Category: Spiritual

Because you have … not withheld … your only son, I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky … and through your offspring, all nations on earth will be blessed, because you have obeyed me. Genesis 22: 16-18 (NIV)

It fills a father’s heart with joy to see his children obey. The younger our children are when they willingly and joyfully obey, the more remarkable it is! In our desire to build godliness into our children’s lives, we want to be sure obedience is in place on their character chart.

If the obedience of our children is meaningful to us, how much more it must please God when we obey Him, whether we understand the outcome or not. Abraham did just that. When God asked him to take Issac to Mt. Moriah and sacrifice him, Abraham obeyed. We aren’t told of the emotions he felt or the sleeplessness he may have endured through the long night before. We just KNOW that he obeyed and trusted in God.

BOTTOM LINE:

One of the best gifts a godly father can give his child is when the child can observe his father’s heart being obedient to the Lord. So, are we ready to immediately and joyfully do whatever God asks without hesitation? Yes, it may at times be very difficult, and we MAY not fully understand until we see the full effect later in our life’s rear view mirror, but rest assured, God blesses families when their fathers obey.

One act of obedience is worth more than a hundred sermons.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Discovery: Experiencing God’s Word Day by Day June 8 David Jeremiah

I’m always so curious…

Fathers, this camouflaged short simple 246 word devotional has the explosive potential to rock our boats, perhaps thus revealing the needed changes in our embedded fathering leadership patterns, especially when we consider Abraham being commanded to GO, let alone the SACRIFICE component!

First off, is it normal thinking that we men (or even mothers) place ourselves mentally in a similar position as Abraham found himself? I did briefly, and then naively, found myself wondering if I would have even shared the command with Loretta, or if I’d just sucked it up, made the necessary plans the night before, arisen early the next morning and left without a word? Who am I kidding when I can’t even plan and implement a surprise picnic?

And I also keep wondering, where was Sara in all this drama? I’m not aware scripture really addresses that, like her earlier recorded snicker. Had Abraham confided the command with her, or, did he not, but because of her intuition as his wife, was she there undetected in the early morning shadows, watching Abraham’s team departure. Either way, knowledgeable or not, of God’s bizarre command, you wives/mothers can best imagine Sara’s mental anguish from such a heart-wrenching situation .

Back again to my reality. When my brain fog lifts, I realize my suppositions that God would even enter my space and give me such a command was akin to pure foolishness. It is not likely I will ever possess the essentials to warrant such an interaction/intervention from God. How I could ever be so naive to think that I could place myself in that realm of possibility of that command from God ever occurring to me?

But yet, is that not the playing field for all of us today to navigate as we encounter our “altar challenge” in order to spiritually mature? So, perhaps the important question really is: how well am I now obeying His Biblical commands or reveling in the inspiration of His Holy Spirit, so we’re ready for that inevitable future “altar moment”?

Such off-the-wall thinking tends to demoralize my present mental state before God and upon becoming depressed by my intellectual folly, He soon replaces such foolishness by an awe of His greatness. Read Psalm 19. Notice how quickly our warped little minds can run the gamut from our nothingness before an Almighty God to embracing the resplendent empowering three “omni” attributes that characterize Him as all-powerful, all-knowing, and everywhere present culminating in John 3:16, “For God SO LOVED the world that He gave His ONLY BEGOTTEN SON, that whosoever BELIEVETH in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

FYI, Omnipotence means that God is in total control of himself and His creation. Omniscience means that He is the ultimate criterion of truth and falsity so that His ideas are always true. Omnipresence means that since God’s power and knowledge extend to all parts of creation, he himself is present everywhere. Together they define God’s lordship, and they provide us a rich understanding of creation, providence, and salvation.

Greater understanding of God always begins with obedience.

The following scripture was listed on today’s dailylightdevotional.org., again, such an inspiration.

“And being not weak in faith, [Abraham] considered not his own body now dead, when he was about an hundred years old, neither yet the deadness of Sarah’s womb; he staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief; but was strong in faith, giving glory to God. And being fully persuaded that, what He had promised, He was also able to perform.” Rom. 4:19-21 KJV

The Message version reads:

19. Abraham didn’t focus on his own impotence and say, “It’s hopeless. This hundred-year-old body could never father a child.” Nor did he survey Sarah’s decades of infertility and give up.
20. He didn’t tiptoe around God’s promise asking cautiously skeptical questions. He plunged into the promise and came up strong, ready for God,
21. sure that God would make good on what he had said.

“And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also. John 14:3

Little kids love the idea of a special trip. If a favorite uncle promised them a day trip to the zoo, beach, or other long desired destination, they can hardly sleep the night before. On the day, they are up early and dressed long before the appointed hour. Then they stand by a front window waiting for the familiar car to pull in the driveway.

No wonder Jesus said that those entering the kingdom of God ought to enter like children – with the same wide-eyed anticipation of a child being transported from the ordinary to the extraordinary (Matthew 18:3). The Bible says Jesus has promised to come and “pick us up” and take us to a place He is now preparing for us (John 14: 1-3).   

And not for just a day of fun, but for all eternity. The question is, “What is our level of anticipation?” As adults, are we so attached to things of this world that we have lost our sense of anticipation? Get ready! He is coming again to gather those who want to spend an eternal day with Him.

David Jeremiah Destination: Your Journey With God June 12

FYI: Recently while in MA I made a new friend six years younger than I from Colombia S.A. who too was visiting his son and grandchildren in the UMass complex next door to my son and grandson. We really hit it off, he’d gotten his Master’s from Auburn, his PhD in Japan, and spent a lifetime in the science of raising fish for meat commercially, etc.

We explored many bunny trails all leading repeatedly to our shared concern for the fragile state of our world’s well-being, and especially the handicaps the younger generations are now inheriting. We each entered the conversation from our experiential spiritual perspectives, Anabaptist & Catholicism, but the commonality of being bonded in faith and mental community transcended country of origin or education. I personally sensed a real sadness in that we’d likely never meet again, perhaps sorta like those divine seatmate encounters on airplanes, but this time I didn’t have work needing done!

I remember well thinking to myself as I left the encounter, why can’t we just be honest and say, “Well so long for now, but I’ll see you later in heaven, when we can really get acquainted.” Fast forward in time depending on our schedules and God’s, will determine whether we’ll then be concerned about our kids and grand-kids, but at least, he and I will be ultimately restored!

Ever since that revelation nearly two weeks ago, I’ve been thinking how I’m going to implement that conversational openness when publicly appropriate about we meeting up in eternity, when we’re in our next similar earthly encounter, and are about to part when it is very likely our paths will never ever cross again. And just why is this?

Why are we so crazily inhibited about publicly referencing professionally our eternal home? Just think about how much of our yak time is driven by trivia, perhaps significant at the moment of impact, if your AC or car just died, or your dog had to be put down, etc.. but really now, note how easily we are effectively shut down and rendered totally ineffective.

Yes indeed, I agree, life does happens! But still, where is our eagerness like a child as expressed above? Get the picture? Remember when you as a child had a trip the next day and you couldn’t sleep? I suggest we all go lay out in the grass like I remember doing once as a first grader during summer vacation contemplating how I was ever going to survive until school started again, but then, miraculously my legs finally reached the tractor’s clutch and brake pedals, and I never again lacked for engaging opportunities! I remember while looking up yonder back then, either watching those MN cumulus clouds by day, or at night, the stars, and now, I’m trying to remember what I was thinking back then and what was going on in the world. I well remember while getting ready for church Sunday morning Oct 6 1957 hearing on Christian radio that the Sputnik mission was successful, but that was 28 months after I was first deemed fit to drive the tractor.

Now if getting into this heaven frame of mind doesn’t come easy or natural, I highly recommend “Imagine Heaven” by John Burke, formerly an agnostic engineer whom God repurposed to prime the flow of our understanding and appreciation for heaven.  I’ve mentioned that book frequently prior. Sorta reminds me when as a kid I primed the pump outside the one room schoolhouse to secure a vibrant flow of water, but you might not get that either.

Bottom Line: First, we gotta get in the flow! Utmost For His Highest today tells us “The one true mark of a saint of God is the inner creativity that flows from being totally surrendered to Jesus Christ. In the life of a saint there is this amazing Well, which is a continual source of original life. The Spirit of God is a well that is springing up perpetually fresh. A saint realizes that it is God who engineers his circumstances; consequently, there are no complaints, only unrestrained surrender to Jesus.

(And this is so key-perhaps even today’s second bottom line):

Never try to make your experience a principle for others, but allow God to be as creative and original with others as He has been with you!!!” Go For It, No excuses!

Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning. James 1:17

No matter how dear your friends are, they can fail. No matter how much money you have, you can go broke. No matter how diligently you exercise, you can get sick. Even your most trusted walking stick can break. Your dearest dream can die. Life is as uncertain as the clouds that gather and scatter, and as fickle as the waves on a beach.

That being said, we oldsters today are experiencing losses that are not easy for us to verbalize among our peers and especially, our genetic down-line. We, who were birthed during the 30-40 year period from just prior WWII until our nation’s 200th birthday, largely experienced the cultural dimensions of hope and prosperity as communicated to us by our parents, family, close-knit communities and the relevant stable institutions, etc., providing us in the USA, at least on the surface, a mostly invigorating world view, even though we usually knew much of the world’s populations were struggling for adequate water, sustenance, shelter, and especially, physical and emotional health and its subsequent well being.

Fact is today, the hopelessness formerly experienced in either third world or strife or war-torn countries during our first 30-40 years of life has now come home to roost in Europe and North America, and more than a few of us are increasingly, viewing our current culture and living conditions at their best, kindly spoken, simply as “senseless!” The evidence is now in plain sight even with the switch & bait games, with such as the Covid fiasco & lock-down (who knows, perhaps to be repeated again by the Moderna bird flu jab and it’s subsequent lock-down), the Ukraine War, Trump trial, Israel Gaza conflict, the disintegration of our inner-connected global economies, fragmented dysfunctional homes & families, evil now called good & good now called evil, rampant impairing addictions cutting across all segments of populations, etc., etc.

And we of the group birthed in that 30-40 year window, are now being smartingly irritated from this descending & prevailing cloud of senselessness. So, often we simply choose not to meaningfully communicate with those born since the eighties including now too often even those labeled progressive oldsters because the conversations between all of these media purposely polarized generations just doesn’t seem to go so well, or for sure, not end well. 

And so, we oldsters too often simply withdraw, at the very moment in our personal history of destiny, that we are most needed to be lovingly engaged with the younger crowd, to come alongside them while they are being pawned or hawked by media outlets, so as to draw out their questions, concerns, frustrations, conclusions, as well as their dreams, goals and aspirations during these darker senseless days that are oppressing them relentlessly without evidential access to His hope from us, virtually to their fatal demise, that being, of course, the bottom line for Satan and his crew. Seriously, think this through!

Some of you may well recall your emotional darkness during the Berlin wall going up, the Cuban missile crisis, the three assassinations (Kennedy’s & King, Vietnam atrocities, Cambodian bombings, etc. And, as traumatic as these events were for us, I now consider everything we experienced in our first forty years of life as rather trivial and insignificant compared to the cultural, moral, emotional, spiritual and physical nuclear blasts figuratively speaking being unleashed on the younger generations today. And to think we oldsters are off busying ourselves elsewhere thereby avoiding our responsibilities rather than even directly refusing to engage with them (ignorance is bliss?) during these horrific world and cultural events for whatever be our excuses; shame on us!

For example, just observe how pervasive the mothering instincts is in nature with its young; thus serving or confirming the biological basis for that truth. Fact is physically and emotionally, our infants and children, even youth, are the most vulnerable of all God’s creation while in their preparation to achieve their life’s destinies; and are we content to just sit back and watch them struggle without the benefit of our experience, hopefully wisdom, and His love, within a Cultivating Anchored Community?

Isn’t it sad for us with such a rich spiritual heritage that we are actually allowing ourselves to be held hostage now in this senseless world since we are literally ignoring our changeless God? Especially so, when we actually do have a God with whom there is no variation nor shadow of turning. He doesn’t have shifting moods, bad days, “oops” moments, momentary breakdowns, or changes of mind or heart. He’s as consistent as a plumb line, as steady as a rock, and as unchanging as eternity. He is as He has always been and always will be. Forever He is enthroned in the highest, and forever His Word is fixed in the heavens.

BOTTOM LINE: Even though our culture’s actions, sights, sounds & smells may at times overwhelm us, take strength in the fact our forefathers chose to walk with God the best they could, and so can we, and most assuredly, so can our children. God’s provisions for us are the same in every generation. His promises cannot fail, His presence cannot dim, His power cannot wane. We can trust Him completely.

“False christs and false prophets will rise and show signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect. But take heed; see, I have told you all things beforehand.” Mark 13:22-23.

It is not wise to be overly confident dogmatic as we try to interpret current events. The twists and turns of history are under God’s providential control, and it’s best to watch prayerfully so we can take advantage of open doors for evangelism while awaiting our Lord’s return. We must live every day with confidence and excitement that no matter how dark or senseless the news reports, our sovereign Lord is in control.

This quickie admonition I tweaked from David Jeremiah’s Discovery April 21 several paragraphs is much too long, but you are well aware by now, if I’m inspired, brevity is not one of my virtues. And adding insult to injury, I’d be remiss if I’d not share yet, for those of you with more time and interest, the nugget I found in today’s, June 6, dailylightdevotional.org in it’s Evening’s 8^th innocuous verse from Ephesians 2:14, “He is our peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us.” Since that was unclear to me, I read it in the Message and that really opened up the gates! So simple, so plain! And yes, FYI, I am aware today’s theme of we oldster’s stepping up to the plate that was was also hit on earlier in the conclusion of the Eat Move Sleep Finale post. Perhaps there is a reason. Be aware though, my scribblings are written first to me.

In fact, I suggest at some point you all read the whole chapter to get a vision for God’s big picture. Such will serve you well considering the senselessness all about us! Here it is from The Message Version, for your ready comprehension. The scholarly translations have their place BUT hopefully not to complicate Truth for the masses. I include the verses here because too many readers are yet without a copy. Most thrift stores in our area have copies for cheap. Better, keep a supply yourself to give away when appropriate.

NEXT UP: Since this turned out to be something of a weekend edition, the next post will be short & sweet.

Ephesians 2:1-22 (MSG) 

1. It wasn’t so long ago that you were mired in that old stagnant life of sin.
   2. You let the world, which doesn’t know the first thing about living, tell you how to live. You filled your lungs with polluted unbelief, and then exhaled disobedience.
   3. We all did it, all of us doing what we felt like doing, when we felt like doing it, all of us in the same boat. It’s a wonder God didn’t lose his temper and do away with the whole lot of us.
   4. Instead, immense in mercy and with an incredible love,
   5. he embraced us. He took our sin-dead lives and made us alive in Christ. He did all this on his own, with no help from us!
   6. Then he picked us up and set us down in highest heaven in company with Jesus, our Messiah.
   7. Now God has us where he wants us, with all the time in this world and the next to shower grace and kindness upon us in Christ Jesus.
   8. Saving is all his idea, and all his work. All we do is trust him enough to let him do it. It’s God’s gift from start to finish!
   9. We don’t play the major role. If we did, we’d probably go around bragging that we’d done the whole thing!
   10. No, we neither make nor save ourselves. God does both the making and saving. He creates each of us by Christ Jesus to join him in the work he does, the good work he has gotten ready for us to do, work we had better be doing.
   11. But don’t take any of this for granted. It was only yesterday that you outsiders to God’s ways
   12. had no idea of any of this, didn’t know the first thing about the way God works, hadn’t the faintest idea of Christ. You knew nothing of that rich history of God’s covenants and promises in Israel, hadn’t a clue about what God was doing in the world at large.
   13. Now because of Christ—dying that death, shedding that blood—you who were once out of it altogether are in on everything.
   14. The Messiah has made things up between us so that we’re now together on this, both non-Jewish outsiders and Jewish insiders. He tore down the wall we used to keep each other at a distance.
   15. He repealed the law code that had become so clogged with fine print and footnotes that it hindered more than it helped. Then he started over. Instead of continuing with two groups of people separated by centuries of animosity and suspicion, he created a new kind of human being, a fresh start for everybody.
   16. Christ brought us together through his death on the Cross. The Cross got us to embrace, and that was the end of the hostility.
   17. Christ came and preached peace to you outsiders and peace to us insiders.
   18. He treated us as equals, and so made us equals. Through him we both share the same Spirit and have equal access to the Father.
   19. That’s plain enough, isn’t it? You’re no longer wandering exiles. This kingdom of faith is now your home country. You’re no longer strangers or outsiders. You belong here, with as much right to the name Christian as anyone. God is building a home. He’s using us all—irrespective of how we got here—in what he is building.
   20. He used the apostles and prophets for the foundation. Now he’s using you, fitting you in brick by brick, stone by stone, with Christ Jesus as the cornerstone
   21. that holds all the parts together. We see it taking shape day after day—a holy temple built by God,
   22. all of us built into it, a temple in which God is quite at home.