Pray for the Spirit in Nature’s Path Today

1. Of most importance, pray this morning that God would touch the hurricane hitting the east coast. Twenty million people are in its path. You already know this and you know how to pray. It always moves me to faith when I remember that Jesus Himself is the one that starts and allows any storm and He is controlling its every movement. He still rules the wind and the waves, and he also hears the cries of his elect. 
    Should we not pray for mercy to be extended and for him to show his power in changing the storm? We do not know his secret decree, but we know his heart, his mercy, and his promises. Please do pray this morning for this. Pray for the power of the Spirit upon the hurricane and its force and path.
    I think many of you and your churches would want to do something afterward if possible. There is already talk of some relief trips, so if you or your church begins to think of this, please do pray that God would raise up all that is needed. 
 
Pray for the Spirit in the work of the Gospel this weekend
 
2. I am scheduled this Sunday morning to begin preaching at First Baptist Church, Olney Texas, 2 hours west of here. It is the largest and probably the most historic church in this town of a few thousand people. Chad Edgington is a dear brother who serves as the pastor there. This church has been preparing with some seriousness, and now have excitement and expectation about the three days of meetings Sunday morning and evening, and then Monday and Tuesday.
    Please pray. Please pray for the power of the Spirit to come on the preaching. All we will be doing in the services will be to sing the songs of truth and preach the Word. That’s all. But that is sufficient. I have longed to see God break in and move in power, and have not seen it happen in years since I saw it happen in Romania about 10 years ago.
   I have driven through another small town near Olney in recent months which reminded me of God’s descending power. Bryson Texas, approximately 1 1/2 hours northwest of Fort Worth, where I preached in 1976 for a full weekend. It was there on a Sunday morning that the Holy Spirit came down suddenly and every young person in the church was either converted or was greatly affected by a movement of the Spirit. It shook the entire church. I had no idea it would happen, and I had no idea what to do during that day when it was occuring. The pastor did not know what to do either, so we sat back and watched God at work. 
    I have never forgotten it, and every time I drive through there, I drive right by that Bryson church building. God is able to do it again. Please pray that he would do it in Olney starting Sunday.
 
Luke 11:13!
– Mack 

Every Enemy Defeated

Then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father, after destroying every rule and every authority and power. (1 Corinthians 15:24)
 
How far does the reign of Christ extend?
The next verse, 1 Corinthians 15:25 says, “He must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet.” The word all tells us the extent. 
So does the word every in verse 24: “Then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power.”
There is no disease, no addiction, no demon, no bad habit, no fault, no vice, no weakness, no temper, no moodiness, no pride, no self-pity, no strife, no jealousy, no perversion, no greed, no laziness that Christ will not overcome as the enemy of his honor. 
And the encouragement in that promise is that when you set yourself to do battle with the enemies of your faith and your holiness, you will not fight alone.
Jesus Christ is now, in this age, putting all his enemies under his feet. Every rule and every authority and every power will be conquered. 
So, remember that the extent of Christ’s reign reaches to the smallest and biggest enemy of his glory in your life, and in this universe. It will be defeated.
– John Piper
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Heavenly Wisdom

What a man is on his knees before God in secret, that will he be before men: that much and no more.
-Fred Mitchell

We must deliberately seek to meet with God absolutely alone, and to secure such aloneness with God we are bidden to ‘enter into the closet.’ God absolutely insists on this ‘closet’ communion with Himself. One reason, no doubt, that He demands it is to test our sincerity. There is no test for the soul like solitude. Do you shrink from solitude? Perhaps the cause for your neglect of the ‘closet’ is a guilty conscience? You are afraid to enter into the solitude. You know that however cheerful you appear to be you are not really happy. You surround yourself with company lest, being alone, truth should invade your delusion.
– Gordon Cove

I want deliberately to encourage this mighty longing after God. The lack of it has brought us to our present low estate. The stiff and wooden quality about our religious lives is a result of our lack of holy desire. Complacency is a deadly foe of all spiritual growth. Acute desire must be present or there will be no manifestation of Christ to His people. He waits to be wanted. Too bad that with many of us He waits so long, so very long, in vain.
– A. W. Tozer

I should like to allude to a point in the character of Mr. Hudson Taylor which impressed me personally, and which I think had something to do with the blessing that God granted to his efforts on behalf of China. First his prayerfulness; he was of necessity a busy man, but he always regarded prayer itself as in reality the most needful and important part of the work.
– D. E. Hoste

Out of a very intimate acquaintance with D. L. Moody, I wish to testify that he was a far greater pray-er than he was preacher. Time and time again, he was confronted by obstacles that seemed insurmountable, but he always knew the way to overcome all difficulties. He knew the way to bring to pass anything that needed to be brought to pass. He knew and believed in the deepest depths of his soul that nothing was too hard for the Lord, and that prayer could do anything that God could do.
– R. A. Torrey.

All great soul-winners have been men of much and mighty prayer, and all great revivals have been preceded and carried out by persevering, prevailing knee-work in the closet.
– Samuel Logan Brengle

WHY DOES GOD ALLOW WAR?

From whence come wars and fightings among you? Come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members?
James 4:1

As I contemplate human nature and human life, what astonishes me is not that God allows and permits war, but the patience and the long-suffering of God. “He maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matthew 5:45). He suffered the evil, perverse ways of the children of Israel for centuries; and now for nearly two thousand years He has patiently borne with a world that in the main rejects and refuses His loving offer, even in the Person of His only-begotten Son. The question that needs to be asked is not, “Why does God allow war?” but rather, “Why does God not allow the world to destroy itself entirely in its iniquity and its sin?” Why does He in His restraining grace set a limit to evil and to sin, and a bound beyond which they cannot pass?

Oh, the amazing patience of God with this sinful world! How wondrous is His love! He has sent the Son of His love to our world to die for us and to save us; and because men cannot and will not see this, God permits and allows such things as war to chastise and to punish us, to teach us and to convict us of our sins, and above all to call us to repentance and acceptance of His gracious offer. The vital question for us therefore is not to ask, “Why does God allow war?” The question for us is to make sure that we are learning the lesson and repenting before God for the sin in our own hearts and in the entire human race that leads to such results. May God grant us understanding and the true spirit of repentance, for His name’s sake.

– Martyn Lloyd-Jones

You Do Not Have Much Time

(Read this slowly and carefully with real meditation-MT)
Of the many video clips I watched of Billy Graham the week of his death, one in particular has stuck with me. Preaching in Southern Seminary Chapel in 1982, Graham said that at sixty-four years old, his greatest surprise in life was the brevity of life: ‘If someone had told me when I was twenty years old that life was very short and would pass just like that — I wouldn’t have believed it. And if I tell you that, you don’t believe it either. I cannot get young people to understand how brief life is, how quickly it passes.’
Time. Flying past us. Not enough of it. Slipping away from us. Always pressed for it. Wishing we were better at managing it. Feeling guilty we don’t have more for someone special or something noble. We are always running out of time. And Billy Graham is right — oh, how quickly it passes.
Time is a profoundly theological entity. An eternal God teaches creatures some of his greatest lessons in the vehicle of time. It has both a linear and a circular form — you can’t repeat time, even as it gives you many things on a repeating loop. All of it educates us about what God loves and about what it means to be human, giving us at least three great lessons.
1. THE PATH OF WISDOM RESPECTS TIME’S RHYTHMS.
‘For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven’ (Ecclesiastes 3:1). It’s worth pausing right there, at the entrance to this most famous of reflections on time.
Scripture says there is a time for all things, but our world counters that, instead, all things can be done all the time. Most technology, for instance, has harnessed us to the lie that we can throw off the creaturely restraints of time and have access to everything always, without waiting, without stopping, and without needing to rest.
Electricity blurs the boundaries between working while it is day and sleeping while it is night. Our online life has become our timeless master, as several screens ping commands without end which we obey without question. Gyms, fuel stations, libraries, offices, and supermarkets are open 24-7 and we come to believe we can do everything all the time. There is no particular season for anything. We do what we want, when we want.
Wise people respect time’s rhythms. Dawn, morning, afternoon, evening, night. God made six days to work, one day to rest. This structures a week, which repeats over a month, and the months in years.
Many people try to live rhythm-free lives by simply doing whatever they feel like doing in any given moment, without proper attention to whether it is the right time to do that thing; this actually tears at the fabric of what it means to be human. We are now discovering that our constant, season-less attention to digital media is diminishing our personhood.
In years of pastoral ministry, I have not seen many families unravel who unswervingly observe the Lord’s Day together with deliberate joy and routine hospitality. I have witnessed others whose irregular devotion to the corporate body of the church is merely a symptom of the irregular rhythms in other areas of life.
2. THE PATH OF FOLLY SEEKS TO CONTROL TIME’S SEASONS.
Rhythms are not all there is in an ordinary life under the sun — there is ‘a time to be born, and a time to die’ (Ecclesiastes 3:2), there is ‘a time to weep, and a time to laugh’ (Ecclesiastes 3:4), there is ‘a time to love, and a time to hate’ (Ecclesiastes 3:8). These are seasons, not rhythms, for there is no predictability to their appearance in our timelines and often their presence takes us by surprise.
It takes the eye of faith to see that God ‘has made everything beautiful in its time’ (Ecclesiastes 3:11), because we often live with life’s ugliness and pain as much as its beauty and delight. Further, these are relational seasons: they involve people we love and lose, those we wrong and forgive, those we befriend and those who do us harm. We are profoundly relational beings and most of our lives are taken up with navigating the different seasons of our relationships and the effects they have on us.
Such seasons expose how little control we actually have over our lives. Zack Eswine says, ‘Many of our frustrations rise from our blindness to the change of season or to the pain or joy of them, and we struggle to adjust our expectations’ (Recovering Eden, 130). What do we do with those seasons which bring wrecking-ball damage to our tidy little realms? Where do we turn?
Ecclesiastes helps us to see that one of the seasons we do not control is the time for justice. ‘I said in my heart, God will judge the righteous and the wicked, for there is a time for every matter and for every work’ (Ecclesiastes 3:17). There will be a time, one day, for divine time travel: ‘God seeks what has been driven away’ (Ecclesiastes 3:15). All the events of human history that have slipped through the hourglass of time into the past might be lost to us — but they are never lost to God. One day, he will dial back time and fetch the past into his present to bring it to account. Every time will have its day in court.
Foolish people seek all the answers to life in each and every season of life. But some seasons yield only questions, not answers. Some seasons bring a wound that will not heal; it might take a lifetime to learn that we ‘cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end’ (Ecclesiastes 3:11). The story of my life has broken characters, jarring interruptions, unexpected joys and relationships caught up in unresolved tensions and difficulties. In God’s kindness I have, as yet, unfinished chapters. But my story is not the story. ‘The story reveals that there will be a time for judgment, and believers trust that judgment will finally prevail’ (Craig Bartholomew).
3. THE PATH OF LIFE EMBRACES TIME’S REVERSALS.
This perspective is the gospel’s now-and-not-yet voice speaking in the unfamiliar accent of Ecclesiastes. Today is the time of suffering and anguish, of work and pleasure, of toil and terror; tomorrow is the time of glory and judgment, of the resurrection of the body and life everlasting in world without end.
Now, this; tomorrow, that. The Lord Jesus fills our time with the unspeakable comfort of promised great reversals. Lose your life today for the sake of Jesus and his gospel; save it tomorrow. Gain the world now; forfeit your soul then. Be ashamed of Jesus in the time of this sinful generation; witness him being ashamed of you in the time of his coming in the glory of the Father and the holy angels (Mark 8:35–38).
Believers on the road to life know that the experiences of time can be reversed. The gospel turns the world on its head. Marred beyond human resemblance, the Servant of the Lord comes, in time, to shut the mouths of kings; buried with the wicked, he comes, in time, to divide the spoils of the strong (Isaiah 52–53). Blessed are those who are poor in spirit, who mourn, who are meek, who are hungry, those who lose everything in the here and now, for the day of reversal is coming and the reward will be great in the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 5).
– David Gibson

God Works for Us

I lift up my eyes to the hills. From where does my help come? My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth. He will not let your foot be moved; he who keeps you will not slumber. (Psalm 121:1–3)

Do you need help? I do. Where do you look for help?

When the psalmist lifted up his eyes to the hills and asked, “From where does my help come?” he answered, “My help comes from the Lord” — not from the hills, but from the God who made the hills. “My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.”

So, he reminded himself of two great truths: One is that God is a mighty Creator over all the problems of life; the other is that God never sleeps. “He who keeps you will not slumber.”

God is a tireless worker. He never wearies. Think of God as a worker in your life. Yes, it is amazing. We are prone to think of ourselves as workers in God’s life. But the Bible wants us first to be amazed that God is a worker in our lives: “From of old no one has heard or perceived by the ear, no eye has seen a God besides you, who works for those who wait for him” (Isaiah 64:4).

God is working for us around the clock. He does not take days off and he does not sleep. In fact he is so eager to work for us that he goes around looking for more work to do for people who will trust him: “The eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to give strong support to those whose heart is blameless toward him” (2 Chronicles 16:9).

God loves to show his tireless power and wisdom and goodness by working for people who trust him. The sending of his Son, Jesus, was the main way the Father showed this: “The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve” (Mark 10:45). Jesus works for his followers. He serves them. The gospel is not a “help wanted” sign. It is a “help available” sign.

This is what we must believe — really believe — in order to “rejoice always” (1 Thessalonians 5:16) and “[give] thanks always and for everything” (Ephesians 5:20) and have “the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding” (Philippians 4:7), and “not be anxious about anything” (Philippians 4:6), and hate our lives “in this world” (John 12:25), and “love [our] neighbor as [ourselves]” (Matthew 22:39).
What a truth! What a reality! God is up all night and all day to work for those who wait for him.

– John Piper

Jesus Died for this Moment

I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (Galatians 2:20)

When the alarm went off at 4:59 am, I had a split-second thought of the utter realness of dying and standing before an utterly holy God with nothing to commend me but my own life.
The horror of it was only surpassed by the flash of reality: Jesus Christ died for this very moment.
Then it was gone.

My immediate sense was: This is the essence of what happens whenever someone is converted. This is how Jesus Christ is discovered to be real. This is how a person comes to cherish the love of Christ. Suddenly, for the first time, they see and feel, with the eyes of their heart, the undeniable reality of having to meet God with a guilty conscience.
The impact of that vision is devastating. It causes us to know that our only hope is a Mediator. Standing alone, with nothing to commend us but our own sinful life, we are utterly lost. If there is any hope for eternity in the presence of this God, we will need a Redeemer, a Substitute, a Savior.

At this point of terrible crisis, nothing shines like the gospel of Jesus Christ — “who loved me and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:20). In the split second before he was there, I was granted to see the all-engulfing darkness and horror of the judgment — not a theological inference, not a merely rational conclusion, not a mere thought, but a glimpse with the inward eye full of knowing and feeling and certainty.

Our God is a consuming fire. He will not look upon evil. We are utterly lost. My guilt was so huge, so real, so unquestioned in that split second, that there is not even the remotest possibility of making excuses. It was sudden and all-enveloping and infinitely hopeless.
In this instant, Jesus is all that matters. O Christ! O Christ! Can my heart contain the wave of gratitude?! O Gift of God, my desperate and only need!
– John Piper

His Footsteps our Pathway

Psalm 87 is so good this morning! But one verse in it reminded me of growing up in a small moralistic and legalistic church in West Texas. There was no gospel preached in that church, and it was boring to me. But I have some vivid memories, one of which was the Sunday evening service, when they would always sing s specific song every Sunday night each week. I knew it was coming every time and I dreaded it– The Footsteps of Jesus. The first stanza was forever etched in my mind as a lost sinner growing into adulthood–

Sweetly, Lord, have we heard Thee calling,
Come, follow Me!
And we see where Thy footprints falling
Lead us to Thee.
Chorus–
Footprints of Jesus,
That make the pathway glow;
We will follow the steps of Jesus
Where’er they go.
The words meant nothing to me for years except as a religious memory. But I could have sung that first stanza and the chorus anywhere, anytime, by memory. Only later did I realize it was straight out of the Bible in Psalm 85:13–“Righteousness will go before Him, and shall make His footsteps our pathway.”

His footsteps our pathway; what is the pathway for the believer laid out in Psalm 85? It is marvelous! To summarize—

1. The path of favor (vss. 1 and 3); In the gospel is favor. He has made known to us his salvation. Merciful and kind favor so undeserved! In His favor, all His wrath is gone toward us forever because of the cross–“You have taken away ALL your wrath and turned from Your fierce anger.” The redemption of the cross did this permanently for us. Now favor is ours always every moment– forever!

2. The path of restoration (vss. 1 and 4) “You have brought back the captivity of Jacob . . . . Restore us, O God.” Deliverance from the bondage and captivity of sin and being restored to life and freedom. What a path!

3. The path of reviving and joy (vs. 6) “Will You not revive us again, that Your people may rejoice in You?” The Holy Spirit gives this periodically, as we seek Christ and walk with Him.

4. The path of continual communion and obedience (vs. 8) “I will hear what God the Lord will speak; He will speak peace to His people.” This is the path of walking with Christ, hearing His voice, and joyfully conforming our lives to His ways, purpose, and path.

5. The path of gospel warning (vs 8) “But let them not turn back again to folly.” The gospel not only sets us free and encourages us, it not only strengthens and sanctifies us, it also warns us to not return to a path of past sin and this world again. It warns us to not turn back, not to look back, and to keep our hand to the plow. There is nothing in our past or in this vile world that can satisfy or help us. The past path of sin and worldly pleasure only robs the believer. It offers nothing for us except spiritual grief and danger. Keep on the path! Turn not back again to folly!

6. The path of promise (vs. 12) “Yes, the Lord will give what is good, and our land will yield its increase.” The Lord will give what is good”; all He does is good and whatever He gives is always good for us, regardless of our evaluation of it. If it is not good for His child, He won’t give it; if it will do us true good, He gives it. Scripture says, “No good thing will He withhold from those who walk uprightly.” What promises the gospel gives us, exceedingly great and precious! We should feed daily upon the sweet and true promises of His Word. They are all ours, certain and unfailing–the path of promise!

7. The path of His footsteps (vs. 13) “Righteousness will go before Him and shall make His footsteps our pathway.” Picture it–His footsteps, the way of the Master, the path Jesus walked, the way He lived, the choices He made, the way of God’s commandments, the life of obedience He had–all of it is our pathway, which were His footsteps. His footsteps are the map set before us in Scripture, the highway of holiness, the path of obedience, and the steps of the Lord.

Wherever He leads, I’ll go–whatever He reveals, I will walk in that light–whatever He says, I’m bound with joy to do–what He wants for me is my daily bread, meat to eat that the world knows nothing about. Following Jesus is better than life itself. There is no other way for the Christian than one–His footsteps, our pathway!

– Mack Tomlinson

When the Potter is for Us

“Woe to him who strives with him who formed him, a pot among earthen pots! Does the clay say to him who forms it, ‘What are you making?’ or ‘Your work has no handles’?” (Isaiah 45:9)

The majesty of God is magnified when we see him through the lens of creation out of nothing. He commands nothingness, and it obeys and becomes something.

Out of nothing he makes the clay, and out of the clay he makes us — the pottery of the Lord (Isaiah 45:9) — his possession, destined for his glory, in total dependence on him.

“Know that the Lord, he is God! It is he who made us, and we are his; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture” (Psalm 100:3). It is a humbling thing to be a sheep and a pot that belong to somebody else.

There is another amazing statement about God’s majesty, which, when you put it together with God’s absolute power and rights as Creator, explodes with good news for us.

Isaiah 33:21! It says, “The Lord in majesty will be for us!”

For us! For us! The Creator is for us and not against us. With all the power in the universe and with absolute right to do as he pleases with what he made — he is for us!

“No eye has seen a God besides you, who acts for those who wait for him” (Isaiah 64:4). “If God is for us, who can be against us?” (Romans 8:31).

Can you think of anything (I mean anything) that is more comforting and assuring and delighting than that the Lord in his majesty is for you?

– John Piper

Jesus is God’s Amen

All the promises of God find their Yes in him. That is why it is through him that we utter our Amen to God for his glory. (2 Corinthians 1:20)

Prayer is the place where the past and future are linked repeatedly in our lives. I mention this here because Paul links prayer with God’s Amen in this verse in a striking way.

In 2 Corinthians 1:20, he says (with choppy Greek that comes through in choppy English), “That is why it is through him that we utter our Amen to God for his glory.” Let’s try to smooth that out.

Here’s what he is saying: “Therefore, because of Christ, we say Amen to God in our prayers to show that God gets the glory for the future grace we are counting on.”

If you’ve ever wondered why Christians say Amen at the end of our prayers and where that custom comes from, here’s the answer. Amen is a word taken straight over into Greek from Hebrew without any translation, just like it has come into English and most other languages without any translation.

In Hebrew, it was a very strong affirmation (see Numbers 5:22; Nehemiah 5:13; 8:6) — a formal, solemn, earnest “I agree,” or “I affirm what you just said,” or “This is true.” Most simply, “Amen” means a very earnest Yes in the context of addressing God.
Now notice the connection between the two halves of 2 Corinthians 1:20. The first half says, “All the promises of God find their Yes in him.” The second half says, “That is why it is through him that we utter our Amen to God for his glory.”
When you realize that “Amen” and “Yes” mean the same thing, here’s what the verse says: In Jesus Christ, God says his Yes to us through his promises; and in Christ we say our Yes to God through prayer.
– John Piper