Psalms 62:5 My soul, wait thou only upon God; for my expectation is from him.
It never ceases to amaze me, the way the devil uses our offenses and our “offendedness” to divide and conquer marriages, relationships, churches — even entire nations!
Many of us are not careful enough about the things we say and more importantly, we get offended way too easily. As we were discussing this topic recently, a good friend gave this analogy and we loved it:
If you are holding a baby and his little arm swats you in the face, would you take offense to that? Of course not! We know the little guy didn’t intend to hurt us. We respond with “awwww” or laughter or something to that effect. But if it is a friend, a family member or a brother or sister in the church who offends us with a little swat of his words or actions, we are undone. We expect more from them! What hypocrisy! We become angry and we want to defend ourselves, fight back or leave forever.
Yeshua (Jesus) said NO! He said that even if someone despite-fully uses us, that means on purpose, that we are to respond in love! We as human beings are troubled and sinful. We are not perfect and we should never expect others to be, no matter what their positions are in the church. God is perfect and He is the one from whom our expectations should come — no man.
So let’s be quick to forgive, and slow to anger! Turn over all of those offenses to the Lord and allow Him to restore His perfect shalom over us!
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[worthy_plugins_devotion_single_body]The Moravian revival, our current subject, began in the little community of Herrnhut on August 13, 1727, with a tremendous outpouring of the Holy Spirit likened to that of Acts 2. It was a work of God that would transform this group of splintered Christian settlers into a unified missionary endeavor committed to reaching the unsaved around the world.
As we discussed last week, the word for “sign” in ancient Hebrew is “oht”. It was used in Genesis to designate God’s covenant sign with Noah, (the rainbow). And we see now the same word again, in Exodus, identified with the deliverance of the Jewish people from the tenth plague, when the angel of death passed through all Egypt to strike the firstborn. Anyone under the “sign” of the blood was spared.
This is one of my favorite promises in the Bible — that God turns mourning into dancing! He takes away the anguish of being clothed in sadness and replaces it with gladness. However, notice what God doesn’t do — simply stop your mourning and make it disappear. No, He transforms it…into joy!
With war drums beating even more intensely in Iran and Syria, we’ve received numerous phone calls and emails expressing their concerns — and understandably so! Nevertheless, even in this climate of anxiety, we are preparing to enter into Shabbat (the Hebrew word for Sabbath) this afternoon. And as we do, we are remembering again, the deep lesson of God’s entering into His rest following the six creation days.
A sailor who was shipwrecked on a desert island was captured by some of the natives of that island. They carried him off on their shoulders to their village, where he was sure he would end up being the main course. But instead, they put a crown on his head and made him king. He was enjoying all the attention he was receiving but was growing a little suspicious. He started making inquiries and discovered that their custom was to crown a stranger king for a year and at the end of that year the crowned king would be sent to a deserted island where he was allowed to starve to death.
Some of the wealthiest individuals in the United States are real estate developers. They make their money by buying a piece of property that is terribly run down, seemingly useless, without any value to the naked eye and reforming it completely, making it look brand new! These businessmen are not as much interested in what is on the property as they are interested in the land it’s on!
For those of you who didn’t get that title, it’s a well known children’s Suzuki violin rhythm.
Not long ago, I came across an old issue of Homemade, where Dr. Ernest Mellor writes on fostering good relationships. This is so good I had to share.