How has the Lord’s intervention in your life changed you?
26 Mar 26
Today's devotional: taken from YouVersion, Devotions on F.I.R.E. Year One
Readings:
Joshua 16
Joshua 17
Joshua 18
Luke 5:1-16
Do not be afraid. From now on you will catch men (Luke 5:10).
How has the Lord’s intervention in your life changed you?
Peter and associates have fished all night and caught nothing. After Jesus teaches, He tells the tired fisherman, “Launch out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch” (Luke 5:4). The hesitant apostle takes Jesus at His Word and has a huge catch of fish (Luke 5:6). Jesus assures the broken fisherman, “Do not be afraid. From now on you will catch men” (Luke 5:10). The expression “from now on” is a favorite of Luke, which shows that God’s intervention in one’s life changes things forever. Luke first uses this expression in Luke 1:48. Mary says, “henceforth [from now on] all generations will call me blessed.” She, like Peter, responds to the Lord’s work by faith (Luke 1:38), and that is why they are forever different.
Employment Point: Respond by faith to the Lord’s intervention to be forever changed.
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Reflections
Faith is a lesson and it is a gradual one, which brings us through the different levels of faith. It begins with seeing and believing to believing without seeing. “Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.”Hebrews 11:1 NIV
And as we move up through the different levels of faith, we too will be transformed as the Lord moves with us.
“The people of Joseph replied, “The hill country is not enough for us, and all the Canaanites who live in the plain have chariots fitted with iron, both those in Beth Shan and its settlements and those in the Valley of Jezreel.” But Joshua said to the tribes of Joseph—to Ephraim and Manasseh—“You are numerous and very powerful. You will have not only one allotment but the forested hill country as well. Clear it, and its farthest limits will be yours; though the Canaanites have chariots fitted with iron and though they are strong, you can drive them out.””Joshua 17:16-18 NIV
- it is typical of us to only see the challenges ahead but have forgotten who is with us. For if the Lord is for us, who can be against us? However, it takes time for us to recognise this authority from Heaven that is more powerful than any other. When we fail to see that, it is our own unbelief. It is not because the tribe of Joseph cannot defeat their enemies (Joshua had already told them that they have the power to drive them out). It is because they do not have that faith in the Lord.
- It is the same for us. One may deny and say no, I have full faith in the Lord. But when situations like these arise, is what we proclaim to be true to our actions too?
- May we continue to walk closely with the Lord so that our faith is able to increase day by day.
“Simon answered, “Master, we’ve worked hard all night and haven’t caught anything. But because you say so, I will let down the nets.””Luke 5:5 NIV
- sometimes faith can look like this too. We may not be sure but we know the one who do and the one who commanded it to be done. Sometimes, we just need to take that leap of faith to just do as we were told, no questions asked in order to experience something new, in order for us to level up.
“But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.”Luke 5:16 NIV
- the commentary from Nicky Gumbel’s Bible in One Year says this - You will never cope with the demands of life in the kingdom of God unless you are being recharged through your hotline to God.
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Vision by Personal Purity
BY OSWALD CHAMBERS
March 26
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. — Matthew 5:8
Purity is not innocence; it is much more. Purity is the outcome of sustained spiritual closeness with God. We have to grow in purity. Our private life with God may be healthy, and our inner purity may be unsullied, and still, every now and again, the bloom on the outside may become tarnished.
God doesn’t shield us from this possibility. When we go astray in some outward expression or action, we realize just how necessary outward purity is to maintaining our vision of God. Spiritual understanding becomes blurred the instant we go astray in our external lives. When we notice that the outward bloom of our life with God has been damaged, even to a tiny degree, we must stop everything and correct it. The inner sanctuary and the outer rooms must be brought into perfect agreement.
God makes us pure by his sovereign grace, but we also have something we must take care of: our bodily lives. Our bodily lives bring us into contact with other people and other points of view, and if we are not careful these external influences can tarnish our purity. If we are going to keep in personal contact with Jesus, there are some things we must refuse to do or touch or think, even things which seem worthy and legitimate to others. A practical way of maintaining personal purity around other people is to say to yourself, “That man, that woman: perfect in Christ Jesus! That friend, that relative: perfect in Christ Jesus!”
Remember that spiritual vision depends on character: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.”
WISDOM FROM OSWALD
We should always choose our books as God chooses our friends, just a bit beyond us, so that we have to do our level best to keep up with them.
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Reflections
Reading the above devotional reminds me of The Parable of the Clean Cup (Matthew 23:25-26). Jesus’s teachings focused on what is on the inside, which is our hearts. What may be good outward appearances or actions may just be skin deep. What His focus is upon us, is that we have a total heart surgery, as if we have undergone a heart transplant.
When we are in Christ, the Holy Spirit will convict us of things that are displeasing to the Lord. We will then have to choose to take action, to repent, to come to the Lord to seek His forgiveness, to ask the Lord to grant us the determination to change and follow His way instead of ours. We ought not to be like the Pharisees who outwardly appear as holy but with a heart that is in total contrast to what people think.
I guess it is good to periodically take stock and reflect on our lives and what we have been doing. To pray and seek the Lord on the things that He wants us to change. To listen for His voice and also find ways to purify ourselves. For His commands to us is this. “I am the Lord your God; consecrate yourselves and be holy, because I am holy.….”Leviticus 11:44a NIV
May the Lord carve in our hearts this reminder. We are all perfect in Christ Jesus!
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Lent devotion Day 37/53
taken from YouVersion, Lent for Everyone
Lent for Everyone is a devotional created and written by N.T. (Tom) Wright. For each day of Lent, there is a reading chosen from the Gospel of Matthew, plus a reflection by Wright. These readings have grown out of a project encouraging Lent reading in Northern England. This is the second in a three-volume series based on the Revised Common Lectionary of the Church of England.
Today’s reading:
Matthew 25:31-46
WEEK 5: THURSDAY
One of the greatest soldiers of modern times recently published an autobiography. In it, he skates very lightly over one or two incidents in which, according to those who knew him at the time, he acted with almost incredible bravery in the face of extreme danger. But you wouldn't know that from the book.
It isn't just modesty. His memory of the incidents, he will insist, is that he was concentrating totally on the safety of the soldiers under his command. He was completely focused on doing whatever was necessary to look after them while completing the dangerous tasks he and they had been assigned.
That sense of not knowing what it was one was doing right — or, indeed, wrong — is one of the most striking elements in this remarkable tableau. (It isn't a 'parable', by the way, despite what many people say; the image of 'the sheep and the goats' in verses 32 and 33 is just an illustration, a simile, not part of a longer story about shepherds and livestock.) The theme seems to be that Jesus is offering a panoramic view of the kind of world he longed to see, the kind which would bring glory to God and which he himself would therefore approve and applaud.
We would miss the point entirely if we were to read it as a list of 'rules to be obeyed'. To be sure, if you are starting out on the path of Christian discipleship, then these are guidelines that demand close attention. But Jesus doesn't envisage us keeping a list of these actions and carefully ticking them off as we do them. He wants us to be the sort of people who do these things, as we say, 'naturally' — though actually it will be a kind of 'second nature' — without stopping to think about them.
This, of course, demands effort, particularly in the early stages. But it's an effort which springs, and has always sprung right through the course of Christian history, from people knowing Jesus, worshipping him, hearing his word and feasting at his table. Though of course people of many traditions and beliefs are kind to outcasts, visit prisoners, feed the hungry, and so on, it is noticeable, especially in our increasingly selfish society, that those who sign up for these activities on a regular basis, and who do similar things automatically even when 'off duty', are people who day by day say their prayers and week by week worship the God we know in Jesus.
That was how Christian faith spread even when the Roman emperors were determined to stamp it out. People saw the Christians behaving like this and wanted to know why. The world was full, alas, of people who didn't help, didn't feed the hungry, and didn't care for the weak and vulnerable. The Christians were modelling a new way of being human. It was, and remains, compelling.
This tableau thus stands, at the end of the last long discourse in Matthew's gospel, as the final statement of something which has been there all through. The houses on the rock and on the sand, in Matthew 7; the wheat and the tares, the good fish and the bad, in Matthew 13; and now the sheep and the goats. Matthew has highlighted the fact that Jesus intended his followers to be utterly different, people who reflected God and his love in a whole new way into the world. That is what will ultimately count. There will be surprises all round when the things people have done without thinking about them turn out to reveal their deepest characters. But there will be no doubt which of the two ways of being human is the genuine article.
TODAY
Gracious Lord, as we look to your future, fill us with your love, so that we may gladly serve you by serving those around us in deepest need.
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Let’s pray:
Father may You grant us the focus to keep seeking You first so that through all these we are able to have peace in our hearts and the stillness to know that You are God.
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