Called, even when I don't feel qualified (Quiet Time Reflections)

I'm a few days behind on my daily schedule for quiet time with God. So, it was especially good, in the midst of what's been a busy period, to have that time with Him this morning. You'll find an explanation of my quiet time with God includes here.

Suffice it to say that with quiet time, I stop to confess my sins and pray; look at a chapter of Scripture; listen for what God is telling me in the passage (God generally seems to draw my attention to one or two verses), some new truth, some old truth underscored, some new insight about God or my faith; and respond to what God has told me. Again, the explanation linked above will tell you a bit more.

This morning, I read Galatians 1. Here's where God led me:

Look: “I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ.” (Galatians 1:12)

In this passage, which comes early in his letter to the Galatian Christians, Paul is establishing his status as an apostle of Christ’s Church. Apostles were part of a unique and time-bound group disciples. An apostle is, considering the Greek New Testament from which the word comes to us, literally, a called out one, a disciple from among the disciples as leaders within the Church and evangelists to the world. To be an apostle, a disciple had to have experienced personal contact with Jesus (Acts 1:21-22) and to have personally seen the resurrected Jesus. Paul, earlier called Saul, came to fit this bill belatedly on the road to Damascus, where as a zealous Pharisee looking for the excommunication or death of believers in Jesus, He was encountered and called by the risen and ascended Jesus to apostleship (1 Corinthians 15:8; Acts 9:1-19).

Because of the apostles’ personal knowledge of Jesus and their call to apostleship by Jesus, buttressed by the understanding of Him they gained through their knowledge of God’s Old Testament Word, the teaching of the apostles about the life, office, ministry, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus has always been considered normative by the Church. The Holy Spirit has used the apostles to assure us of the truth of God’s Word in Christ and the truthful witness of both the Old Testament and New Testament.

So, in this verse, Paul is making an important assertion to the first century church at Galatia: Their drift toward “another gospel,” one that doesn’t conform to the revealed truth about God personally witnessed by the apostles, including Paul, and affirmed by the Old Testament (and today by the New Testament that measures up to the apostles’ teaching) puts the Galatian Christians’ salvation at risk.

To take hope in any false gospel is to follow a false god, even if those who have wandered from Jesus carelessly refer to their false deity as Jesus.

Paul is trying to get their attention: I didn’t make up the gospel you once confessed believing; it’s from Jesus, God enfleshed, Himself.

Listen: The era of the apostles is ended, of course. But the Church (and that includes me) is still called to teach the truth about Jesus.

We’re to share the gospel, the good news, that out of love for our fallen, sinful human race, God entered our world as a perfect human being, true God and true man, then, although sinless, made Himself the perfect sacrifice for our sin (Acts 1:8).

To confirm Jesus’ power over sin and death and to show that His promise of new and everlasting life for those who repent and believe in Him can be counted on, Jesus was raised by God the Father.

Jesus then spent forty days on the earth giving further instruction to the disciples, His Church.

Then, ascending to heaven, He went to the throne room of the Father, sitting at His right hand in order to intercede for those who believe in Him and offer prayers in His name and to be at the ready for the moment when the Father will say that it’s time for Jesus to return to the earth in order to consummate history.

We know all of these things, not just because we’ve heard them from preachers, theologians, Sunday School teachers, parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, or friends. We know them because because of the revelation from Jesus Christ we receive when we hear and read God’s definitive Word, certified by the apostles like Paul, that we encounter in the Bible.

AND, we can point others to knowing these truths, receive salvation, and be disciples when we, like the apostle Paul, live like disciples of Jesus with a message and a way of life others need. This is urgent business because, it’s as true today as it was the day this statement was first made by the apostle Peter when speaking of Jesus: “Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).

Respond: Help me and all the disciples of Your church who seek to build our lives on the true gospel of Jesus to be bold in sharing Christ, Your Word, and making disciples (Acts 4:29).

Help me to say, believe, and live out of the truth that Paul talks about in Romans: “...I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentile” (Romans 1:16).

Today, Lord, help me not to hide the light of life with You that I’m privileged to have with Jesus. Help me to shine it everywhere I go and give Your light away to everyone I can. (Luke 11:33)

Forgive me for too often slinking by in the world. Today, help me to share Your message or to position myself relationally to earn the right to share Your gospel with others. In Jesus’ name.

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. ]

More Power to Share

Five mornings a week, I try to begin my days with a Quiet Time in which God speaks to me through His Word and I ask Him to help me to respond. Here are what God seemed to be telling me today.

Look: “Yet Saul grew more and more powerful and baffled the Jews living in Damascus by proving that Jesus is the Messiah.” (Acts 9:22, NIV)

Saul, once the persecutor of the Church, encountered the risen and ascended Jesus on the road to Damascus. He was heading to that city with papers from the temple authorities in Jerusalem authorizing him to move toward the excommunication of any his fellow Jews who confessed faith in Jesus as the Messiah/Christ. But rendered blind and helpless by his meeting with Jesus, Saul came to be a believer in Christ. Under the nurturing hand of Ananias and other church leaders in Damascus, Saul began receiving what amounted to catechetical training and, in no time, was preaching of the Gospel of new life through faith in Jesus Christ.

He meets with skepticism at the synagogue. “Isn’t he the man who raised havoc in Jerusalem among those who call on this name? And hasn’t he come here to take them as prisoners to the chief priests?” people ask (Acts 9:21). This reminds me of the skepticism Jesus was met with at His hometown synagogue in Nazareth in Luke 4:22: “Isn’t this the carpenter’s son?” Skeptics always want to cut the things of God--whether it’s God enfleshed like Jesus or Saul, a former enemy of Christ who proclaims Christ, like Saul. People do this in order to elude the lordship of Jesus.

But in verse 22, we’re told that in the face of skepticism, “Saul grew more and more powerful.” This rendering is OK, but it hardly does justice to how Luke, in the Greek in which he wrote Acts, expresses things. A more literal rendering is: “Saul however, was all the more empowered.” Σαῦλος δὲ μᾶλλον ἐνεδυναμοῦτο. That last word, transliterated into English as enedunamouto, carries the meaning of was empowered. The danger of the NIV translation is that it makes it seem that as Paul spoke, he gained greater confidence in himself and became more powerful.

But that’s not what that verb implies at all! What Luke is saying is that Saul was being filled with power from an outside source. Saul had nothing to do with the power that was enabling him to prove that Jesus is the Messiah. That was and to this day, is the work of the Holy Spirit in believers willing to share Christ and His Gospel with others.

We see how the power of a Christian’s witness grows as they make themselves available to share Christ in two separate incidents recounted in the Gospel of John.

In John 4, Jesus encounters a Samaritan woman by a well outside the village of Sychar. After Jesus tells her everything about herself, she runs into the village and speaks to people she had earlier been avoiding. She starts simply by inviting these people who had been gossiping and ignoring her to come and see a man who told her everything about herself. She ends by broaching the possibility that Jesus may be Messiah.

In John 9, Jesus heals a man born blind. The religious authorities are in an uproar and ask the now-healed man to tell them what happened. As the veracity of his story is challenged and as his own fearful parents leave him to fend for himself, the blind man becomes increasingly bold in proclaiming Who the Man Who healed him must be.

In each instance, the two who dared to say a good word about Jesus in the face of skepticism and opposition, even threats in the case of the once-blind man, grew bolder in their proclamation. They became more powerful.

I think more is going on here than the growing certainty that comes to us when we repeatedly rehearse something. That verb, enedunamouto, tells me that the more we lean on the truth of God’s Word about Christ, the more we share it, the more the Holy Spirit empowers us to share that Gospel word.

In Acts 1, the risen Jesus, just before He ascends to heaven, tells the apostles to wait in Jerusalem for the promised Holy Spirit to to come to them before sharing the Gospel. They do, the Spirit descends at Pentecost, and they proclaim the Gospel. And the more they proclaim it, the more power--power to convince others, power to sustain the proclaimer, power to confound skeptics (Acts 9:23)--comes to those who proclaim or share the Gospel.

Listen: Here, Lord, I feel that You’re telling me not to give up on proclaiming the Gospel. I need to proclaim the Gospel, not myself. I need to do so boldly and lovingly and not give up on doing so. I need to encourage the Church to do the same thing. As we do, You will give our witness more power: more power to convict and convince (John 16:7-11), more clarity, more ability to confound those who are skeptical, critical, or even enemies of Your Gospel.

Respond: Today, I make myself available to share Your Gospel with others. Help me to do it with boldness and humility (Acts 4:29). In Jesus’ name.

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

God's Word: Knowing it, living it

From my quiet time with God this morning, what God taught me from Revelation 1:3. That passage reads:

Great blessings belong to the person who reads the words of this message from God and to those who hear this message and do what is written in it. There is not much time left.

Look: “Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear, and who keep what is written in it, for the time is near.” (Revelation 3:1)

Listen: John has received a revelation, one consistent with the revelation of God given to the ancient Israelites and with God’s ultimate self-disclosure in the crucified and risen Jesus.

He says that the person who dares to read this revelation to the churches of Asia Minor is blessed, or favored by God. One might wonder how favored or blessed the world would regard the reader. John is living an exile on Patmos, an enemy of the state. To be associated with John and John’s witness for Christ would not make someone favored in the eyes of the government or the world.

But then, the Bible always evidences a strange notion of what marks a person as blessed or favored by God.

After the angel Gabriel visited the virgin Mary to announce that she will give birth to the Messiah, Jesus, Mary travels to see her relative, Elizabeth, and says: “...from now on all generations will call me blessed; for he who is mighty has done great things for me” (Luke 1:48-49).

Mary speaks here as an ordinary believer, blessed to have the Savior come to her and blessed too, to have the particular role marked out for her by God to be the bearer of God in her womb.

And yet, there were times when Mary would not have seemed, from an earthly perspective, to be blessed. First, there was the stigma attached to being a mother out of wedlock, something with which she would always have to deal.

Second, there was the knowledge that she was raising a Son Who faced certain rejection. When Jesus was eight days old, Mary and her husband Joseph took Jesus to the temple in Jerusalem to be circumcised. There, they encountered Simeon, a man who had been faithfully waiting and praying for Messiah to come in his lifetime. When he saw Jesus, he knew that his prayers had been answered. But he told Mary: ““Behold, this child is appointed for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is opposed (and a sword will pierce through your own soul also), so that thoughts from many hearts may be revealed.” (Luke 2:34-35)

To be blessed then, is not to have everything go our ways. It’s about living in God’s favor no matter what unpleasantness, pain, or death we may be going through at any given time.

Paul captures this idea of blessedness when he writes in Romans 14:8: “If we live, we live for the Lord; and if we die, we die for the Lord. So, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord.”

Jesus shows just how radically different the state of godly blessedness is from the world’s notions on the subject in the Beatitudes in Matthew 5:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.

“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.

“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

“Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” (Matthew 5:3-12)

We experience a state of blessedness from God when we are emptied of any dependence on the world’s definition of blessedness or happiness and instead, are filled only with the desire to live lives pleasing to the God Who has saved us by grace through faith in Christ.

Like Christ, we’re called to empty ourselves of concern about ourselves, confident that we belong to God forever and can move boldly to follow and do the will of God, whatever the world may think or say. (Philippians 2:7; Acts 4:29; Romans 8:31-39)

I have not attained this state of blessedness. Too often, I’m like the kids in the “trust experiment”: I trust, but not quite. I think of the radical call in Romans 13:14: “...make no provision for the flesh, to satisfy its desires.”

The public reader of God’s Word mediated through John in the book of Revelation was, John writes, “blessed” because he was following God rather than human beings in boldly daring to share the Word with others. (Acts 5:29)

I want to lead that kind of blessed life.

John goes on to say “...blessed are those who hear, and who keep what is written in it.”  

This reminds me of James’ words:

“But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like. But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, he will be blessed [there’s that word again] in his doing.” (James 1:22-25)

This is no promise that everything will go well for us in this world if we do God’s Word, doing what He commands us to do.

In fact, Jesus promises the exact opposite: “In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.” (John 16:33)

We are blessed--favored by God--when we not only hear His Word, but seek to live it and its implications out.

Listen: It’s too easy for me to turn Your Word into head knowledge for me, akin to all the trivia I have catalogued in my mind, Lord. Too often, I’m a kind of Martha (Luke 10), only I don’t scurry with serving dinner guests...I scurry for the acquisition of knowledge not to be more faithful to you, or a better person, or a better citizen, or a better family members, but just to be more knowledgeable. That’s a worldly game and its vain, both in the sense of pointless and in the sense of being egotistical.

Respond: Help me to live out my faith, to do what You call and command me to do: Love God, love neighbor, make disciples. Help me also to live out my specific callings in life: to serve, preach, teach, lead, to be salt and light in unlikely places.

Help me to seek to really live Your will for my life, even though there are times when, like a horse gone wild, I want to break free and do what I want to do.

Help me to read and live Your Word, Lord.

In Jesus’ name I pray. 

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]