Looking For a Blessing

Isaiah 51:1-2
“Listen to me, you who pursue righteousness
    and who seek the Lord:
Look to the rock from which you were cut
    and to the quarry from which you were hewn;
2 look to Abraham, your father,
    and to Sarah, who gave you birth.
When I called him he was only one man,
    and I blessed him and made him many.

I am looking for God to bless me.

I try to cut myself out of a rock of self assurance, but there is not blessing there

I go down to the quarry of self sufficiency, but there is no blessing there

I am looking to the Father of faith and the mother of faith, Abraham and Sarah.

They left with nothing, but God blessed them

They left with no map, God blessed them by being their map

They left with insufficient provisions, because they did not know what they needed for this journey.  But God blessed them with the right provisions at the right time

So today I am looking for God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to bless me.

Rembrandt The Sacrifice of Abraham

This Is My Story

Psalms 38 Read By Elizabeth Smith

S.O.A.P. Isaiah 46 1-9

Scripture- Isaiah 46:1-9 Easy-to-Read Version (ERV)

The Lord says, “Bel has fallen to the ground. Nebo is kneeling before me. “Men put those idols on the backs of animals. They are only heavy burdens that must be carried. They do nothing but make people tired. 2 But they all bowed down and fell to the ground. They couldn’t escape; they were all carried away like prisoners. 3 “Family of Jacob, listen to me! You who are left from the family of Israel, listen! I have carried you since you left your mother’s womb. I carried you when you were born, 4 and I will still be carrying you when you are old. Your hair will turn gray, and I will still carry you. I made you, and I will carry you to safety. 5 “Can you compare me to anyone? No one is equal to me. You cannot understand everything about me. There is nothing like me. 6 Some people are rich with gold and silver. Gold falls from their purses, and they weigh their silver on scales. They pay an artist to make a false god from wood. Then they bow down and worship that false god. 7 They put their false god on their shoulders and carry it. That false god is useless; people have to carry it! People set the statue on the ground, and it cannot move. That false god never walks away from its place. People can yell at it, but it will not answer. That false god is only a statue; it cannot save people from their troubles. 8 “Sinners, change your heart and mind. Think about this again. Remember it and be strong. 9 Remember what happened long ago. Remember, I am God and there is no other God. There is no other like me.

Observance- In Isaiah's time men would build gods of wood or stone and have to carry them around.  Those gods became heavy and burdensome.  Those gods would weigh the people down.  We build things in our life then we have to carry them.  Many times the things that we build our lives around and on weigh us down from carrying them.  God promised the people that listened to Isaiah that he was the God who would carry them.  He was not a god that needed carrying.  God promises us the same thing.  God promises to carry me. I cannot build God or force God's hand. He carried me like a mother would carry a newborn when I was young.  He is my support and carries me as I grow older.

Application- Remember who God is, he is the one who should be carrying me. I should remember to stop trying to carry so much of my life, it is weighing me down.

Prayer- God thank you that you are carrying me today.  Lord help me to notice the things in my life that I am carrying that are weighing me down.  I repent of carrying them.  I lay them down.  I ask you to carry me.  In Jesus name. Let it be so.

E'en So, Lord Jesus, Quickly Come

A Farewell To Mars

Click to Order From Amazon Farewell To Mars

You need to read this book, then read this book again, then read this book one more time.  Pastor Brian Zahnd is speaking prophetically to this generation of Western Christians.  These are the things we are not hearing about Jesus that we should be hearing about Jesus, because this is who Jesus really is.

Here are 10 of the 180 quotes I took from this book.

    

1. We reduce Jesus to being the Savior who guarantees our reservation in heaven while using him to endorse our own ideas about how to run the world.
2. Can humanity possess the capacity for self-destruction and not resort to it? The jury is still out. But this much is certain—if we think the ideas of Jesus about peace are irrelevant in the age of genocide and nuclear weapons, we have invented an utterly irrelevant Christianity!
3. What has happened over the ensuing two millennia is that we who confess Christ have deftly (and mostly unconsciously) crafted a religion that neatly separates the Jesus who died on the cross for the radical ideas he preached—ideas that Jesus foresaw would lead to his crucifixion.
4. What I saw was that great and powerful nations shape God into their own image; great and powerful nations conscript God to do their bidding. Great and powerful nations use the idea and vocabulary of God to legitimize their own agenda. Great and powerful nations project God as a personification of their own national interests. And for the most part, they don’t know they are doing it. This is not to say that everything great and powerful nations do is evil—far from it. They maintain order, provide security, produce industry, maintain civility, educate the populace, preserve culture, and so on. But neither are they to be confused with the kingdom of Christ. And neither can they claim that the God revealed in the crucified and risen Christ is their God, committed to their interests! No! There are no “Christian nations” in the political sense. 
5. The thought that makes me so happy is that Jesus is the Savior of the world! This world that you and I inhabit—where we go to work, do our living, raise our children, and try to find meaning and happiness—Jesus is the Savior of that! Jesus is not a heavenly conductor handing out tickets to heaven. Jesus is the carpenter who repairs, renovates, and restores God’s good world. The divine vision and original intention for human society is not to be abandoned, but saved. That’s a big deal! It’s the gospel! And it makes me happy!
6. In fact, in the eight gospel sermons found in the book of Acts, not one of them is based on afterlife issues! Instead they proclaimed that the world now had a new emperor and his name was Jesus! Their witness was this: the Galilean Jew, Jesus of Nazareth, had been executed by Roman crucifixion, but God had vindicated him by raising him from the dead. The world now had a new boss: Jesus the Christ. What the world’s new Lord (think emperor) is doing is saving the world.
7. And while it may be true that the Jewish community in general has not recognized that God is repairing the world through Jesus, Christians often fail to recognize that God is repairing the world at all!  Salvation is a restoration project, not an evacuation project!
8. Nothing has done more to confer dignity upon the individual person than the Christian doctrine of the incarnation. If God can become human, then we must reconsider how we treat our fellow humans. The incarnation has, without question, made the world a more humane place by raising the dignity of every individual.  Of course I can hear the skeptics howl! They will point out that the world has seen plenty of atrocities since the advent of Christ. Indeed. But what skeptics often fail to realize is that it is precisely because of Calvary that we call these things atrocities and not normalcy. Without the life of Christ, would we call massacres and genocides atrocities, or would we call them just the way things are? Did the pagan world have the ethical resources to produce what has come to be known as “human rights”? Now I’m the one who is skeptical! In the pre-Christian pagan world, what we now call atrocities were largely seen as simply the triumph of the strong over the weak, the way of nature, the way things ought to be.  A world that had never seen a Christmas and never celebrated an Easter would still be a pagan world bereft of compassion for the poor, the sick, the weak, the marginalized, the victimized—the very people Jesus brings out of the shadows through his life and teaching.
9. We have to choose between Christ and the crowd. Let me put it to you like this: Jesus loves you, but he may not love the crowd you have aligned yourself with.  To follow Jesus requires the courage to leave the crowd and join his little flock, Christ is against the crowd because of the crowd’s deep inhumanity and dark allegiance with the satan. But Christ calls to each soul lost in the crowd, seeking to gather all of us to his little flock—a flock redeemed from the demonic crowd learning to live beyond fear and without a need for scapegoats. The flock liberated from fear, living together peaceably, never building unity on a sacrificial “them”—this is the universal flock of the Prince of Peace. That the world might become the little flock of Christ is the peacemaker’s hopeful dream.
10. As the climax of the Hebrew prophetic tradition, Jesus did not merely testify against symptomatic sin—in fact, he spent very little time doing this. Rather, Jesus struck at the heart of the systemic evil that has provided the foundation for human civilization. Jesus didn’t seem very interested in exposing symptomatic sinners—tax collectors, drunkards, prostitutes, etc. Instead Jesus challenged the guardians of systemic sin—the power brokers of religion and politics. Jesus knew that tax collectors were greedy and violent, but he was more interested in focusing his prophetic critique on the foundations of greed and violence that inevitably produce greedy and violent people. Sinful tax collectors were merely a symptom of a sinful but hidden system. The sinful and hidden system of greed and violence is “the world.” Jesus, in his prophetic preaching, was shining a light on the dark foundation of the world: “I will open my mouth to speak in parables; I will proclaim what has been hidden from the foundation of the world” (Matt. 13:35).

Anxiety Free? Check Yes Or No

For most of my Christian life when I read the Scriptures that said do not be anxious, do not worry; I saw them as a box to check.  If I was anxious that day or week I did not get my check mark.  I messed up, failed, sinned, and was in danger of being condemned.  If not by God at least by others and myself who knew about my worry.

I no longer look at these Scriptures this way.  Do not be anxious is a way to walk in and not a box to check.  I see most of God’s commands that way today. 

Let me give you an example of what I am talking about.  There are commands on how to care for an automobile.  But it is more than just a mental wish list.  I want my car to run well, I want it to get me to work and back, it did, yeah, check.  But car commands are something we do. Thou shall make sure your car is not anxious by the way you drive it and by the upkeep.  I wanted my car to run and not be anxious, thus making me anxious, but the engine blew up.  Did you change the oil?  Well, no.  But I prayed that it would still get me places.  Who knew my car got anxious when I went 12,000 miles without changing the oil. 

There is not a person reading this that wants to be a worrier.  But most will pray and get out their mental checklist, and wonder why they are still anxious.  I never go through the actions of doing everything God is leading me to do or not do.  Maybe I need some help not to be anxious from friends, pastors, and even counselors.  Maybe I need a physician to help me not be anxious.  Maybe I have ignored my diet and exercise.  Maybe I have not slept in 6 weeks, that may have something to do with my being anxious.  Maybe God is leading me in many ways to avoid being anxious and not just checking a box, yes or no.    

You are not anxiety free be wishing it.  You walk through anxiety by faith, hope, prayer, and living out God’s good plans. 

Instead of be it(check), walk it, live it, and then you shall be it.