Joy

What makes you happy?  I know for me there are many things that I would say make me feel happy.  Chocolate, a good book, coffee.  Even people make me happy.  Like my wife saying she's proud of me or my daughter laughing at something silly I've done.

Now, for the real question.  What brings you joy?  You see, joy has a deeper meaning than happiness.  Happiness is just finding delight or pleasure in something, but joy - that's defined as keen elation, great satisfaction.  If you search the Bible for the word 'joy', you'll come up with so many results that you won't know what to do with them.  One of my favorites is Habakkuk 3:18, "yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will take joy in the God of my salvation."  We are called to find joy in the Lord.

I learned something new about joy this morning as I was reading in 1 John.  The fourth verse of the first chapter says this, "And we are writing these things so that our joy may be complete."

I guess it would help to know the context. John is talking about the fact that he is an eye-witness to Jesus coming to earth to be our salvation.  He's proclaiming the eternal life that Jesus brings with Him for  us and how incredible fellowship is with Him.  He concludes by saying that he's writing all of that so that his joy will be complete.

Here's what blows my mind and, more specifically, what my take away for today is - I can have joy in the Lord all day long, but my joy is made complete when I tell other people about Him.  That joy is not finished growing in my heart unless I'm telling other people about Him and what He means to me.  Will my life still have meaning and purpose?  Yes, but it will not be completely fulfilled, because part of my calling, my purpose, God's plan for my life is to share his love.  I'm created to share the hope that I've found in Him with the people all over the world who don't know that precious, life-giving joy.

"Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations..."

What are you doing to make your joy complete?      

Precious

I was looking at Beth and Isabella while they slept this morning, soaking in a last little moment with each of them before I went off to work, and I had a moment of clarity.


They are precious to me. Those sweet moments when they don't even know I'm watching are precious to me. The times when Isabella is curled up in a chair with a book. The times when Beth has her head tilted just so as she reads a recent blog update or recipe. The times when they're both asleep, nestled into the blankets in the exact same pose. They don't know I'm watching but those are the most precious times to me.


I mean, there are things in life that we like a lot or even things that we love, but I bet there are just a few things that we would say are precious to us. Things that maybe no one else would appreciate or at least very few people would.


The amazing thing about it all is this - to God, we are that precious! Check out this verse from what I was reading this morning:


"As you come to Him, a living stone rejected by men but in the sight of God chosen and precious..."


Later it says God has chosen us as "a people for His own possession.". What an amazing picture! I was completely overwhelmed this morning as I was reminded that just as I have those precious moments with my family, we are considered all the more precious by our Father in heaven.


Do you feel like the world is weighing you down and nothing is going your way? Do you feel like everyone is against you? Do you feel abandoned or alone or burdened or afraid?
Be encouraged today, because God loves you and He has a plan for you and He has made a way for you to have the most intimate relationship you have ever known! You are precious to Him - more precious than you could ever imagine.


Just one last thing: Are you living your life to reflect how precious you are to the Father?

Hope

What do you hope for?  A typical person these days might say they hope for the economy to start back up again or they hope for war to end.  An American dreamer might say they hope for just that - the American dream.  A husband or wife, 2.5 kids, a house in the suburbs with a big yard and white picket fence.

What about this question:  in whom do you place your hope?  Is it yourself - you know you'll never let you down.  Is it your elected officials or your pastor - they would never betray the hope and trust you place in them!  I read this morning several verses that may set it straight:

"The king is not saved by his great army; a warrior is not delivered by his great strength.  The war horse is a false hope for salvation, and by its great might it cannot rescue."  Psalm 33:16-17

Man!  You mean the people around me are going to fail me?  My hope is misplaced?  You mean even sometimes I'll let myself down?!

Really, in all seriousness, you probably already knew that.  We can hope in stuff and people all day long, but at the end of the day, you know as well as I do that people are fallible, people mess up.  We get let down and hurt and roughed up a lot by this world and it's no wonder we're not all crazy for all the pain we end up in throughout our lives.  It's why you see so much depression and suicide - this world is a hard place to live in!  Check this out, though - the rest of the story:

"Our soul waits for the Lord; He is our help and our shield.  For our heart is glad in Him, because we trust in His holy name.  Let Your steadfast love, O Lord, be upon us, even as we hope in You."  Psalm 33:20-22

Amazing!  I can't even begin to describe the peace that settles on my heart when I read that.  The Bible doesn't just say we should hope in the Lord - it's so much more than that!  He loves us - more than we can imagine.  He's trustworthy - and he'll never break that trust.  He brings our hearts joy - and it's the deepest joy we'll ever know.

Here's my favorite part of that verse:  "Our soul waits for the Lord..."  Our souls are all waiting for just the right piece to make them whole and that piece is the Lord.  Our souls will only ever be satisfied by the Lord.  Our souls are perfectly made to be perfectly completed by the Lord!

If you don't have hope in the Lord, I pray that you will because it's the best thing you'll ever know.  If you do have hope in the Lord, don't forget - your hope is never misplaced in the Lord.

Lofty Task

Do realizations ever just dawn on you out of the blue?  I mean, I was just sitting in the chair in our daughter's room watching her toddle back and forth between rooms in her high water pj's and this thought occurred to me - "She's my responsibility!"

I don't mean I realized that it's my job to make sure that she's eats healthy food or wears cute clothes or has a place to sleep - of course, that's my responsibility.

I'm not even referring to the fact that it's my job to make sure that she does well in school or gets a great job or marries the right guy - yes, all of those things I will do.  Yes, all of those things I take very seriously!

But, to be honest, there's one thing that I was strongly reminded of this morning that Beth and I MUST do as parents.

"Train up a child in the way (s)he should go; even when (s)he is old, (s)he will not depart from it."
Proverbs 22:6

She could be malnourished, naked, sleeping on the street, uneducated, unemployed, and married to some dirtbag - but whether or not we accomplish this one thing will determine our success in raising her.  Whether or not we do this one thing will paint a clearer picture of our priorities in life than anything else we could ever do or say.

It was like an explosion went off in my head!  I always knew that I had this responsibility, but the reminder was incredibly poignant today.

It's our job to raise her up in the Lord, to teach her through the example of our lives and the words of our mouths what God's love means and how it affects our lives - how we will never be the same now that we know it, and how we couldn't be who we are without it!

It's our job to show her what the Gospel is and to lead her to the cross!

It's our job to disciple her once she's found Jesus and help her grow in that most intimate of relationships!

The bad news is - we can't do it in our own strength.  We can never do or say the right thing to accomplish this task.  The good news is - we have faith in our Father, our Lord, our Savior that He will grant us the strength and grace and love and patience to do it all!  Will we make mistakes?  Undoubtedly so.  But the picture of our daughter at the end of our lives will reflect who we are and how we invested our time.

A picture really does paint a thousand words...

Relationships

How much time do you spend with your best friend?  My guess is a lot.  I mean, how else do they become your best friend?  You spend hours talking to and spending time with them.  You call each other to go to a movie or get coffee.  You tell each other about what's going on in your life and how something has made you happy or someone has made you mad.  Why?  Because with a friendship like that, or any relationship for that matter, you have to spend time cultivating it.

What if your best friend never called you?  What if you never spent time with your closest friends?  Isn't it obvious that just like a gowing relationship requires time and energy and effort to make it grow, a relationship without those things is stagnant?  Wouldn't it be true that a relationship without those things is not a relationship at all?  You wouldn't be best friends with that person, you would be more like acquaintances...or strangers...

You know the same thing applies to our relationship with God?  I can say all day long that I love God and I want to glorify Him with my life and I have this really close relationship with Him and I'm trying to figure out what His will for my life is and...and...and...

But how can that be true if I don't spend time with Him?  How can that be true if I don't talk to Him and let Him talk to me?  The truth is, though, that's something I've heard before.  It's not a new concept to me that I need to put time and energy and effort into growing in my relationship with God.  It's not my purpose for writing this today.

I need to take this a step further and share what's been really on my heart lately.  In our small group, we have been reading through "Forgotten God" by Francis Chan.  (WOW!  We're not even halfway through and already it's given me much to think about and apply in my life.)  One of the things that Chan mentions is that the Holy Spirit is a Person, distinct from the Person of God or the Person of Jesus.  That started me thinking about something I hadn't thought about before.

The Holy Spirit is a Person.  John 14:17 talks about how I am to be in relationship with the Holy Spirit.  So, just like with God, I have to foster it, I have to put effort into being in and growing in relationship with the Holy Spirit.  This is such a new concept for me because I guess I just always assumed that the Holy Spirit would just be there, that He would just guide me and teach me and that would be that.

But it's so much bigger than that!  The Bible promises all of these gifts that the Holy Spirit brings with Him.  The Bible says that I will bear the fruit of the Spirit.  So, how do I make sure that I am receiving those gifts?  How do I make sure that I am bearing that fruit?  How do I learn God's will for my life, what I've been praying for since I can remember?

I have to pursue relationship with the Holy Spirit - actively, consistently.  I have to pray for a closer and more intimate relationship with the Holy Spirit, just like I pray for a closer and more intimate relationship with God.

So I guess the thought I'll end with is - what or who are you seeking relationship with?

Resignation?

Perspective is everything, isn't it?

Take a picture of a man and a woman both holding a purse in the street.  If you're a man of honor and integrity, then you assume he's giving it back to her after getting it back from a thief.  If you're a woman who's been taken advantage of, then you assume he's stealing it from her.  What if she's taking it from him?  What if she's giving it to him?  What if they're both con artists that just stole it from some other person not in the picture?  You catch my drift?

Perspective really can be everything to how we view and handle experiences, and over the past couple of weeks while reading through the Gospel of Mark I've been blessed to see a perspective that I hadn't really taken time to notice before.

The first thing I noticed (although it's not hard to notice and someone else actually pointed it out to me) is Mark's use of the word or some form of the word 'immediate'.  All throughout the book it seems like Mark just uses the word over and over.  My English teacher from high school would have circled it after the first few times and written 'redundant' in big, cursive, almost-illegible red script.  But I think he's trying to get some point across by his repeated use of the word.  For a while I couldn't pin-point it exactly, but my second observation helped a little...

The second thing I noticed about the book of Mark was an emotion.  It seeps through the pages, especially near the end, and it just overwhelmed me with every page I read!  I mean, normally there is a verse that stands out or a lesson that intrigues me, but an emotion?  It was new to me.

The only verse the came to mind the whole time I was reading was that verse in Isaiah 53,

"He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth."

And the only word that came to mind the whole time I was reading was resignation.  Of course, that sounds weak and pales in comparision to the word I was really trying to think of - submission.  I know, submission isn't an emotion.  But I don't know any other way to explain it.  I felt...through the way the text was written and the order of the events and even with this word immediate coming up all the time, I felt the emotion Jesus must have felt as he submitted.  Can that even do it justice?  Does that even make any sense? 

I don't know.  What I do know is it was eye-opening for me.  It was real and raw and human.  It helped me see a different side of Jesus than I normally see or think about.  Above all, it helped me understand more of why Jesus went to the cross for me.

He perfectly understood that God's will is perfect...that God's will can be trusted...that God's will has everyone's best interests at heart.

So, after much verbiage, here are two things I've gleaned from my reading of Mark:

1.  If you want to be more like Jesus, submit to the will of God.  You can't change it anyway...
2.  If you want to be better at submitting, try this new word 'immediately'.  Jesus didn't delay in submitting to the will of the Father, and neither should we.

Comforting Trust

Have you ever met someone who is going through something that you just experienced?

Well, I was re-reading the life journal from yesterday - because I lost my list :( - and a couple of things stood out to me.  Both were reminders, but I think they're needed reminders for me today.

First, 2 Corinthians 1:3-4, "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts  us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God."

Sometimes I forget that my experiences aren't for me.  I mean, I know I need to learn from the things that I do and experience.  But I'm understanding that that's not the whole purpose behind why I have life experiences.  Of course, the first reason is to glorify the Father.  Another one, though, is clearly described in this verse  - I'm to comfort and encourage the people around me with the same comfort Christ gives me.  We all have common experiences, right?  Everybody faces joy and sorrow in various forms, and the amazing thing about the Lord is that He gives us the gift of comfort.  The thing about gifts, though, is that we're supposed to give them away.  Don't hold on to the comfort you receive.  Share it gladly with the people around you who need it most.

Second, 2 Corinthians 1:9, "Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death.  But that was to make us rely not on ourselves, but on God who raises the dead."

Need I say more?  God's calling me and you to trust Him.  Completely.  Entirely.  Even unto death.  It amazes me how fully Paul trusts God.  Here I sit thinking about how hard it is for me to let go of things and truly trust the Father, and Paul responds with, "It's no big deal!  Even if I die, God raises dead people to life..."  To some that could seem arrogant, and maybe he was, but is he wrong?  Not at all.  Paul is completely correct to be that confident in the Lord.

I suppose the question is, am I?

Food for Thought

It seems like the South has developed a culture in which certain things or behaviors, are taboo, but no one really wants to come out and address them.  But, isn't that what counseling classes teach you to do when resolving conflict?  Confront the issue?  It has gotten to the point where people either pretend it doesn't exist or are just afraid to say anything at all, but they still talk about it.  They still judge people who participate.


I know I do.


"Gee, Jacob, is that what this post is about?  You're just going to rant about something?  Sit on your high horse and judge people for doing what you won't say anything about?"


Actually, no.  Could I?  Sure.  If I wanted to completely alienate everyone around me for being sinful by judging them, yeah, I guess I could.  No, what I really wanted to use this post for was a declaration of sorts.


A decision.


It's been a long time coming.  There have been many mistakes made and I know I've waffled back and forth on the issue over the years, but I think I have it down.  I got a little confirmation this morning in my life journal reading.


"Therefore, if food makes my brother stumble, I will never eat meat, lest I make my brother stumble."  1 Corinthians 8:13


The first thing that comes to mind when I read this verse is alcohol.  Yes, I said it, alcohol.  That bitter spirit that can take years to make and seconds to consume.  Now, I want to be very careful when I say this, so let me make things very plain:


I AM NOT CONDEMNING OR ADVOCATING ALCOHOL OR ITS CONSUMPTION!


This post is entirely about me (sorry for the selfishness) and a decision that I have come to.  I just was clearly reminded this morning and felt the need to share.  Here it is.  Take it with a grain of salt if you will.


The huge dilemma, it seems to me, with alcohol is that there are groups for and groups against it.  Some say that you should never have any, others it's okay in moderation, others say 'Drink and be merry!'


I suppose I could sum my thoughts in a few points:


1.  According to the Word, if I partake and cause a brother or sister to stumble then I have sinned against them and Christ.  Bad move.
2.  According to the Word, Christ came to set me free from the law so it's my choice to partake or not.


I don't know about you, but this leaves me a little adrift.  Which do I pick?  How do I make a choice that lets me have my freedom but doesn't hurt my brother in Christ?  Here's a logical thought:  What if I only drink around the people that I know are okay with it and don't drink around the people who aren't?  That way, I can be free to do as I wish and also make sure that I don't cause a brother to stumble...


Oops...


That's all well and good, but what about the situation where a person from each group is present?  If I drink, the one brother stumbles.  If I don't, the other one sees my hypocrisy.  I hurt my witness either way.  Neither of those options is acceptable to me!


I'll close with this:


"I choose not to drink alcohol.  I don't think that it's wrong nor do I judge the people who choose to drink.  But, I am choosing not to."


I would rather go without something I have enjoyed before in order to save my witness on both accounts than hurt my witness with either person.  Is it worth it?


I think so.


What about you?

Silence

Sometimes, silence is an incredible thing.  It brings me closer to the Lord when I'm meditating on His Word.  It can also speak volumes.  Here's what I'm doing on this Tuesday, October 20th.  I encourage you to participate with a red arm band or your own silence.

Past, Present, Future

What tense am I living in?  It struck me this morning as I was reading in Acts that every day is a choice for me.  I can choose to live in the past, the present, or the future.  Here's the verse that set my mind to thinking:

"Men of Galilee, why do you stand there looking into heaven?  This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw Him go into heaven."  Acts 1:11

I was reading this passage and it just struck me.  I prayed for God to show me something I hadn't really seen before, and the words themselves began to imply a deeper meaning to me.

"..why do you stand there looking into heaven?..."  Why?  Because the followers of Christ were reminiscing about the days when He was there with them.  They seem to be dwelling in the past and wishing for those days to still be here.  I do the same thing.  I either think about the good things from my past and wish they were still here, or I dwell on the bad things in my past and regret them.  Neither of which is good for me to do, and I think that's why the angels asked that question.

"This Jesus...will come in the same way as you saw Him go..."  The angels are reminding me that Christ is coming back.  It's a promise!  I don't have to sit and worry about whether or not Jesus is coming back.  It's going to happen.

I think the message in this passage for me is this:  I can learn a lot from my past, good or bad.  I can eagerly anticipate everything in my imagination of what the future holds.  But the implied message for me from these angels in Acts is to live for today!  They're gently reminding me of the call of the Great Commission on my life,  that I need to let the past go, let the future bring what it brings, and do everything I can to serve God today.

So, what tense are you living in?