In His Grip

(Click here for an audio version.    Music is from 'Godpleaser' by Petra. ) "Make me know Your ways, O LORD; Teach me Your paths. Lead me in Your truth and teach me, For You are the God of my salvation; For You I wait all the day." (Psalm 25:4-5) I wake up desperate.   No matter how refreshed my rest, my mind just takes off, and more often than not in a negative direction, one that, if left in its default mode, will sink into anxiety and depression. I desperately need God to teach me. Earlier this week I read Psalm 119:66: "Teach me good discernment and knowledge, For I believe in Your commandments." Strongly implied here is that I will be lost unless God directs me – and so will you.   Objectively speaking, the amount that we don’t know is infinitely greater than the amount that we do. God began to bring to mind other verses with the phrase ‘teach me’, and so I did a search for the phrase in the Bible.   It o...

(Click here for an audio version.    Music is from 'Godpleaser' by Petra. ) ""Cease striving and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth."" (Psalm 46:10) "More than that, I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but rubbish so that I may gain Christ,"   (Philippians 3:8) "We proclaim Him, admonishing every man and teaching every man with all wisdom, so that we may present every man complete in Christ. For this purpose also I labor,  striving according to His power, which mightily works within me."    (Colossians 1:28-29) What is your goal?   What are you aiming at?   By what do you measure if a day, week, month, year, or lifetime is ‘successful'?   What do you want to look back at and see accomplished? In short, what brings you the most...

( Click here for an audio version .  The intro and conclusion are from 'Godpleaser' by Petra. ) Much has been said in recent years about ‘social justice’. But what is justice?   Who gets to define it? May I suggest that the Only Source of true justice - and the One without whom we would have no concept of it – has something to say to us on the matter. Justice Defined In the Bible the words ‘justice’ and ‘righteousness’ are used hundreds of times.   The words are often used interchangeably, as the concepts of justice and righteousness are indelibly intertwined: ·       It is a legal judgment of what is defined as right; a righteous standard.   It is defined by God as a standard by which a person is acceptable to Him.   It is a consistent standard applied to all people without discrimination. The testimony of the Scriptures is that man in his fallen state is prone to distort justice, even in the smallest thoughts...

( Click here for an audio version .  The intro and conclusion are from 'Godpleaser' by Petra. ) ‘that they may be perfected in unity’ was Jesus’ prayer in John 17:23. What a wonderful desire, if not an elusive reality. King David would state it emphatically this way: “Behold, how good and how pleasant it is For brothers to dwell together in unity !"   (Psalm 133:1) Why is unity such a good and pleasant reality? Like the life of King David (you can read about his life in 1 Samuel 9 through 2 Samuel 24), our lives are often marked by more conflict and discord than unity and harmony.   The pain of conflict makes the joy of unity that much more precious to us. But where does unity come from?   I have observed the deep irony that unity with each other does not come from focusing on each other.   That is counter-intuitive, but as we will see today, certain. Unity can only come from something in common that unifies.   ...

( Click here for an audio version .  The intro and conclusion are from 'So Many Books' by Michael Card ) "For what the Law could not do, weak as it was through the flesh, God did: sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as an offering for sin, He condemned sin in the flesh, so that the requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us, who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit."    (Romans 8:3-4) In the last In His Grip we dove into the phrase ‘according to the flesh’.   Today we set our sights upward in a more positive direction to its opposite, ‘according to the Spirit’.   First and foremost, Romans 8:4 above tells us that God’s righteous requirement of us cannot actually be fulfilled by us, but must be fulfilled in us by the Holy Spirit.   This is the only possible way. How, and why?   New Life Let’s start at the beginning, that is, the beginning of new life.   In John chapter 3...