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.

What Does He Want? (Friday Devotional)

“Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.”

- Psalm 119:105

People go to extreme lengths to find out what their best future looks like—what job they’re “supposed” to take, who their “supposed” to marry, where they’re “supposed” to live, etc. Pursuing knowledge of what the future holds, some turn to psychics and soothsayers who offer vague pronouncements about what is to come. More analytical minds map out as many hypothetical outcomes as they can imagine and give themselves migraines trying to decide the right decision for every possible scenario.

Not only are Christians susceptible to this desire to know their best future now, they baptize it. Certain that God has one specific, set destiny in mind for every person (and fearful of deviating from it), many Christians will go to extreme lengths to ensure they’re making the correct life decisions. For some that means closing their eyes, pointing to a Bible verse at random, and drawing inspiration from its contents. For others it means waiting for a sign from above, however innocuous that sign may seem to others, and counting on it to point them in the right direction. These flawed methods, though grounded more in superstition than mature faith in God, nevertheless point to a valid, faithful question: how do I know what God wants me to do?

Scripture tells us that the word of God—whether the spoken word of the Lord’s still, small voice; the written word of the Bible; or the incarnate Word of Jesus Christ—is the source of direction in the life of the believer. The psalmist compares God’s word to a lamp, illuminating where you should go; it shines a light when all you see is darkness. By listening to God in prayer, by reading the God-breathed words of Scripture, and by observing the actions and ethic of Jesus, the Word made flesh, you are able to better discern where God is leading you.

When seeking the will of God in your life, you don’t have to turn to elaborate rituals or convoluted procedures to know what God calls you to do. He is not a trickster who reveals His will in riddles; rather, He has abundantly revealed Himself through the words of the Bible and the actions of Jesus, and He continues to show us His will day by day in the Spirit. If you want to know what God wants from you, it’s not about finding the right mechanism you can control—it’s simply about listening to what He says.

Into the Unknown (Friday Devotional)

“Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” So Abram went, as the Lord had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran.”

- Genesis 12:1-4

We hadn’t seen a sign for half an hour. The road had long ago narrowed to one lane, and a tight one at that. To top it off, the 4G signal on our phones, the signal that had been giving us directions up to this point, had abandoned us several miles back. As the car continued to climb the mountainside, never going faster than 20 mph, it was hard to believe we were going the right way.

Lindsey and I were headed to a hiking trail in the Great Smoky Mountains, one recommended to us by a park ranger the day before. It was remote, he’d said, not one of the trails most park visitors attempted, largely due to its distance from the park’s visitors center. That was appealing to us when he told us about it, but as we now made our way up the mountain, we understood others’ hesitation. Climbing the mountain road in our rental car with no hint that a trailhead was near, pressing deeper and deeper into a wilderness we were unfamiliar with, we couldn’t help but wonder: why didn’t we stick with what we knew?

This is the kind of question that must have dogged Abram even in his obedience. While we often focus on the promises God makes in this passage, that Abram will be blessed and his enemies cursed and that he will be a blessing to all the families of the earth, the Lord does not shy away from the demand he is placing on his servant. Abram is commanded to, at age 75, start over—to leave behind his “country and [his] kindred and [his] father’s house”, all for a land he has never seen and to which God hasn’t yet given him directions. His call is to leave behind the known for the unknown.

Moments like these, when your comfortable status quo is threatened by the beckoning of an uncertain future, are perhaps the truest test of your faith in God. When you hear the Lord calling you to make a change, the easy choice is to clamp your hands over your ears and shout, “I can’t hear you!” After all, you think, God has blessed me where I am, so why would he possibly want me to go somewhere else?

One of the greatest threats to faith is such complacency. When you assume you’re spiritually where you need to be, when you’ve closed yourself off to the idea of God changing you, you can no longer claim to be in His will. Especially when your way seems safer and more comfortable than God’s way, faith is what compels you to follow Him instead of leading yourself.

Surrendering your life to the Lord is not a decision you make once, it is something you choose to do every day, every moment. When you know God is calling you to make a change—to serve when you would rather sit, to reach out when you would rather keep to yourself, to forgive when you would rather hold a grudge—which is more important to you, your comfort or His will?

Fighting Fear (Friday Devotional)

“There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. We loved because He first loved us.”

- 1 John 4:18-19

Fear has an outsized influence on decision making. Sometimes this is a positive thing: you fear losing steady income, so you save; you fear gaining weight so you eat in moderation. Fear of the worst case scenario can keep your basest instincts in check.

But more often, fear does not enable self-control, it cripples it.  When you are afraid, instead of thinking rationally and reasonably, you simply react. Instead of holding to what you know is right, you jump at what feels safe. Fear has a way of causing you to think, say, and do things which would normally make you cringe.

Common sense says that you reduce your fear by improving your safety, or at least your feeling of safety. But the unfortunate reality is that a new menace always seems to be right around the corner, whether familiar or in a new form. No matter how much security your provide yourself, no matter how many threats you eliminate or prevent, fear always tells you that you’re a step behind and that danger could strike any day now.

So the Bible offers a different formula for driving out fear, one that is not intuitive but works nevertheless: love. Rather than reacting to fear with anger and rash decisions, God says to respond to fear by worrying less about your own well-being and more about how you can help another’s. We see this lived out in the ministry of Jesus, who spent his days surrounded by the diseased and the demon-possessed, but who reached out instead of recoiling. We see it in his preaching, where he proclaimed the good news even while some of his listeners plotted his death. Ultimately, we see it at the cross, where he gave his life so that we might be saved. In moments when Jesus would have had every right to fear for himself, he thought first of others.

Love does not promise safety and security—after all, Jesus’s supreme example of love resulted in his crucifixion and death. But it does promise that you can face even the most frightening challenges without fearing them. Instead of cowering in the face of your dread, love empowers you stand up for others. Instead of condemning those you see as threats, love enables you to see them as people created in the image of God. Where fear wounds, love redeems.

In a world that sometimes seems to grow more frightening every day, God’s message remains the same: “there is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear.” When you are afraid, instead of grabbing at the low rung of anger and spitefulness, may you reach for the higher ideal of Christ, who responded to fear with compassion, mercy, and grace. May the cross serve not only as your salvation, but as your example—that even when things are at their scariest, loving like Jesus can only bring victory.