Category: August
Daily Light – August 15, 2017
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Daily Light – August 14, 2017
Today’s Daily Light:
This Week we will ‘Graze’ in the Word to remind ourselves of who He is..and who we are and what we have ‘IN’ Him
1 Thessalonians 2:13 “We thank God continually because, when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men, but as it actually is, the word of God, which is at work in you who believe.”
1 Timothy “We have put our hope in the living God, who is the Savior of all men, and especially of those who believe.”
Great Lord…we put our hope in you alone. You are the Creator of life. You are the only means to eternal life. Because we believe in you, trust you, put our total faith and hope in YOU…your word dwells in us and ‘works’ in us. Help us to read and study your ‘word’ ‘so that’ it can seep down into our souls and do its ‘work’. You and Your word are one. Help us to see that this week…Amen
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Daily Light – August 11, 2017
Today’s Daily Light:
Fight the Good Fight
The Apostle Paul…in writing to Timothy, said in I Timothy 6:12-16: “Fight the good fight of the faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called when you made your good confession in the presence of many witnesses. In the sight of God, who gives life to everything, and to Christ Jesus, who while testifying before Pontius Pilate made the good confession, I charge you to keep this command without spot or blame until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ which God will bring about in His own time – – God, the blessed and only Ruler, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone is immortal and who lives in unapproachable light, who no one has seen or can see. To Him be honor and might forever. Amen.”
Father…we have sooo many distractions in our minds…the default system of the sin nature inside us seeks to deceive us and keep us busy chasing shadows of things that can only provide short lived happiness…thus we must ‘fight the good fight…’so that’ we can take-hold of what is of eternal ‘substance’..and not just chase the shadows of temporary and meaningless things. You…great Father..give us the power and energy to fight the good fight…to win the prize for which you have called us…to fight and press on….for You alone are worthy. Help us today, through time we spend in Your word..to see this reality..to fight the good fight…because You are worth it. Amen
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Daily Light – August 10, 2017
Today’s Daily Light:
Continuing and final of article by Owen Strachan:
You Can Anger God But Not Lose Him
Father…I am sooo very thankful that you have never abandoned me, even in my times of failure and disobedience. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for your steadfast love that endures forever. Thank you for including us in your eternal plan. Help us to increasingly see and walk-in your love ‘so that’ we can demonstrate your love to those that do not know you and your wonderful love. May we ‘go’ out and minister you love. Amen
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Daily Light – August 9, 2017
Today’s Daily Light:
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Daily Light – August 8, 2017
Today’s Daily Light:
The Spirit Is Stronger Still
The fact that our sins displease God motivates us in practical terms to put our unrighteousness to death through the power of the Spirit offered and given us in the gospel (Col. 3:1-10). Pastor-theologian John Calvin said it best in his Institutes: “[H]e who in the end profits by God’s scourges is the man who considers God angry at his vices, but merciful and kindly toward himself” (III:4:34). Like David, God is angry at our “vices,” but if we may inject some Lutheran paradox into our treatment of Calvin, this anger is also kindness that leads us to repentance (Rom. 2:4).
God’s response to the sin of believers is not vengeance, Calvin noted, but “chastisement.” The Frenchman pointed out that “when a father quite severely corrects his son, he does not do this to take vengeance on him or to maltreat him, but rather to teach him and to render him more cautious therefore” (III:4:31). The authors of the Westminster Confession concurred with Calvin when they noted that believers “may, by their sins, fall under God’s fatherly displeasure, and not have the light of his countenance restored unto them, until they humble themselves, confess their sins, beg pardon, and renew their faith and repentance” (11.5).
How, then, do we know when we are being chastised? Is God always chastising us since we constantly sin? The Spirit continually convicts us of sin, giving us a low-level form of chastisement (John 16:8). Discipline of the kind that David faced is rare in biblical terms, it seems, and reserved for outsized sins; paraphrasing Calvin, some transgressions receive greater harshness, and many meet with more kindly indulgence (III:4:35). In many cases, we respond to the Spirit’s prompting when our sins have not fully blossomed, a pattern that Calvin calls “voluntary chastisement.” When by the Spirit’s power we train our eyes not to surf over sexual images, or our bodies to avoid gluttonous choices, or our lips not to self-promote, we are engaging in our own chastisement, and no greater penalty will result. So often in our lives, we do not receive what our sins deserve.
Dear Father…your plan is amazing. Your fatherly love is so ‘sure’. Thank you that when we sin…that you continue…through your convicting love…to draw us to yourself. I thank you that you desire a relationship with us. Thank you that you forgive. Amen
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Daily Light – August 7, 2017
Today’s Daily Light:
Over the course of this week, we will read an article by Owen Strachan: You Can Anger God But Not Lose Him
Owen Strachan is the author of Awakening the Evangelical Mind and The Pastor as Public Theologian (with Kevin Vanhoozer). A systematic theology professor at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, he is the director of the Center for Public Theology and hosts the City of God podcast. He is writing a Jonathan Edwards devotional (Tyndale House) and a theological anthropology (B&H Academic).
There is something about fatherly anger that unsettles. My own father was a good man and gentle in the right ways. Decades later, though, I can recall a flash of very early memory crystallized after disobedience on my part. The edges of my recollections are blurry, but there is anger there, just and raw. My childhood was not full of such moments. When needed, however, my father’s anger rose up. My fear rose with it.
This experience leads to a question that bears on our evangelical spirituality: Is it appropriate to suggest that God, our father, grows upset, even angry, over the sins of his justified children?
The Beauty of Gospel-Centered Spirituality
Some today have suggested that because of our regeneration, adoption, and justification, God looks on his children with unbroken favor. Nothing we do, goes the line, can change God’s affection for us. This view is grounded in what theologians call a positional understanding of our salvation. As Martin Luther put it, our savior, Jesus Christ, has transacted by his death and life the “sweet exchange.” He took our sin and gave us his righteousness. We stand justified in him.
I love Luther’s metaphor for justification, and it is my contention that the contemporary view is largely correct. Jesus used positional language in a typically visceral style when he said of those given him by God that “no man is able to pluck them out of my Father’s hand” (John 10:29). Because God’s grace overwhelms our sin, we are held fast by our Savior. We are “in him,” as the apostle Paul said (Eph. 1:11), possessing union with Christ and all his merit.
The Best Father You Know
Is God, though, indifferent to our sin following our conversion? Is he something like a smiling, benevolent grandfather who executed all the hard work a generation ago?
I would suggest that the Lord is more like the best father you know, active, engaged, eminently fair, righteously opposing sin, and relentlessly gracious. Consider the example of David following his consummation of adultery with Bathsheba (2 Sam. 11-12). David’s horrible sin resulted in the most cathartic act of repentance in the Scriptures, a catharsis left bare for all to see in Psalm 51. Because in God’s grace David responded to God’s anger toward his sin with repentance, David stands as the anti-Judas. Like the entrepreneur-traitor, David sinned in a catastrophic way. Unlike the profiteer, David repented.
In the midst of all this, God registered divine dissatisfaction with David: “the thing that David had done displeased the Lord” (2 Sam. 11:27). The text’s terse description of the suffering of David’s sin chills the blood of any parent: “the Lord afflicted the child that Uriah’s wife bore to David, and he became sick” (2 Sam. 11:15). God acts justly in the face of our sin. This “just justice,” as we might call it, includes displeasure and tangible distress.
David, we note, was justified in God’s sight just like we are (see Gen. 15:6). Yet we see here that continual repentance for sin is called for (and seems nonsensical if God takes no notice of post-conversion transgressions). This is why, as Wayne Grudem has pointed out in For the Fame of God’s Name, when praying the Lord’s prayer we ask for forgiveness of our sins (Matt. 6:12; Luke 11:4). Our post-conversion sins displease God. We pray for power over them so that we will “not grieve the Holy Spirit of God” whom Paul notes sealed the Ephesian Christians “for the day of redemption” (Eph. 4:30).
At this point we might mention that God does not look upon his sinning children with wrath. The Davidic episode shows, though, that our on-the-ground decisions and actions matter to God and draw a response from him. God’s punitive response to sin is aimed at restoration and renewal. The Lord disciplined David, the man after his own heart, as one he loved, and so David could cry out, “blessed is the man against whom the Lord will not count his sin” (Psalm 32:2, quoted by Paul in Rom. 4:8 to demonstrate the beauty of justification). God does the same for all his children (see Prov. 3:12; Heb. 12:6; Rev. 3:19).
Father…this week, help us to more seriously regard our sin ‘so that’ we don’t waste so much time and spin our wheels ‘so that’ we live more mindful of what you desire and less about what we think we desire. Amen
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Daily Light – August 5, 2017
Today’s Daily Light:
Today is the last of the series: How Dead People Do Battle With Sin (John Piper)
Forward-Looking Faith
The challenge before us then is not merely to do what God says because He is God, but to desire what God says because he is good. The challenge is not merely to pursue righteousness, but to prefer righteousness. The challenge is to get up in the morning and prayerfully meditate on the Scriptures until we experience joy and peace in believing “the precious and very great promises” of God (Romans 15:13; 2 Peter 1:4). With this joy set before us the commandments of God will not be burdensome (1 John 5:3) and the compensation of sin will appear too brief and too shallow to lure us.
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Daily Light – August 4, 2017
Today’s Daily Light:
Satisfaction Slays Sin
The fight of faith is the fight to stay satisfied with God. “By faith Moses. . . forsook the fleeting pleasures of sin … He looked to the reward” (Hebrews 11:24-26). Faith is not content with “fleeting pleasures.” It is ravenous for joy. And the Word of God says, “In God’s presence is fullness of joy, and in his right hand are pleasures forevermore” (Psalm 16:11). So faith will not be sidetracked into sin. It will not give up so easily in its quest for maximum joy.
The role of God’s Word is to feed faith’s appetite for God. And in doing this it weans my heart away from the deceptive taste of lust. At first lust begins to trick me into feeling that I would really miss out on some great satisfaction if I followed the path of purity. But then I take up the sword of the Spirit and begin to fight. I read that it is better to gouge out my eye than to lust (Matthew 5:29). I read that if I think about things that are pure and lovely and excellent the peace of God will be with me (Philippians 4:8f.). I read that setting the mind on the flesh brings death, but setting the mind on the Spirit brings life and peace (Romans 8:6).
And as I pray for my faith to be satisfied with God’s life and peace, the sword of the Spirit carves the sugar coating off the poison of lust. I see it for what it is. And by the grace of God, its alluring power is broken.
Amen, Amen.
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