavens!
Let your glory be over all the earth!
6That your beloved ones may be delivered,
give salvation by your right hand and answer me!
…
11 Have you not rejected us, O God?
You do not go out, O God, with our armies.
12 Oh grant us help against the foe,
for vain is the salvation of man!
13 With God we shall do valiantly;
it is he who will tread down our foes.

Liquid Courage

No single human being has ever been free from a little bit of stage fright. This psalm of David is actually a combination of 57:7–11 and 60:5–12. Both of these Psalms focus on dealing with fear. David is singing this Psalm knowing that he is about to enter into the performance of his lifetime—a battlefield. He ends the psalm with a prayer to deal with his fears and anxieties, “Oh grant us help against the foe, for vain is the salvation of man! With God we shall do valiantly.”(v13)

There are two ways to deal with his “stage fright” or being performance driven. One method to deal with our fears is to give ourselves a coaching session or “pep talk.” In it you will remind yourself how you actually possess all the qualities necessary to conquer your fears. You will begin to puff yourself up and become unrealistic about your limitations. In fact the way we often deal with fear is by appealing to an indirect form of pride. St Paul talks about this in Philippians 2:3 when he admonishes us to do nothing out of “vainglory” or “conceit.”

David tells us that the one way of dealing with our fears is very much how Goliath dealt with them. It is the way of empty glory and false courage.

The Christian way of dealing with fear is not a path of empty glory, but of glory emptying. As Shakespeare put it, we must “divest ourselves of borrowed glories”(Henry V). We need to acknowledge that any glory we may have was never actually our own. It was only on loan from the Glorious One. David acknowledges this saying, “Be exalted, O God, above the heavens! Let your glory be over all the earth! That your beloved ones may be delivered,” (v5-6).

Unfortunately, we easily can take this glory-emptying as another task we need to accomplish. But David tells us that we cannot deliver ourselves. In fact is it God that does the deliverance. Just as Israel needed a champion to defeat Goliath, so we need a champion to defeat our fears. If you remember the story of David and Goliath, it is about two champions meeting on the field of battle. Whichever Champion wins, his victories will be imputed to that people group. The vicarious warrior who loses will representatively impute his loses to all his people. When Jesus performs the ultimate self-emptying he is giving us his glory. All our defeats become his and all his glories become ours. (Phil 2:5-11)

David prays that his Champion will impute His victories, His glories and His wins to his people –without them ever lifting a finger. May our trust in our Champion Jesus be credited as righteousness, glory and courage.

Forget Me Not

Psa. 106:1 Praise the LORD!
Oh give thanks to the LORD, for he is good,
for his steadfast love endures forever!
2 Who can utter the mighty deeds of the LORD,
or declare all his praise?
Psalm 106:21 They forgot God, their Savior,
who had done great things in Egypt,

10 years ago on the 7th of November, 2003, one of my roommates was shot down whilst piloting his Blackhawk Helicopter in Tikrit, Iraq.

Remembrance Day just flew by. It is a day in which we remember soldiers who made the supreme sacrifice so that we could enjoy the current liberties we so easily take for granted.

This whole psalm is one of thanksgiving. It remembers God’s special care and ransom. But it also painfully recounts the community’s forgetfulness. We often forget unimportant things – and it is not a big deal. When we forget the important things of life we engage in a very subtle form of ungratefulness.

At the military academy my roomates and I chose inscriptions on our class rings that read, “Greater love has no man than this that he lay down his life for his friends.”(John 15:13). Though heartwarming it is nothing compared to the One who truly uttered those words.

This Psalm is a hymn of praise to a God of redeeming, sacrificial love. In spite of all the ungratefulness, God pursues, God redeems, God forgives. “Nevertheless, he looked upon their distress, when he heard their cry. For their sake he remembered his covenant,”(v44-45).

For all its exposure of man’s ingratitude, this is a psalm of praise, for it is God’s extraordinary longsuffering that emerges as the real theme.

It is in this Psalm we see the Captain of our Salvation (Heb 2:10), the one who will spare no expense and regardless of the remembrance or thankfulness of those rescued. He punches a whole through death and accomplishes His great rescue. Let us pause and remember the Great Captain of our Salvation.

Holding your breath

Psalm 104

1 Bless the LORD, O my soul!
O LORD my God, you are very great!
You are clothed with splendor and majesty,
2 covering yourself with light as with a garment,
stretching out the heavens like a tent.
3 He lays the beams of his chambers on the waters;
he makes the clouds his chariot;
he rides on the wings of the wind;
4 he makes his messengers winds,
his ministers a flaming fire.
…
27 These all look to you,
to give them their food in due season.
28 When you give it to them,
they gather it up; when you open your hand,
they are filled with good things.
29 When you hide your face,
they are dismayed;
when you take away their breath,
they die and return to their dust.
30 When you send forth your Spirit,
they are created, and you renew the face of the ground.
31 May the glory of the LORD endure forever;
may the LORD rejoice in his works,

One of our finest hymns, Sir Robert Grant’s O worship the King, takes its origin from this psalm. This Psalm is literally breath-taking. It takes us on a speedy tour through creation. The imagery and poetry of this Psalm capture the reader in rapture, wonder and delight of our Creator.  We hear of the sheer pleasure of God in creating the universe. We catch a small glimpse of what it must have meant for God’s creative act to be the spilling over and out of the delight of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Their creative acts are not born out of need; they are born out sheer pleasure and enjoyment.

The Psalmist responds with worship. For him it is poetry. For others it may be music, still others it may be the glee of figuring out a small bit of this puzzle called the universe. Whichever way you express worship never lose the wonder of praise.

Behind all this, the subject of this whole Psalm is the outflowing energy of God which holds all things in being. The breath, or spirit, of every living thing depends on his Spirit, or breath; the same word is used in 29 and 30 for both. The Psalmist leaves us with a paradox, if we do not respond in breath-taking wonder(v1-27) we will experience breathless wandering(v29). This, so far from implicating him in our misdeeds, deepens our accountability, since we handle only what is his. (see Dan. 5:23: ‘The God in whose hand is your breath … you have not honoured.’)

The stunning thing about Grace is that the God that gave us breath gives up His breath on the cross. In exhaling “Father into your hands do I commit my Spirit,” he breathes his last breath and we breath our first. He gives up His Spirit that we may receive the Holy Spirit.

 

O Worship the King

by Robert Grant (1779-1838) and
Johann Michael Haydn (1737-1806)

O worship the King, all glorious above,
O gratefully sing God’s power and God’s love;
our Shield and Defender, the Ancient of Days,
pavilioned in splendor, and girded with praise. 
 
O tell of God’s might, O sing of God’s grace, 
whose robe is the light, whose canopy space, 
whose chariots of wrath the deep thunderclouds form,
and dark is God’s path on the wings of the storm.
 
Frail children of dust, and feeble as frail,
in thee do we trust, nor find thee to fail;
thy mercies how tender, how firm to the end,
our Maker, Defender, Redeemer, and Friend.