Tag: God

Posted on

Loving God the Most: Making God Our Emotional Refuge

“Trust in him at all times, you people; pour out your hearts to him, for God is our refuge.” – Psalm 62:8

Where do you go with your strong emotions? A lof of times, they just run around in our head. They keep us from important duties, people, and fun. They cause problems with our health, our relationships, and our work.

Emotions need an outlet. We often seek an outlet in other people: withdrawing from them, attacking them, or complaining to them. We often seek outlets in busy-ness, trying to getour mind off of these things or solve them. We sometimes seek an outlet in trying to escape our issues, like endless hours of Netflix or alcohol. We often seek outlets in stres-reducers such as eating, exercise, sleep, planning, and so on.

Sometimes these things help. Sometimes they do not. Sometimes things gets worse. Sometimes our attempt to deal with our emotions hurts the people around us.

The Right Refuge for Our Emtions
The Psalms in the Bible give us a different picture of how to deal with our emotions. What the Psalms teach us is that emotions are not intended to remain on the horizontal plane. They are meant to go vertical. We are meant to resolve them in God.

The Psalms have a word for this. God is our refuge. God is an emotional refuge: “pour out your hearts to him, for God is our refuge” (Psalm 62:8). Continue reading “Loving God the Most: Making God Our Emotional Refuge”

Posted on

Loving God the Most: Making God the Baseline of Our Lives

There is no question that our greatest obligation as human beings is to love God above everything else. Jesus could not have been clearer: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment” (Mt. 22:37–38). This is what life is all about.

The statement is not controversial. If someone asked us, “What is the most important commandment?” Many of us would know the answer. Love the Lord your God. Yet, how many of us have really put effort into loving God more?

The season of Lent is an invitation to consider whether we are pursuing the love of God as our greatest objective. It is an opportunity to consider what our hearts go after in place of God. It is an occasion for reflection on the idols of our hearts that impede the love of God.

There is not question that humans are often unwilling to pursue God. However, sometimes we don’t love God because we are not sure what that even means. Loving a human being means wanting to be with them, get to know them, and help them thrive. But because God is not physically with us, it can be hard to understand what this looks like.

What does loving God really look like? Let me suggest three ways:

  1. Making God our chief source of comfort, love, security, and meaning.
  2. Spending time with God and learning to walk with Him moment by moment.
  3. Taking an interest in the interests of God.

Here I want to focus on # 2: learning to live in God’s presence. It is there that we learn to rely on Him as our chief source of comfort, love, security, and meaning. It is there that we learn about His interests so they can become our interests. It is there we find pleasures at His right hand forevermore (Psalm 16:11).

But what does this really look like? Obviously, we cannot literally think about God all the time, or we would not be able to do anything else because we can only think of one thing at a time. Continue reading “Loving God the Most: Making God the Baseline of Our Lives”

Posted on

Anxiety, Pride, and Relationships, Part 2: Pride as Response to Anxiety

[Note: this is a four part series based on the story of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar, looking at the way sin affects our relationships in the family and how the presence of God can bring redemption to them. You can read the first part, looking at anxiety here]

Life is full of problems that we can’t solve. We can’t solve what people will do or how they might treat us. We can’t ensure that people will think well of us. We can’t ensure that we will have enough. We can’t ensure that we will know everything or see everything we need to. We can’t ensure that we will be able to get done all things we need to get done.

All these issues become a basis for anxiety. I call anxiety an awareness of the gap between our ability to see problems and our inability to do anything about them.

What do we do when we have this awareness? We can exalt ourselves thinking we can get a handle on all these problems; or we can accept our limits, work where we can, and trust God with the rest.

In the last article, we considered how anxiety becomes the occasion for sin. In this article, I want to consider the shape and form of sin, which is pride. Our pride is where we take that which is good and significant about us and make it much bigger than it is. The result of this is the common dissolutions, destructions, addictions, and injustices of life. There is really no limit to pride or the temtpation to pride. No matter how much we solve, there are still new problems. Greater heights; greater falls.

In the story of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar, we have three anxious people who also believe that they can solve their own problems. They take good things about themselves and make them much bigger than they are. This is the tragedy of the story and the sin of the story. Let’s look at Hagar, Sarah, and Abraham in turn to see how pride is a response to anxiety.

Hagar’s Pride
The pride of Hagar is rather obvious. “And [Abraham] went in to Hagar, and she conceived. And when she saw that she had conceived, she looked with contempt on her mistress” (Gen. 16:4). Hagar conceived the first child of Master Abraham, and she let it go to her head. She does what we often do when we have success. She looked down on others.

Let’s look at her pride a little more closely. When I was in Louisiana at the Evergreen Plantation, the tour guide gave us an explanation of how those eating dinner would keep cool. A slave boy would wave a giant fan during the supper. I thought that would be strange to have someone standing right next to you like that, but then I realized something. They would not see the slave. He would just be part of the scenery. He would be virtually invisible. That’s how slaves are: unseen. They are just part of the machinery of the household. Continue reading “Anxiety, Pride, and Relationships, Part 2: Pride as Response to Anxiety”

Posted on

10 Tips for Applying the Book of Judges to Your Life

Out of all the books in the Bible, the book of Judges may be harder for modern ears to hear than any other. Between kidnapping brides, guts spilling out, tent pegs in skulls, and sending body parts to the various parts of Israel, there’s enough crazy stuff in there to make even the most experienced moviegoer wince. So, what to do with this book? In spite of all the gore and war, there is much to learn here to enable us to live well with God and fellow human beings.

We might not like to talk about it, but there is still plenty of violence and messiness along the lines of the book of Judges in the modern world. Then as now, we find God right in the middle of it. Jesus was not born into a sanitized world but a world filled with such things. When God comes down, He enters into a world filled with evil and problems in order to bring it to a better place and in order to bring us to a etter place. If we look at things from that perspective, we can learn much from the book of Judges.

Here are ten tips for applying this ancient book to your life. If you wish, you can listen to my recent sermon where I took this approach. Listen to it here.

1. God’s wrath is rooted in His love for people. There is no question that God gets angry in the book of Judges. No way around it. Other cultures may struggle with the love and forgiveness of God, but ours is one that struggles with the wrath of God. At the same time, would we really want a God that did not care how humans lived or what injustices they committed? God is passionate against evil because He wants humans to do what is truly good for them and what is best for them is to live in harmonious fellowship with Himself and with other human beings. When you see the wrath of God in the book of Judges remember that it is rooted in God’s passion for people to live in the good way He created them to live.

2. God’s wrath is rooted in His love for His Son. The book of Judges is Trinitarian. The whole Bible is really about revealing the Son of God who ultimately comes in human form in the gift of Christmas. But Jesus was present and existed before He ever became a human. In the book of Judges, one way we see Jesus is as the angel of the Lord (Judges 2, Judges 6, Judges 13). This angel of the Lord speaks to the people of Israel and says that He is the one who brought them out of Egypt. He identifies as Jehovah, the Lord, and yet he is also in some ways distinct from Jehovah. It is the relationship of the eternal Father with His Son. The Father has such supreme delight in His Son that when people don’t listen to Him, it grieves Him and angers Him (see Psalm 2 for a framework for this).

3. Every generation faces its test. Judges is a book of multiple generations. There is a part of us that wants smooth sailing for our children and grandchildren, but that’s not going to be the way things work out. Each generation has to face the hard facts of reality and decide how it will live in light of them. It has to decide whether to rely on the Lord and seek the way of the people around them. This is true for our generation, and it will be true for the next generation. In Judges, each new generation faces its own challenge and has to work through things in order to come to the right place. Generally, that’s how it works, and this book is a great reminder of that. The more we can tell our children that they will have to face challenges, the better we will be able to equip and prepare them for that test.

4. Passing on the faith is a challenge. It’s easy to assume that our children will just “get” what we teach them. They do imitate us to a great degree. However, passing on our faith requires conscious effort. The generation that came out of the wilderness served the Lord, but “there arose another generation after them who did not know the Lord or the work that he had done for Israel” (Judges 2:10). They lived for the Lord but did not talk about Him nearly enough to the next generation. We should prepare the next generation for the tests they will face and make sure they know what God has done in the past.

5. God is full of compassion. One amazing thing about Judges is how compassionate God is. In spite of the way people ignore Him and do exactly what He tells them not to, when they are in trouble, He is always ready to help them. Judges 10 is a poignant example. The people cry out to Him, and He says that He is not going to help them anymore. The people keep crying out to Him and say, “We don’t believe you! You will help us!” Then, it says that God became impatient with His people’s misery, i.e., could not bear it any longer (10:16). Then, He acted.

6. God will hear us when we cry out to Him. That should encourage us to cry out to the Lord when we are in misery. Whatever we are struggling with, we should cry out to Him about it. “But when the people of Israel cried out to the Lord, the Lord raised up a deliverer for the people of Israel . . .” (Judges 3:9). Ask, and you will receive. When there is deep hurt, pain, or struggle, it is time to cry out to the Lord, and He will hear you and help you. Does He not act right away? Keep crying out. He hears and in the right time will act.

7. God delights to use His people for big things. In Judges 3:9 (just cited in #6), it notes that when the people cried out to the Lord, He raised up a deliverer. He did not just destroy their enemies. He didn’t just confound them by miracles or mighty acts. He raised up a leader, Othniel. That’s what God likes to do. In Judges and throughout the Bible, God delights to use His people to do great things. He delights to use you!

8. God uses many leaders to point to the greatest leader, Jesus. One reason God the Father loves to raise up leaders is because He is always thinking about the greatest leader, His Son, our Lord Jesus. All of the leaders that God raises up point to this one great leader who is the great Judge and Savior of the world, the Savior from Satan, sin, and death. God sends hundreds of leaders in the Bible to point to Him, and each one teaches us a little bit about the Son whom the Father delights in and wants to honor as the greatest leader the world has ever known, the conqueror of all evil.

9. God’s Spirit empowers us for service. In Judges, we see not only the presence of the Father and the Son but also the Holy Spirit. When Othniel led the people of Israel to freedom against Cushan-Rishathaim of Mesopotamia, the Spirit of God came upon Othniel. That’s how He was made a leader. When God calls us to His service, He not only gives us the command but the power of the Holy Spirit to enable us to serve Him and do great things for His name.

10. God is faithful to keep blessing His people in spite of what they deserve. God is faithful. He keeps doing good in spite of what His people deserve. He doesn’t give up on them. He keeps working with them, calling them, and leading them. God just keeps working with His people. That should encourage us when we fail, make mistakes, and sin. God keeps coming back with His relentless love to bring salvation and blessing to the world, and especially His people.

This should give you some ideas for thinking of how to apply this ancient book to the modern world. Have different thoughts or ideas about this? I’d love to read them in the comments below. Thanks for taking the time to read my site. If you liked this post, you can sign up to the right (laptop) or by scrolling down (mobile). I hope to see you hear again.

________

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Posted on

Why Should I Rejoice in My Suffering?

In Paul’s letter to the Roman Christians, he says that “we rejoice in our sufferings” (Romans 5:3). How can we possibly rejoice in the midst of death, job loss, rejection, sickness, or betrayal? Note very carefully. He does not say, “rejoice in spite of our sufferings.” He says, “rejoice in our sufferings.” It would seem that this is the last thing we can rejoice in. What could he mean by this crazy statement?

What he does not mean is that suffering itself is good. It’s not good to be hit in the jaw, get in a car wreck, or lose a friend. There has to be something else that is added to the suffering that would make us rejoice in it. In other words, suffering can be used for some purpose that would make it good for us.

Let’s take being hit in the jaw. If we were training for a boxing match, getting hit in the jaw might help us see a weakness in our defenses we might not have seen otherwise. Getting in a car wreck might lead us to a lifetime of more careful driving. Losing a friend may have been the loss of an unhelpful friendship. It also may have gotten us out of our shell in a way that opened up new possibilities and friendships that made us grow. Most of us have had experiences like this.

So, what is the good connected to suffering that Paul has in mind? The answer is found in the words “we rejoice in the glory of God.” This does not mean that we rejoice because we will see or experience God’s glory, even though we will. It means we rejoice that we will be made like God, i.e., we will have a character that reflects His good, loving, and just character. Continue reading “Why Should I Rejoice in My Suffering?”

Proudly powered by WordPress