2002-01-01
Good Morning Faithful Ones,
Yesterday, I was led to write about Your participation in the Covenant of Grace. The citations discussed revealed the faith that God had given to the apostle Paul through all his suffering and that He gives us to us to deal with ours. You remind us through PHIL 4 :13 that “[we] have the strength to face all conditions by the power that Christ gives [us].” God has made His will clear to us, that He wants us to endure in faith through whatever pain, temptation, or evil that the adversary sends us. He wants us to be reminded that we do not face these trials alone, that He is with us all the way, cheering us on to the victory for which He has equipped us. It is my hope that you won’t think I’m belaboring the issue when I repeat a couple of citations that we are tempted to forget when we are amidst suffering. JN 15: 7, 16, [Christ speaking] “If you remain in Me and My words remain in you, then you will ask for anything you wish, and you shall have it…You did not choose Me; I chose you and appointed you to go and bear much fruit, the kind of fruit that endures. And so the Father will give you whatever you ask of Him in My name.”
It is as if the Father commanded the Son to present us with a blank check and told us to fill in whatever amount we felt we needed in Christ’s name. The Father’s trust placed in us reveals the depth of His love and His profound belief that we will please Him by what we do with this check. He has placed His trust in us that we will be faithful, obedient, and loving participants in the Covenant of Grace with Him. Personally, I want Him to feel that the trust He has placed in me was well-founded and that I will come through for Him. Ask yourself how you feel about that. There is no guarantee that we will always please Him with what we do, but the motivation is there to do our best.
JN 15: 17, “This, then, is what I command you: love one another.” We can’t take this lightly when He issues this command. It is easy to love one’s friends, but how much effort do we make in offering our love to those we don’t know well. It is so easy for us to get caught up in our own world and not think about those people who wander into our lives and our congregations who are strangers to us. I recently came upon a women I didn’t know sitting by herself in our church. God immediately gave me the message to reach out to her, which I did. It turned out that she had just recently moved to Woodbury and didn’t have a congregation to call her own yet. I told her about ours and invited her to come back. She even decided to receive these devotions that I write each morning. Shortly afterward, she became ill and had to go to the hospital for a procedure. Unbeknownst to me, our pastor ended up visiting her while she was in the hospital. I do not know if she will join our congregation, but I certain hope she does. Later, when our pastor told me about his visit, I was privileged to see God at work in this situation. My own faith has been strengthened by this, and it is my hope that this lady’s has too. Many is the time that God brings new people into our lives for His reasons, and we are richly blessed by this. For God to do His work, we must open our hearts and welcome newcomers. The next time you see someone you don’t know, greet them with the love God gives us and see what I mean.
As participants in the Covenant of Grace, we must deal with spiritual warfare. We are not the only ones to do this. It’s been going on since the serpent’s tempting of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden [GN 3: 1-6]. The OT prophets and faithful people dealt with it. There is a very revealing incident in the book of Daniel that allows us to see that there is even a battlefront in the unseen world of angels. DN 10: 12-13 is the chief messenger angel, Gabriel’s, words to Daniel, who had been in confessional and intercessory prayer for 21 days. “Then, he said, ‘Daniel, do not be afraid. God has heard your prayers ever since the first day you decided to humble yourself in order to gain understanding. I have come in an answer to your prayer. The angel prince of the kingdom of Persia opposed me for twenty-one days. Then Michael, one of the chief angels [an archangel who is the guardian of Israel] came to help me, because I had been left alone in Persia.” From this, we can see that even angels sometimes deal with challenges including anger-power shortages. Just because there is action from the evil one and his cohorts all around us, there is no reason to feel that they can defeat us. That is because of the power imparted to all participants in the Covenant of Grace.
Let me once again reiterate EPH 6: 10-18 even gives us the tools with which we are to deal with spiritual warfare. Faith is our shield. Salvation is our protective helmet. God’s word is our sword. Truth is the belt around our waist. Righteousness is our breastplate. Our “steel-toed” shoes are our readiness to announce the Good News of peace. These are the things that our loving Abba has given us, and they are effective. If we will endure in the battle, we will come closer to eternal life with Him and be strengthened by the power given us by His Son. Have you ever known a more worthwhile goal?
PRAYER: O Lord, through Your word, we ask You to awaken us from our self-centeredness and enable us rise up and out of our apathy to put ourselves on the front lines of the battle with the adversary. You do not command us to this without equipping us to go on to victory. First, we must trust and have faith in You and Your Son. Then, we must pay attention to the tools You have given us, including power to do this battle through Your Son. The way will not be easy. We will suffer pain along it, but we will never be alone or have a test we can’t endure with faithfulness and effort. You will be ever present to cheer us on, give us direction, and encourage us in this battle. When we have faith in You and spread Your word, more believers will join us to help us. When we show the kind of love that You have for us toward others, our chances of winning this spiritual warfare are even bettered. You are there to comfort us and grant us peace when we are in pain. You are there to make sure that the adversary never has an unfair advantage over us. You are there providing for our every need. It is You Who gives us this chance to work toward the perfection we need to answer the call of that last trump for that meeting in the air with Your Son. You choose us, love us, and sustain us, giving us the endurance and strength that we must have to defeat the adversary. For that and so much more, we approach You in humility to offer You our adoration, worship, loyalty, trust, obedience, confession of sin, honor, glory, praise, and thanks. In Christ’s name, amen.
Tomorrow, the Lord leads me to write about covenants as solemn, binding agreements and how that impacts us. We will begin looking at the OT citations that reveal why this part of their nature is so important to us. As I look back over what the Lord has instructed me to write to you, I can see a pattern that is very crucial. Much of this is designed for all of us to get to know Him better. He has revealed many sides to His complex personality while at the same time revealing His will for us. Because the two parallel truths of His sovereignty and our responsibility to respond it exist, He wants us to know a lot about each. When we ask ourselves why, the only logical answer is because He loves each of us so much that He doesn’t want any of us to suffer the horrific consequences of a lifestyle of sin. Instead, He wants us to come to Him purified and perfected, so that He can gather us to Him for eternity and take away all our pain forever. Now, that’s love! Peter and I send you our love too.
Grace Be With You Always,
Lynn