Prepare for Life

There is great mystery surrounding the cross of Christ. For three hours, from noon to three, while Jesus hung on the cross everything went literally black. Total darkness fell over the land. The curtain came down. Luke said, “It was as if the sun stopped shining.” Matthew, Mark and Luke each describe this three hour period with one sentence, “Darkness came over the land.” John covered this time wi...

As you approach Holy Week and behold Jesus in the Gospel readings of His trials, don’t be distracted by the travesty of justice and his scourging, mocking and beatings. Don’t forget who He is. Some day, maybe within your lifetime, you might live to see His return. “Behold, He comes riding on the clouds, and every eye will see Him even those who pierced Him; and all the tribes of the earth will mou...

Earlier when Jesus came to Jerusalem on what we now call Palm Sunday the people praised God joyfully with a loud voice as they laid coats and palm leaves in his path. The Pharisees were disgusted and demanded that Jesus rebuke the people. He answered, “If these become silent, the rocks will cry out!” Luke 19:40. I think something similar is going on in Gethsemane. These men who came to arrest Jesu...

There is no way to minimize the anguish the Lord felt in Gethsemane as he anticipated the cross. His suffering was part of His sacrifice. It was so real that he literally almost died, so real that he cried out like a wounded animal. He didn’t blithely go through the motions of obeying the Father’s will, he bore the full weight of the horror of the cross. Nothing about this was easy for him. He fel...

As we come to the final week of the earthly life of Christ we are down to his last precious moments. Every second was important. Each action the Lord took and every word he spoke were full of significance. One fourth of each of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke focus upon the this time period. Almost half of the Gospel of John is concerned with this last week.

Weekly Devotional Jesus didn’t stop Mary; he stopped the biting criticism and shaming of Mary. “Leave her alone. She has done a good deed to Me. She has done what she could, she has anointed my body beforehand for burial. Wherever this gospel is preached in the whole world, what this woman has done shall also be spoken of in memory of her.”

I found a treasure this week and I want to share it with you. A friend of mine sent me the questions that John Wesley and his band of fellow believers used for reflection. You may remember John Wesley. As a young man in 1738 Wesley had a radical encounter with Jesus Christ. He went on to form “classes and bands” for study and accountability and eventually founded what became the Methodist denomina...

Genesis shines like a bright beacon showing us where we came from, where we are going, who it is who created us, who we are to honor and thank and worship. Genesis delineates what our problem is, how God deals with it and in the meantime how we are to live in a way that pleases God, how to walk with Him, how to trust Him.

There is a discipline of the heart that is missing from most of the lists found in books about spiritual disciplines. It is essential to the practice of our faith. It needs to be put into our lives every single day. It is a lifestyle of wholehearted obedience to the word of God.

Do you need some encouragement about now? Do you feel like you are in an undertow with all the bad reports in the news? Is there a situation in your personal life that has you down? I understand. Sometimes we get so discouraged we just want to crawl under a rock and give up on following Jesus. Recently a verse from Hebrews has been rolling through my mind, “Do not forsake assembling yourselves tog...

If I could go back in time and do only one discipline of the heart differently it would be to practice meditating on the Scriptures earlier in my walk with the Lord. Meditation has been a game changer in my spiritual life. We are not talking about meditation in the sense of eastern religions or new age practices where we empty our minds and repeat a mantra. Meditating on the word of God is filling...

Prayer makes a difference. Yes, God is sovereign. Yes, He can do whatever He wants to do. Yet somehow in His sovereignty He often limits Himself to acting in response to the prayers of His people. He is waiting for His people to pray. Our prayers move God’s heart to action. Our prayers carry great significance. In the words of James, “You have not because you ask not.” James was not promising that...

Life can get mundane. We can work hard and get into ruts. We can take things, including ourselves, very seriously, maybe too seriously. Even in our pursuit of the Lord we can fast, pray, meditate, and work so hard that we miss the joy of knowing the Lord. At some point the Lord knows we need to lighten up. He wants to disrupt our calendars. He wants us to embrace and enjoy times of celebration.

Is the Lord tugging on your heart to intentionally set aside a day of the week for rest? Read these words of Isaiah as you consider this invitation, “If because of the Sabbath you turn your foot from doing your own pleasure on My holy day, and call the sabbath a delight, the holy day of the Lord honorable. And shall honor it desisting from your own pleasure, and speaking your own word. Then you wi...

Today I want to talk about the discipline of fasting, not because I love to fast but because of its value and importance. First of all I am not an expert on fasting. I have tried and failed so many times. I have also tried and by the grace of God been able to hold fast! I find it very humbling because when I fast from food, I realize how much of my life revolves around food and how often my flesh...

Today I want to talk about worship. Taking the time to worship God each week is so important. You can worship in church, you can worship at home alone. Worship does not have to be reserved for one hour on Sunday morning, you can turn in your heart to God’s heart in worship when you wake up in the middle of the night. Worship can be part of your lifestyle.

How do we develop strong vibrant spirits? Just as in the natural we need to exercise in order to to strengthen our bodes, so in the spiritual there are exercises we can do that will strengthen our spirits and deepen our relationship with the Lord. In the words of Galatians, we sow to the Spirit. These exercises are tiny daily seeds we sow as we walk on the ancient paths with the Lord. They are som...

We have spent the past several weeks getting to know the Holy Spirit, learning about who He is and what He does. But there is another spirit who often gets overlooked and ignored—your spirit, the human spirit. The Bible teaches we have a triune nature — spirit, soul and body. I Thessalonians 5:23 lays this out for us, “Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you entirely and may your spirit and...

As we walk on the ancient paths with the Lord we have a guide, the Holy Spirit. He leads us and helps us stay on the ancient paths. He knows about the twists and turns in the road ahead and He will be there to lead us through. His companionship is a treasure that means we will never be alone or forsaken by God. He teaches us and comforts us. We would be like an orphan if it weren’t for the Holy Sp...

I had a conversation with a friend the other day about whether we are always called to share the gospel. My first thought was, “Yes, of course we are.” Jesus left us with the Great Commission to go and make disciples of all the nations. I Peter 3:15 tells us to always be ready to give an account for the hope that is in us. Ephesians 6 explains that putting on the full armor of God includes having...

A normal man can walk or run 15 miles a day. What we see around us are not normal people but average people who think if they walk to the fridge they have gotten their daily exercise! Just because we all aren’t running great distances doesn’t mean that it is not normal to do so. We have learned to settle for average which is really subnormal. I think the book of Acts depicts the normal Christian l...

Many of you may be waiting on the Lord right now… waiting to hear a doctor’s report, waiting for a wayward child turn back from walking away, waiting for some answered prayer. Waiting can be so hard! There is a great example of waiting on the Lord given to us in the book of Acts. We can learn a lot from the example of the first disciples. Forty days earlier Jesus had been crucified, died, buried a...

Lamps, Wine and Fire - As we walk on the ancient paths with the Lord through our lives we are discovering how important it is to stay close to the Holy Spirit. Initially we might have a hard time relating to Him because He is a spirit, He is mysterious; but the Bible helps us to understand Him by giving us metaphors that tell us what He is like. We learn how to relate to Him. Today I want to help...

As I continue to introduce the Holy Spirit to you I want to tell you more about Him. I want all of us to have a deeper understanding of who He is and what He is like. The Bible helps us in this endeavor by giving us many different metaphors that explain a different aspect of the Holy Spirit. Let’s explore some of these today

If I wanted to introduce a friend to you, how would I do that? My friend is someone I have gotten to know and I think you will want to know him too. We usually begin introductions with the person’s name and then we might tell something about what they do and what they are like. Today I have the joy of beginning to introduce the Holy Spirit to you. I feel inadequate for this task because He is myst...