Grains of Sand

I just received a box of business cards. I know, what does a retired person who has no business need with business cards? I might be a victim of good advertising—or at least persistent advertising—but I did it anyway. I didn’t order 500 as was suggested—I’m not quite that foolish—I’ll be dead and gone before I ever gave away that many! But while I was designed my card, I had the option of putting something on the back side of it. Three words came to mind and here they appear again in my verse for today. “ Look to the Lord and his strength; seek his face always .” (1 Chronicles 16:11) In the context in which this verse was recorded, David is celebrating the arrival of the ark in Jerusalem. The verse is part of a song of praise (16:8-36) written to remind the people of God just Who this God is, and all that He has blessed them with as a nation. It is well worth the reading, and the singing—you can make up the music as you go along—I’m sure David won’t mind if you change his melody a li...

Pixabay Complaining was one of the many negative character qualities of the children of Israel. They weren’t that long out of Egypt—accompanied by many HUGE miracles that attested to God’s provision for them—when they were grumbling about the “room service”. Several times food and water were the issues. But though God could have avoided the conflict, He didn’t, preferring to test the faith of His people and to teach them valuable lessons about that faith. He let them go hungry for a reason. In Deuteronomy 8:3, Moses speaks these words to the people: “ He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your fathers had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord ”. So important was this lesson that Jesus used the latter part of the verse in His contest with Satan in the wilderness. (Matthew 4:4) The children of Israel must have wondered about the application of the les...

Pixabay I’ve always jokingly said that I was in such a hurry to get started with life that I was born a month prematurely and have been running ever since! Like just about everything, being fast isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But then again, it can get a person into trouble. In fact, going too slowly can do the same thing. Perhaps that is why this passage from Numbers 9 caught my attention. At the end of the chapter the writer is describing the cloud that covered the Tent of Meeting, or the tabernacle, that was the centerpiece of the Hebrew camp. During the day it was a cloud, at night it was a pillar of fire—the same cloud and fire that had been with the Israelites since they had left Egypt. Moses writes: “ Whenever the cloud lifted from above the Tent, the Israelites set out; whenever the cloud settled, the Israelites encamped. At the Lord’s command the Israelites set out, and at his command they encamped ” (9:17, 18). The passage goes on to say that sometimes the cloud settled f...

It’s a verse that most of us know by heart. We’ve repeated it over and over, claiming its promise for everything imaginable. “ Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart ” (Psalm 37:4). To delight is to take pleasure in, or to be pleased with; in this case to take pleasure in the Lord or to be pleased with the Lord. I can think of a lot of things that would qualify as “the desires of my heart.” And I am sure that over the years I have claimed all kinds of things based on this verse. But this morning, after I had read through the chapter several times and stopped to think about some of the other verses, I returned to verse 4 again. In fact, I returned to it several times. I made this note beside the verse: “ The relationship between the believer and the Lord is what ultimately leads to the desires of the heart being fulfilled. And what desire is better than an intimate relationship with the Lord? ” The eternal circle. Finding my pleasure in an intimat...

theheartoftheworshiper.blogspot.com (Google Images) Sometimes there remains nothing to be said. David’s words from Psalm 63 said it all this morning. O God, you are my God,     earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you,     my body longs for you, in a dry and weary land     where there is no water. I have seen you in the sanctuary     and beheld your power and your glory. Because your love is better than life,     my lips will glorify you. I will praise you as long as I live,     and in your name I will lift up my hands. My soul will be satisfied as with the richest of foods;     with singing lips my mouth will praise you. On my bed I remember you;     I think of you through the watches of the night. Because you are my help,     I sing in the shadow of your wings. I stay close to you;     your right hand uphold...

Google Images The experts are still not quite sure what the woman did for a living. But whoever she was and however she put food on the table, Rahab was no fool. Everyone in Jericho had heard about the children of Yahweh camped on the other side of the river. They had also heard of the exploits of these nomadic tribespeople. And they were afraid (Joshua 2:9). It's bad enough when you are being stared down by a few million eyes, but even worse when the God who governs the manpower represented by those eyes has displayed His might and right and decimated every nation that has threatened His people. Rahab didn’t have to be a prophet to figure out who was going to win whatever battle was on the horizon. She picked the winning side before the battle even began and before Joshua’s spies (2:1) arrived on her doorstep. When they came, obviously divinely directed to her house rather than to the house of someone less astute, she negotiated with them for the lives of her family (2:8-13) a...

The first murder of 2012 was committed last Saturday morning here in my hometown. Considering that 20 or 30 murders occurred on any given weekend in Caracas while I lived there, one in eight months doesn't seem like much. But it is still one too many. It's not that there is an absence of law. No, we are not a lawless nation. But we are a godless nation. Oh, we have churches and freedom of religion is guaranteed. All those niceties exist. Our country was founded on Christian principles and those principles form the basis for the rule of law. But chaos doesn't begin with the breaking of the law, it begins in the heart. And the heart of the nation is godless. David writes in Psalm 33:12a, " Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord ." It doesn't say that a nation is blessed if it gives lip service to a religion, or holds to a set of moral and ethical norms. It says that blessing comes to a nation that acknowledges THE God and where that God is LORD over every...

Pride personified: from Byron's Curse How soon we forget. Uzziah was sixteen when he became king of Judah (2 Chronicles 26:1). At an age when most people think they know everything, the young king was wise enough to know that such a responsibility needed better prepared heads than his. It is written that: " He sought God during the days of Zechariah, who instructed him in the fear of God. As long as he sought the Lord, God gave him success " (26:5, NIV). And he was successful. He enjoyed a fifty-two year reign. His enemies were defeated. He was wealthy and built up the wealth of the land. He was famous and became powerful. Then these ominous words: " But after Uzziah became powerful, his pride led to his downfall. He was unfaithful to the Lord his God… " (26:16, NIV). He desecrated the temple by assuming the role of a priest and burning incense on the altar. The priests rebuked him. At that point he should have repented. Instead, Uzziah got angry because of ...

There are days when I'd like to be a cat! It's how you finish that counts—or so they say! I suppose someone could stretch that saying to mean that as long as you manage to repent and "do the right thing" fifteen minutes before you die, you can live the rest of your life any way you please. But I think there is something deeper to this phrase. Take the life of Asa, the King of Judah, described for us in 2 Chronicles 14-16. He started out so well: " Asa did what was good and right in the eyes of the Lord his God " (14:2, NIV). He knew where the secret to his success was: " The land is still ours, because we have sought the Lord our God; we sought him and he has given us rest on every side " (14:7, NIV). When faced with adversity, Asa did not hesitate to seek the Lord. Facing his enemies, he prayed: " Lord, there is no one like you to help the powerless against the mighty. Help us, O Lord our God, for we rely on you, and in your name we have ...

Sometimes tunnel vision ruins my eyesight. I see only my little world and my insignificant "issues." These are times when I need to look beyond myself and broaden my outlook. I can't take a "God-view" of things because I'm not Him, but I can adjust my vision to look TO God, whose view of everything—even my little world—is so much clearer than mine.

Youthwork International, Google Images He did everything except build it himself. David's dream of building a temple for God would not become a reality in his lifetime, but that didn't stop him from doing everything in his power to prepare for it. Despite what must have been a disappointment for him, David displayed a cheerful submission to the will of God. Perhaps knowing that his son would be the one to finish what he had started brought him consolation. In his instructions at the end of 1 Chronicles 22, David says this to the leaders who would work alongside Solomon in this project: " Now devote your hearts and soul to seeking the Lord your God. Begin to build… " (22:19, NIV). David's dream was building this temple. Sometimes we get so caught up with realizing our dreams that they end up replacing God in our lives. David's instructions to the leaders of Israel remind us of a truth that David learned, a truth than prevented him from allowing his dream to...

“ On what are you basing this confidence of yours? ” (2 Kings 18:19, NIV). This was the beginning of a message that Sennacherib, King of Assyria, sent to Hezekiah, King of Judah, as the Assyrian army lay siege to Jerusalem. Israel had been decimated, her people taken into captivity. And now, the Assyrians were threatening to do the same to Judah. Sennacherib ridiculed Hezekiah. He mocked the God of Judah, comparing Him to the gods of the pagan nations whom Assyria had swept away. It was an ugly situation—and a desperate one. The question had been a valid one, though the answer Sennacherib got was not the one he expected.  Just where WAS Hezekiah’s confidence going to be placed? Where is ours placed when our world threatens to blow apart. or already has? 2 Kings 19 describes how Hezekiah took the message the King of Assyria had sent and laid it before the Lord. He sent his leadership team to Isaiah, God’s prophet “ all wearing sackcloth, ” a symbol of mourning. “ Do not be afraid ...

Reading: Acts 10-12 The snow is beginning to fly. It will be a while before we get a real snowstorm. Right now we are still in the “in between” period that marks the transition of fall into winter. But still, it's cold and windy and the flakes are falling, suffering an identity crisis as they try to decide whether they really are snow or should actually be hail or rain. It’s a good day for stew and that is exactly what is now beginning to fill the apartment with the slow-cooked richness of a nice piece of beef shank. Comfort food for cold weather. Cornelius wasn't looking for a nice bowl of comfort food on a winter-like day. But he was looking for comfort. He was a good man “…devout and God-fearing; he gave generously to those in need and prayed to God regularly ” (Acts 10:2, NIV). That wasn’t what he said of himself but what others testified about him. When the messengers came to Peter to ask him to come to the centurion’s house, they said: “ He is a righteous and Go...

Reading: Ezekiel 46-48, Revelation 1 Tedious. That’s what the journey seemed like until I got to Ezekiel 47. I have a colour-coded Bible that I use for my quiet time. The colours were all brown until I got to Ezekiel 47:9-12. Blue appeared, as blue as the water described in its verses. The description is of the restored city, shown to Ezekiel in a vision from God. In this particular chapter, the temple is the focus. As the chapter begins, Ezekiel sees a river of water flowing out from the temple. “ Swarms of living creatures will live wherever the river flows. There will be large numbers of fish, because this water flows there and makes the salt water fresh; so where the river flows everything will live. Fishermen will stand along the shore; from En Gedi to En Eglaim there will be places for spreading nets. The fish will be of many kinds—like the fish of the Great Sea. But the swamps and marshes will not become fresh; they will be left for salt. Fruit trees of all kinds will g...

“ For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also ” —Matthew 6:21, NIV I’ve lost a lot of things and people in my life. Moving around from country to country has cost me over the years—a little glimpse of what the phrase means: “you can’t take it with you.” Sacrifices, some of which come back to haunt me have had to have been made along the way. Some of them aren’t all that big or significant. Others poke and prod in the back of my mind, big enough to cause regret. I have consoled myself by remembering Peter’s statement and the Lord’s answer in Mark 10:28-30: “ Peter said to him, ‘We have left everything to follow you!’ ‘I tell you the truth,’ Jesus replied, ‘no one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age (homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and fields—and with them, persecution) and in the age to come, eternal life .” I was kind of hop...

“ In my distress I called on the Lord, and he answered me. From the depths of the grave I called help, and you listened to my cry ” —Jonah 2:2, NIV. A group of ladies from our church are into their second week of a study called, Made to Crave, Satisfying Your Deepest Desire With God, Not Food , written by Lysa TerKeurst. Last night’s session was titled From Desperation to Determination . As soon as I read the verse for this morning what we had looked at in this last session came to mind. What is it that I do when I’m desperate? Jonah had the right idea. Obviously he couldn’t stuff himself with unhealthy food choices when his whole world collapsed around him. Seaweed might have been a healthy option, but a burger and fries, a big bag of chips or a chocolate bar didn’t appear on his radar. He learned the lesson of moving from whatever his desperate state was to a determined effort to seek God and dump the load on the only shoulders that could bear the weight. Most of us carry a ...

“ Look to the Lord and his strength; seek his face always ” —1 Chronicles 16:11, NIV The Book of Psalms is perhaps the best-known and best-loved literature read by believers. But not all of David’s psalms—a considerable contribution to the book—are found in it. Here in Chronicles we find a wonderful psalm of praise that David wrote on the occasion of the return of the ark to its rightful home in Jerusalem. The whole psalm, all twenty-eight verses, is filled with admirable material that needs thinking about. But to today has been assigned this small fragment of David’s magnificent, God-inspired, poem. The verse directs us to look to the Lord when we so often look elsewhere. Our minds and hearts are so often captured by other things and other people. We look to ourselves. We dig deep within to find our inner strength, considerable at times, to deal with whatever challenges we are living through at the moment. We vaguely claim that this inner strength is God-given, as it is, but ...