Bible

My Help Comes from the LORD

smokey mountain

One of my favorite places to visit is the mountains of North Carolina. I think one of the reasons for that is because mountains make me feel very small. It’s hard to go to the mountains, see the majestic sky lines and the unbelievable views and not be in awe of God’s creation.

This year in particular, I felt very small. The house in which we were staying was surrounded by terrifying roads along with a terrifying driveway leading up to the house…and let me tell you, I probably prayed as hard and as fervently as we drove up and down these roads and that driveway as I’ve prayed in some time. There’s nothing like contemplating your impending doom, to get you praying…and praying hard!

I write all of this a bit tongue in cheek, but on a very serious note, I came back from vacation quite refreshed (even if it wasn’t that relaxing). I think one of the reasons I came back so refreshed was because I had time away from the everyday “hustle and bustle” of life to spend some time contemplating the things of God. And no matter where you find yourself, it is always a good thing, and a beneficial thing, and a soul refreshing thing to do…to contemplate the things of God.

For me personally, the mountains are a good place to do this. I’ve heard some say the beach helps them to connect with God in a way that they may not in their ordinary day to day lives.

With all of this being said, and aside from my terrifying drives that got me really close to God a few weeks ago, the fact is we as Christians here in America live in relative safety. We get to worship in relative safety. But this has not always been the case, and that is the backdrop for one of my favorite Psalms – Psalm 121.

The backdrop of Psalm 121 is that of a pilgrim traveler that was making his way up to Jerusalem to go up to the temple to worship. And this pilgrim who was making his way to and from the temple would encounter many trials and dangers along the way.

I suppose in light of the immediate context of this Psalm, some might wonder how this Psalm would apply to you and I. Well, let’s take a closer look.

While it is true that you and I dwell in relative physical safety in our day, that doesn’t change the reality that we are still pilgrims in the midst of a dangerous world. This being true, we can see very plainly in just the first few verses just how applicable this text is for us.

In verse 1, the Psalmist says, “I lift my eyes to the hills. From where does my help come?”

Friends, even though we may not be facing perilous physical journeys right now in the way of dangerous mountain roads, the fact is that all of us deal with challenges in this world. Dangerous challenges that threaten to derail us on our journey WITH and TO God, and that threaten to derail us on our path to worship.

Our world and our lives are filled with things like sickness, the death of loved ones, difficult relationships, money issues, trouble at work, and we could go on and on. All of these things are in addition to the Spiritual and emotional challenges that we all face. (Of course the big one that sort of sums up all of these things up is SIN…We ALL deal with sin.)

Each of us could, I have no doubt name something that we are dealing with right now.

So…in this context, I love this question. Why? One, because it is an acknowledgement of and an awareness of the need for help. Secondly, because it implies that there is an answer, and there is help to be found.

The Psalmist asks, “Where does my help come from…?” As the Psalmist looks to the hills as a picture of the trials and dangers that await him, it reminds us that we are a people who do need help. Much like I said earlier about how the mountains help me to feel small and they humble me…so does our seeing and going through challenges and difficulties in our everyday lives. These things help us to remember that we are not self-sufficient. We are not strong. We are not the ones with all the answers. We are small…and we are in need of help along the journey of life.

But here is the reality. The truth is we are all tempted to look somewhere else, other than to God for our help. Unfortunately most of us, and maybe even all of us often look in places that offer no help at all or at least they don’t offer us the help that we truly need.

But, the Psalmist here in Psalm 121 gives us just the answer that we need, and tells us EXACTLY who we are to be looking to for our help. In the midst of whatever trial, and in the face of the mountains that lay before us.

Verse 2, “My help comes from the LORD, who made heaven and earth.”

Folks, we can and we MUST be looking to the ALMIGHTY, ALL POWERFUL, SOVEREIGN God of the Universe. The God who is the creator of the heavens and the earth. Look around at the world, look all you want, and you won’t find anything that God didn’t create. If God created it, He is sovereign over it. I know sometimes it seems like the world is out of control. Sometimes it seems like your problems, your hurts, your pains are too much for anyone to bear…but if you have the ALMIGHTY God, the creator of the world…the one who is sovereign over ALL things…then what should you fear? Nothing!

Is anything too hard for the Lord? Absolutely not!

Look what the Apostle Paul says in Romans 8.

Romans 8:31, “…If God is for us, who can be against us?“

Romans 8:35, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword?….” Verse 37, “No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

There is a lot going on in these verses, but I think we can sum it all up quite simply…You are in good hands with God. Nothing can separate you from the love of God. There is nothing this world will throw at you that can destroy you if you are in the hands of God, and friends if you are in Christ, that is precisely where you are. Firmly in the hands of God.

And I think the Psalmist in Psalm 121 would agree. So,  no matter what challenge or what mountain you see before you on this day…be looking to the LORD, the only one that can truly give you the help that you need.

The Life-Changing Gospel

Gospel1

C.S. Lewis once said, “Christianity must be from God, for who else could have thought it up.”

I want us to think about this statement, because it’s true! Who could have made this stuff up? Think about how our message (the Gospel, the message of Christianity) must sound to someone who had never heard of, or read the Bible…

God created man and woman, and he gave them everything they could possibly want or need. The only thing God told them was not to eat of a particular fruit on a particular tree. Well, even though they had everything they could possible want or need, including food…they still chose to disobey God and eat of the fruit of that tree. And why did they do it? Because they were tempted by a talking snake. Now, because of their disobedience to God the curse of sin has come into the world and we all are headed to destruction…all because of a talking snake and some fruit on a tree.

But this isn’t even the craziest part. We also believe that God had a plan in all of it, and we believe that God did something to save us. What’s that? God came down to earth, as a man, was born in a stable and lived for 33 years as a poor man, spent three of those years traveling with a rag-tag bunch of people (sinners, prostitutes, tax collectors, even some fishermen were his most trusted disciples) preaching and teaching them who he was and about how we should live.

Think about this, GOD became man and did these things. And if that wasn’t crazy enough, this same God went to the cross and died a horrendous death. The death of a criminal on a Roman Cross. Who would make this stuff up?

But it doesn’t stop there! After he died on that cross, three days later he rose from the grave, taught a small group of believers about himself, and then sent them out to teach others. During this time he was disappearing and reappearing, he was cooking fish and eating, and going through doors almost as if he were a ghost of some sort. After 40 days of doing this he went back to heaven. It doesn’t end there.

We also believe he is going to come back as a conquering king to judge the world, and set everything right. Of course there is much more to the Gospel story than that, but that’s the gist of it.

Now, If I’m going to make up a story, that’s not one I’m going to make up. If I’m going to make up a story that I want people to believe, and one that is easy to believe, it wouldn’t be that one.

Just the very fact that the suffering servant is the conquering King…Sin is defeated by death…The one who died is the one who brought victory and saved us…Humanly speaking it doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Now to us who are believers it does, because we’ve had our eyes opened by God. We’ve heard the story so many times, it’s second nature to us…but in many ways the Gospel is completely contrary to human reason.

Not only that, the Gospel is contrary to how man’s mind works. Grace is contrary to how we think. We want something we can earn. We want rules to keep. We want to be able to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and earn our way to God. That’s the tendency of the natural man, but that is completely contrary to the Gospel.

The Gospel is, “it is finished.” God has already done enough to save you. In Christ you have the grace of God and all you have to do is believe it. It’s too good to be true! It’s like a fairy tale! But friends it’s better than a fairy tale, AND it’s completely true…

This is why Paul said in Galatians 1:11, “For I would have you know, brothers, that the gospel that was preached by me is not man’s gospel.”

The Gospel Paul preached, and the Gospel we preach is not man’s Gospel because it wasn’t made up by a man, and it wasn’t made up in order to please men. The Gospel is the Gospel because the Gospel is true and we can believe it!

We can believe the Gospel because we’ve seen it at work. We’ve been changed by it. False Gospel’s can’t change you. They may change your behavior as you try real hard to keep the rules, but they can’t change your heart. This is the beauty of the true Gospel. It changes your heart.  It changes who you are…and if you’ve truly experienced it, you know it’s true. And if you’ve truly experienced it, you want others to experience it too. As we are out in the world, as we are living our lives, as we talk to others about Christ…this is what they will see.

The obvious question for us is, has this Gospel we are talking about and the Gospel we say we believe changed us? Can people believe what we are saying?

Paul said in Galatians that the source of His Gospel was Christ. And if the source of His message was Christ, then that means the power IN His message, and the power OF his message to transform was Christ as well. Therefore Paul could confidently speak, write, and preach knowing that the Gospel would do its work.

Now, none of us have audibly heard God speak. None of us have the dramatic conversion experience Paul did (Read Acts 9, 22, or 26 to learn more), but at its core, the source of our message and the source of the Gospel we have to proclaim is the same Christ. Therefore, we too can confidently speak the Gospel unashamedly, knowing the Gospel will do its work. If we are doing that as ones changed by its message, there is no telling what God can do. Look back at the Bible. He took the church from 12 to 120 to over 3,000 to what it is today!

From a small group of 12, God changed the world. How? Through His Gospel being proclaimed, taught, believed, and lived out in the world – the very same Gospel we see taught in the Bible – that in Christ we can experience the grace of God, and have peace with God, all to the glory of God, forever and ever, Amen…

It’s a beautiful Gospel, it’s a powerful Gospel. It’s a life-changing Gospel.

 

 

 

 

 

The God Who Mourns

dark sky

One thing my family and I try to do is have a time of family worship in which we spend some time reading and talking about the Bible, and praying. Normally my kids love this time we spend together, and love hearing about Jesus and what God has to say to us through His Word.

Recently however, my 4 year old daughter didn’t want to have Bible Study. She wanted to play with her older sister. Even though I told her we were going to talk about Jesus, and how it was so important because Jesus loves us, she still wanted no part of our worship time. Even though I told her that the Bible tells us all about God, and how we can love God better, at that moment she had zero interest in hearing what the Bible had to say. (This sounds a lot like some adults I know also.)

After several minutes of me trying to encourage my daughter to join us, she finally got frustrated and blurted out, “I don’t like Jesus! I don’t want Him! I don’t want to know about God!”

Now, I understand that she is 4 years old and she really doesn’t understand what she is saying. I understand that she doesn’t have the intellectual capacity to understand that when we read the Bible, and read about Jesus, and when we choose to receive it as truth or reject it…there are eternal consequences. But nevertheless, when she blurted out those words, I was crushed. My feelings were hurt, and my heart agonized hearing such harsh words come from the lips of my little girl.

Her words got me to thinking though. If those words crushed me – If hearing the voice of my little girl reject Jesus and the things of God affect me so powerfully – How much more does it hurt the heart of God when He is rejected?

How it must pain Him when He hears people say they don’t want Him. How it must cause Him to mourn when people reject His Word. How it must grieve the heart of God when He sees people turn away from His Son Jesus, and the salvation that He brings. Sadly, there are times when even those who profess to love Him still choose to reject Him…either with their lips, or with their actions.

Now, this idea of God mourning over the words or the actions of people may strike some as odd. God is sovereign, He has perfect foreknowledge…so, does God really grieve over the actions of men, or how they choose to respond to Him and His love? The answer to that question is an emphatic, “Yes!”

Colossians tells us that Jesus is the image of the invisible God. (1:15) This means that if you’ve seen Jesus, you’ve seen the Father. Jesus Himself says this exact thing in John 14:9. Jesus was God in human flesh, and perfectly reveals God and His character and personality to us. This being true, if we want to know how God feels about something, or how He would react to a particular scenario…all we have to do is look to Jesus.

So, how did Jesus respond to being rejected? He wept and He mourned. In Matthew 23:37 Jesus says of Jerusalem, “How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” Luke 19:41 tells us that when Jesus drew near and saw the city, “…he wept over it.”

I don’t know about you the reader, but as I read these words and think about the heart of God, I am amazed. To think that God loves us so much and longs to bring us to Himself is amazing. To think that God grieves when we choose to reject Him with either our words or our actions, is a powerful thought.

Friends, God loves you. God longs to be with you. We know this because He sent His Son Jesus to tell us so. God loves you and longs to be with you so much, that He sent Jesus to the cross to make it possible. Jesus took upon Himself your sin, and my sin, so that we could be forgiven and no longer separated from Him. There is no questioning the love of God for His people, or His desire to be with us. The only question is…how will you respond to His love?

My prayer is that none of us would foolishly echo the words of my young daughter. She spoke out of youthful ignorance. If you are reading these words, you don’t have that excuse. Jesus loves you, I pray that you will love Him back. Jesus wants you, I pray that you want Him as well. God knows all about you, do you have the desire to know Him? I hope that you do.

Dear reader, don’t grieve the heart of God by rejecting so great a love. Run to Him. Desire more of Him. Learn all you can about Him, learn how to love Him better, and rest in His precious saving grace.