Category: Intimacy with God

This message has a big title to live up to, and I thought about changing it to something less bold, because I didn’t want people to come away from this saying that the best thing about the message was the title.

When you prepare a message, it is good to have a clear objective in mind, and to have a purpose high enough to even inspire yourself to dig deeper and uncover more gems to share. I feel privileged to be sharing an important, potentially life-changing message with you today. This is a message that I wish I had heard when I was younger.

But no matter how old you are, every person alive has a “rest of your life” to live. Even if you are the oldest person that you know, you have a “rest of your life”. And don’t you want the rest of your life to count? Don’t you want to make a difference in this world for God, even if you only have a short time left here? If you haven’t given up on living the rest of your life with a purpose, then this message is for you.

If you only knew how much you were worth…

Continue reading “Making Your Life Count: Developing Vision and Attitude to Accomplish All the Great Things That God Has for You to Do”

In any long-term relationship, there are many occasions for disagreement, conflict, and hurt — things that can damage or end relationships. This is true of those following Jesus and those who have not yet started following Jesus. One might think that inside the family of people following Jesus there wouldn’t be conflict, since all of us stand on the common ground of having been forgiven by God, and were told to forgive others as we have been forgiven. But people who follow Jesus have feelings just the same as those who don’t, and those feelings get hurt some times.

There are those in the faith who advocate suppressing your hurt feelings as a strategy for being more like Jesus. Good luck with that! Suppressed hurt feelings tend to bubble over in unexpected and undesirable ways, generally causing havoc for those who get bubbled upon, as well as for the bubblers. I do agree if the offense is small and it caused no real damage to the relationship, it is often wiser to overlook it. This is called “forbearance”. However, for those offenses that we have difficulty shaking, we can’t simply forbear, we have to do something about.

I’m pretty sure Jesus would not recommend stuffing our feelings. His comments in Matthew 18 suggest that He wants us to talk to the person who hurt us, for the purpose of restoring the relationship. I have heard some really bad teachings on Matthew 18, which spent a whole lot more time on punishing the other person. But if you read Matthew 18 as anything but a desire by Jesus to restore relationships, then you are reading it incorrectly.

Continue reading “Restoring Broken Relationships”

Sometimes I feel like the Lord prompts me to go to a particular chapter in the Bible, because he wants to say something to me from that passage that will either speak to my current circumstances or will teach me something about himself or the life of faith. On silent retreat a few weeks ago, I felt like I heard him say to turn to Psalm 147. I said to myself, “Well, that’s probably not the Lord, because I’m pretty sure there’s nothing really interesting there.” But I turned there any way, just in case. And in reading it, verse 11 especially popped out. It says

The Lord takes pleasure in those who reverently and worshipfully fear Him, in those who hope in His mercy and loving-kindness. (Amplified)

Skip over the word “fear” for now, because it evokes negative reactions in most of us, and to understand it properly, it will distract us from what the Lord is really saying here. This verse says that if we really believe in and rely on his goodness and kindness towards us, this attitude in us actually brings joy to God’s heart. We put a smile on God’s face because of how we trust him to love us and care for us.

Continue reading “How to Make God Smile”

I was thinking intently about the theme verses for a Chrysalis team I served on, trying to understand what they were telling me. (Chrysalis is a ministry to young people between the ages of 15 and 24, with chapters in many states and around the world.) The verses chosen by the leaders of the team were Hebrews 12:1-3, and in the NIV they read

_¹Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. _²Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. _³Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.

I don’t know about you, but when sentences are long and have a lot of commas and parenthetical expressions, it takes a while for their meaning to get to my brain. Probably because of that, it took me some time to break it into pieces so that I could grasp what it was saying. As I thought about what “the joy set before him” meant, it felt like the Holy Spirit spoke to me in my heart and said, “You were the joy set before Him”. Something deep within leapt with joy, while at the same time bringing tears to my eyes. Can it really be? When Jesus faced opposition and in His flesh felt like giving up, did He think of me, and that gave him hope?

Continue reading “Extravagant Love: Fixing our Eyes on Jesus”

One of the passages that seems to link the words dwell and abide that were the subject of three recent posts is Psalm 91:1-2, where it says

¹He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High
Will abide in the shadow of the Almighty.
²I will say to the LORD, “My refuge and my fortress,
My God, in whom I trust!” (NASB)

The word translated as “abide” in the NASB uses a third Greek word from the Septuagint that has a similar meaning to the two we have already seen. The Greek word , “aulizomai“, means “lodge” or “spend the night”. The NIV translates it as “rest in”. If you “dwell” in God’s presence, you will find “rest” there.

But even more than rest, we find something else. For me, the most profound point of these verses is that as we learn to dwell in God’s presence, we find an invaluable benefit: God will be our refuge. A refuge is a place of safety, where we are sheltered from the effects of storms and battles. A refuge does not cause the storms and battles to cease from raging around us, but instead keeps us safe as they rage. This is very much in tune with what the Apostle Paul writes in Romans 8:35-39.

Continue reading “Finding Refuge with the Lord”

Continuing the idea presented in the two earlier posts on abiding, based on the words of Jesus in the Gospel of John, we focus on an Old Testament passage from the book of Psalms. Here we focus on the idea of “dwelling”, which is very closely related to “abiding”. While the Old Testament was written in Hebrew and the New Testament was written in Greek, at the time of the writing of the New Testament, there was a Greek version of the Old Testament that provided the language and context for the quotations used by the Apostle Paul and most of the other writers. This version is known commonly as the Septuagint. We find that in the Septuagint, the Greek word for “dwell” (katoikeo) is in fact different from the Greek word used for “abide” (meno), but nonetheless, their meaning is almost identical. The former (“dwell”) has the sense of “inhabiting”, while the latter (“abide”) has the sense of “remaining” or “staying”.

One of the most famous verses emphasizing the idea of “dwelling” is found in Psalm 27:4. It says

One thing I ask of the LORD,
this is what I seek:
that I may dwell in the house of the LORD
all the days of my life,
to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD
and to seek him in his temple.

Continue reading “Dwelling in the Lord’s Presence”