Preparing for the Party (Friday Devotional)

“Seek the Lord while He may be found, call upon Him while He is near; let the wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous their thoughts; let them return to the Lord, that He may have mercy on them, and to our God, for He will abundantly pardon.”

- Isaiah 55:6-7

I’ve learned something as an adult that was beyond my comprehension as a child and even a teenager: holidays and big events don’t just happen. Christmas festivities with the family, Thanksgiving dinner, birthday celebrations—all of these used to be fun get-togethers where all I had to do was show up, eat, and maybe open some presents. It never occurred to me that there was more to it than that for anybody else.

Only after getting married did I suddenly learn the truth—such celebrations are feats of planning and coordination. Finding the right weekend that 25 people can be in the same house for dinner is a herculean task, one best undertaken months in advance. Coordinating with family members so that no one buys the same gift for the same person—something I’d always thought just happily worked out on its own—turns out to be an exercise in stress management. Even cooking the holiday meal, which I’d always assumed was relatively similar to any other dinner, just with more food, is something that requires a minute-by-minute plan before the oven ever starts preheating. I never realized it until lately, but it’s true: if a holiday is going to work, you can’t just show up; you have to prepare for it.

This same principle applies spiritually as we approach Easter. In this Lenten season, when our eyes are fixed upon the cross and our souls are overwhelmed by the scope of its power, there is a need for every believer to seek the Lord in a spirit of repentance. Before you can rejoice at Christ’s power over your sins, you must first acknowledge the reality of those sins, the sad truth that you are prone to wander from the God you love. Before you can sing praises of thanksgiving for the imputed righteousness of Christ, you must first turn your unrighteousness over to Him. Before you can praise God for His mercy, you must first rely on that mercy.

Repentance is not a one-time event, not just step one in the procedure of salvation; it is an attitude that all believers are called to adopt in their daily walk with God. There is never a time in which you no longer need God’s presence in your life, and so there should never be a time in which you stop coming to Him. Long before Jesus walked the earth, the prophet Isaiah declared that God’s people should seek the Lord while He may be found and call upon Him while He is near, that they should repent of their sins and rely upon His mercy. As those who are witnesses to that mercy personified, Jesus Christ dying on the cross, how can we do any less?

As the days draw nearer to Easter Sunday, may you in turn draw nearer to the Lord, approaching Him with the humility of a repentant heart. And by coming to Him daily with a spirit of repentance, may you find yourself newly captivated by the grace of God.

What's In It For Me? (Friday Devotional)

“For many live as enemies of the cross of Christ; I have often told you of them, and now I tell you even with tears. Their end is destruction; their god is the belly; and their glory is in their shame; their minds are set on earthly things. But our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.”

- Philippians 3:18-20

“What’s in it for me?”

That question, whether asked bluntly or with a more courteous approach, is something you probably at least wonder about before extending a helping hand. It’s why fundraisers award benefits to top donors, why politicians campaign in the language of pandering instead of principle—as appealing as altruism sounds in theory, in practice we like knowing we’ll get a little something for our trouble.

But the difference between self-interest and selfishness is subtle, and the follower of Christ should be wary of it. It takes no time at all for curiosity about what you might gain to turn into a demand for gain. And when your willingness to serve is contingent on what you’ll get out of the experience, you are on a dangerous path.

Scripture warns against those who put their own interests above all else: “their end is destruction, their god is their belly.” In other words, they have placed their own desires above anything else, with disastrous consequences for themselves and those around them. To do this is to be an “enemy of the cross”, because the cross is the ultimate representation of self-sacrifice, of love without regard for self-interest.

In this Lenten season, you have the opportunity to reexamine your priorities and ask yourself what and who is most important. So be mindful of where your true loyalty lies—in yourself, or in the Savior who calls you to deny yourself and take up your cross. Instead of asking what’s in for you, may your concern be what’s in it for Him.

What A Mess (Friday Devotional)

“Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded.”

- James 4:8

When I was a freshman in college, my roommates and I had an unspoken rule regarding whose job it was to take out the trash. We would allow our one wastebasket, situated for some reason by the door, to fill up to its brim and then overflow to the floor, where the pizza boxes and empty 2-liter bottles would then pile up to precarious heights. Eventually, when we’d crossed the line from the expected slovenliness of college guys to just being disgusting slobs, one of the three of us would gather all that garbage in his arms and make the long trek(s) to the dumpster outside. When that brave soul had completed his task, the baton was passed off to the next roommate, and the cycle would begin again, this time with him in charge of the next garbage collection.

In theory, it was a perfect system—when it was time to take out the trash, we rotated the responsibility evenly. But after a few weeks, I noticed a problem with our silent agreement: we each had different definitions of when that time was. I was the neat freak of the group; I wanted to be able to carry everything in one trip. One of my roommates would let it get a little worse than that; he didn’t mind some clutter if it meant he could wait another day to make his dumpster trip. But my other roommate…

When it was his turn, we knew we were going to spend a few weeks staring at a growing accumulation of floor trash. If we mentioned the pile to him passive-aggressively (the only language college roommates know), he’d assure us he was going to get to it. And in the meantime, the pile of trash on the floor would grow to impressive heights. But on numerous occasions, my cleanliness overwhelmed my sense of fairness—when the trash started spilling over into the doorway, when I had to leap over the heap of Gatorade bottles and Ramen noodle boxes just to get in my own room, I would override our agreement and gather all the trash up myself, making the 3, 4, sometimes 5 trips to the dumpster, cursing my roommate under my breath the whole way. The trash had always bothered me, but when it was blocking my access, that was the last straw.

Sometimes your relationship with God works the same way. You want access to Him, you want to feel His presence, but your path is cluttered with junk. Sins from the past, struggles of the present, and worries about the future all accumulate into such a mess that your attempts at worship are muddied; your prayers are distracted and unfocused. You want to enter into God’s presence, but it’s hard to first get past the mess you’ve made.

Scripture offers a simple prescription for this: repentance. Rather than trying to maneuver your way around your sins into God’s presence, content to leave them where they are for now, the Bible calls you to remove them altogether, to cleanse your hands and purify your heart so that you can better draw near to God. Instead of being double-minded, compartmentalizing your faith and separating it from areas you’d rather not change, you are called to fix your eyes on Jesus, knowing that if you will repent of your sinfulness, the Lord will welcome you into His presence with open arms.

Lent, which began Wednesday, offers an occasion to examine yourself and seek repentance. In this season when as Christians we prepare our hearts for the journey to the cross and the joy of the resurrection, take some time to reflect on what messes are blocking your way and whether they are worth the separation they create. The sooner you seek God’s forgiveness, the sooner you will find restoration in His presence—don’t wait; that mess isn’t going to clean itself up.

An Attention Grabber (Friday Devotional)

“For we do not preach ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus’s sake.”

- 2 Corinthians 4:5

We live in an age of self-promotion: every major accomplishment is announced on Facebook, every photo catalogued on Instagram, every quip transmitted via Twitter. Between selfies, status updates, blog posts, and more, social media offers a host of ways to shout to the world, “Look at me!” Everyone wants to be noticed, and it has never been quite so easy to put yourself in the spotlight.

For the follower of Jesus, the age of self-promotion is troubling because of its potential effect on how the gospel is perceived and delivered. For every believer, the good news of Jesus Christ is a personal story, a testimony of how you have been saved and redeemed. One of the most beautiful things about the gospel is that it is not just a dusty old tale stuck in the first century; it is alive and relevant for every believer, who can proudly claim, “This is my story.”

But while part of the gospel’s power is demonstrated in its effect on individual lives, we should never lose sight of who the main character is: not the recipient of salvation, but the Savior himself; not you, but him. It is Jesus who accomplished the work of salvation, who died on the cross and then rose in glory. It is Jesus who sanctifies the believer, who calls every Christian to abide with him. The follower of Jesus is not center stage, but is by definition at the back of the line, with the Lord leading the way.

The beautiful reality of the gospel, sometimes hard to swallow in an age of self-promotion, is that it is much less about you than about Jesus; it is not a story about how far you’ve come so much as how far he has brought you. The cross is not a tool for building yourself up in the eyes of others, but a reminder that the exalted will be humbled and the humble will be exalted, that Christ’s power is perfected in weakness. So may your pursuit not be self-promotion, but self-sacrifice, giving of yourself not so that you will be noticed, but so that Jesus will be.