God is Our Refuge and Strength

Three weeks after moving from Washington State to the Midwest I found myself sleeping in a barn at a retreat in Kansas. In the middle of the night a violent storm jolted me awake. Torrential rains pummeled the side of the barn. The wind howled and thunder boomed louder than I had ever heard before.

As I sat on the hay listening to the storm, my mind kept running through scenes from the 1996 movie Twister. Watching Helen Hunt dodge massive tornadoes was the only place I had learned anything about these powerful storms.

Fear paralyzed me. I had no idea what to do, as I realized I was not in control. Repeatedly I imagined myself being sucked into the sky, standing at the pearly gates of Heaven quoting the line from the Wizard of Oz, “I don’t think I’m in Kansas anymore.”

It turned out that the storm was relatively mild and I had nothing to be concerned about. But I didn’t know that in the moment! The uncertainty and fear that I experienced was very real.

This type of fear surfaces when we discover that our perception of absolute control over our lives is an illusion. Any number of situations we face lead to this realization.

Natural disasters like the recent tornado outbreaks in Joplin, Missouri and Moore, Oklahoma turn cities upside down. Nations threaten war with one another, leaving citizens under the constant threat that their world could be very different the next day. The pressures of life push individuals to their breaking point. Jobs are lost. Tests come back positive for cancer. Loved ones tragically pass away much earlier than anyone could possibly have imagined.

It seems that the promise of facing difficult days becomes only stronger the longer we are graced to live.

Psalm 46 is a hymn to be sung by a congregation in worship as a reminder that even in complete chaos God is in control. 

God is our refuge and strength,
a very present help in trouble.
Therefore we will not fear though the earth gives way,
though the mountains be moved into the heart of the sea,
though its waters roar and foam,
though the mountains tremble at its swelling.

The congregation confesses together that God is present in the midst of our present hardships. He is our strength and shelter when we encounter the unknown.

When God created the earth he separated the water and the land. Even if creation started to reverse and the mountains fell back into the seas, God would still be in control. Therefore, we have nothing to fear.

There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,
the holy habitation of the Most High.
God is in the midst of her;
she shall not be moved;
God will help her when morning dawns.
The nations rage, the kingdoms totter;
he utters his voice, the earth melts.
The Lord of the heavenly armies is with us;
the God of Jacob is our fortress.

In difficult times, God provides sustenance to his people. Even though individual battles may be lost, we can have complete confidence that God is still with us. He will be there to help us pick up the pieces when a new day begins.

Nations rise and fall, but when God speaks the earth melts. If the Lord of the heavenly armies is with us we have nothing to fear when the nations are in turmoil. He is ultimately in control of the kingdoms of the world.

Come, behold the works of the Lord,
how he has brought desolations on the earth.
He makes wars cease to the end of the earth;
he breaks the bow and shatters the spear;
he burns the shields with fire.
“Be still, and know that I am God.
I will be exalted among the nations,
I will be exalted in the earth!”
The Lord of the heavenly armies is with us;
the God of Jacob is our fortress.

The hymn shifts from a group confession to an invitation to those outside the community. The congregation calls the surrounding nations to, “Come and see the works of our God. See that no one has ever been able to stand against him. He is even Lord over the elements of war. With his words alone he causes wars to cease. Therefore desist your futile attempts to stand against him and know that the great ‘I am,’ Yahweh, is the one and only God. He will be exalted in the nations. He will be exalted in the earth. In the end, our God will ultimately be victorious in every way! The Lord who controls heavenly armies of angels is with us. Our protection comes from the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob who throughout history has been faithful to his people.”

When natural disasters turn our world upside down our God is still in control.
When we see our nations on the verge of war our God is still in control.
When we encounter incredible personal suffering our God is still in control.

The works of our great Enemy are futile against the plans of our God. On days it seems that battles are lost we still place our trust in Jesus. Even taking our last breath we can have complete confidence in him, knowing that one day we will rise again just as Jesus first rose from the dead. The great weapon of our Enemy has been defeated. Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?

If our God is for us, who can be against us? What could we possibly fear? The Lord of the heavenly armies is with us; the God of Jacob is indeed a fortress.

God’s Plan for Our Lives (Part II)

Last week, my friend Zack challenged me to a game of table shuffleboard. I had never played before, but it looked simple enough. Two players take turns sliding weights down a fifteen foot wooden table covered in tiny silicone beads. The object of the game is to get your weight to stop in one of the sections near the end of the table. The closer you get to the end, the more points you receive.

Just slide the weight down the board so it stops near the end. Sounds simple enough, right? But as we started playing I soon discovered that what looked relatively easy was actually incredibly hard.

In forty minutes of playing the game, I don’t think I had more than ten weights stay on the playing surface. It was incredibly frustrating. I kept trying different things, but it was quickly apparent this was the type of thing that could only be learned through repeated practice.

Sometimes the simplest sounding things turn out to be the most difficult to do.

I shared in my last post that God’s primary plan for our lives is that we seek him with our entire being. This is an echo of Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 22:37, that the greatest commandment is to love God and your neighbor. All we have to do is “Love God and Love People.” However, what can be reduced to a relatively simple statement is in fact quite difficult to do. What does it mean to love God with all of our heart, mind, and strength?

Loving God with our entire being involves using everything that we have– our mind, understanding, gifts, talents, energy time and resources– in pursuit of knowing him and being obedient to him.

Practically, part of this is giving time and attention to disciplines that result in growing our relationship with Jesus. The discipline of “daily devotions” has always been tough for me. This is certainly related to my own struggle with self-discipline, but the encouragement to daily “read your bible and pray” is considerably more strenuous than it sounds.

Reading scripture daily is a discipline that takes some serious initial effort to develop. If you do not currently have some type of reading plan, the YouVersion Bible App has been incredibly helpful to me. They have a number of great reading plans and devotionals. It is also possible to set reminders to keep yourself from forgetting. Their plans are available here.

The discipline of prayer has always been much more challenging to me. Reading is easier. It is objective. I can read a text and consider how it may impact my life. Prayer feels more subjective. It requires a lot of patience. And scheduling time to pray has always felt a little inauthentic to me. But despite my best intentions I have found that if I do not plan to do it, it does not happen.

I’ve been reflecting this week on a parable in Luke 11. Jesus teaches the disciples about the importance of persistently seeking God in prayer.

In the parable, a traveler has just arrived at his friend’s house from a long journey in the middle of the night. The friend didn’t expect him because there was no way for him to pick up a phone and let him know precisely when he would arrive.

After several full nights walking in the desert the traveler is famished! The friend wants to serve him something to eat, but he has run out of his daily supply of bread he had cooked earlier in the day. He considers making fresh bread, but it would take hours to start a fire and bake it. Feeling desperate, he goes to his neighbor’s house and ask for some of his leftover bread.

He calls from the porch, “Neighbor, my friend has just arrived on a long journey and I am out of bread. Can I please have some of your leftovers from today?” The neighbor calls back from his small one room house, “Go away! I have the door locked and my children are all asleep with me here in bed. It is too inconvenient for me to get up. If I get up and unbolt the door I’ll wake all of my children.”

And then Jesus says “I tell you, though he will not get up and give him anything because he is your neighbor, because of your persistent knocking he will get up and give you whatever you need. So I tell you, ‘Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened.”

And he goes on to say, “Which of you fathers would give your son a snake when he asked for a fish, or a scorpion when he asks for an egg? If you then as human fathers marked by a sinful nature know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”

Jesus says we should seek him with persistence like the man knocking on his neighbor’s door. We are to keep doing it until he answers.

We seek the presence of Jesus because it changes us. It changes our desires. It changes the way we see other people. It empowers us to be God’s hands and feet in our world. It is what he asks us to do.

Prayer is an activity that can feel awkward at first. It certainly has at times for me. But Jesus says we are to keep knocking… and knocking… and knocking. With repeated practice over time it starts to feel more natural.

If you have been a Christian for six months or forty years, Jesus asks you to knock. His plan for our lives is that we persistently seek him. He promises that if we do seek him, we will find him.

I invite all of you reading this to a join me in a challenge this week. Schedule thirty minutes a day just to seek him. Get in a quiet place, maybe turn on some instrumental music and place all of your attention on him. Ask that his Holy Spirit would come and work on healing your wounds. Ask him to come and empower you to love the difficult people you interact with everyday. Ask him to help you understand the scripture as you read it and apply it to your life. Take a moment and surrender all of you concerns and anxiety before him. Then sit in the quiet. Listen. Expect him to meet you.

If you’re not accustomed to doing so, it could feel uncomfortable at first. Jesus says, “keep knocking.” Time may seem to drag on a bit. Keep knocking. You will begin to remember all of the things you need to do later on in the day. When those things come up in your mind, write them down briefly and keep knocking.

God’s primary purpose for our lives is that we seek him with everything that we have. If our desire is to fulfill God’s plan for our lives we must begin by daily spending time seeking the presence of Jesus and reading his Word.

May each of us have a special grace to encounter Jesus this week as we set aside time to persistently seek him.
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“For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you. You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you, declares the Lord” (Jeremiah 29:12-14 ESV).

God’s Plan for Our Lives (Part I)

One of the loneliest feelings I have experienced was walking through a foreign city by myself. Strange noises and unrecognizable landmarks abound. As you pass people on the street you know that language barriers inhibit strangers from becoming friends.

This must have been how the Israelites felt when they were exiled out of Jerusalem. As they walked the streets of Babylon, they encountered an entirely new way of life. Even something as simple as finding food was different than it was at home.

They must have felt incredibly discouraged.

They had just watched their city and temple be destroyed. The temple in Jerusalem was the dwelling place of God. Without the temple his people no longer had access to him. Now sitting in Babylon, far from the ruins, they felt God had abandoned them.

But God sends a message to the Israelites through Jeremiah. He tells the people they should continue doing common things. They should marry, have children, build homes and work. He tells them to pray for the nation they find themselves in because, as “things go well for Babylon, things will go well for you” (Jeremiah 29:7).

This is all part of God’s plan. God led them into the exile because they broke the covenant that he had with them. As he had done many times with his people when they had turned away, he gets their attention. Now that he has their ear, God promises that in 70 years he will restore all that was lost.

He tells them, “For I know the plans I have for you… plans to give you a future hope” (Jeremiah 29:11).

The future hope that God promises is that they will no longer be separated from him. The God who miraculously rescued his people from Egypt now led them into captivity once again, but he won’t leave them there. He will rescue them. He is calling them to come back to him.

I have always read Jeremiah 29:11 as a promise that God has a plan for my future “work.” Because our culture so greatly values success in terms of earning or power, I assumed that his good plan for me would unquestionably lead to a “job” filled with success, power and influence. But the hope the people of Israel longed for was that God would one day be close to them again. He promised that he would once again commune with his people.

Oswald Chambers said that as he matured in his faith he discovered, “prayer does not equip us for greater works– prayer is the greater work.” As Christians, perhaps we spend too much time focusing on what “great works” we should accomplish for God.

We dream and plan for a successful career or bountiful ministry, but what God wants most is for us to seek him with our entire being.

Like the Israelites, we are “temporary residents and foreigners” in a pagan culture (1 Peter 2:11). As followers of Christ we are citizens of God’s kingdom. But until that kingdom comes into its full reality and Christ returns, we are also stuck as exiles in our culture. The values and ideals of our culture are very different from God’s plans and desires.

As pilgrims our true home is with the Lord. We should work, marry, raise families, establish homes and engage our communities. But our primary identity should not be associated with our occupation, spouse, size of our home or the nation we live.

Instead, we should identify ourselves primarily as individuals seeking Jesus with our whole hearts. God’s plan for each of our lives is that we live knowing him. Whether as teachers, bankers, doctors, lawyers, pastors, married, single, young or old this is what he desires most.

My prayer is that we be moved to spend time in the presence of Jesus. May we fully embrace his plan for our life– knowing him.

“For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you. You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you, declares the Lord” (Jeremiah 29:11-14 ESV).

Remembering the Faithfulness of God

Reading through the Old Testament this spring I have found myself at times lost for words when I encounter the fickleness of the people of God. Over, and over, and over again they go through the same monotonous cycle.

For a while they follow God.
A short time passes.
They forget God’s faithfulness.
God gets their attention.
They repent.
God delivers them.

I started to get incredibly frustrated reading through centuries of history. Why couldn’t they figure it out? Why couldn’t they just do what was right?

But then it hit me. Perhaps my frustration with the pattern was not with them, but that it hit a bit too close to home. Isn’t this my story? Isn’t this your story? We all have a tendency to forget God’s faithfulness in our life.

In order to follow Jesus faithfully we must break this cycle and find ways to remind ourselves how his story has shaped our story.

Jesus gives us through communion a powerful means to remember what he has done for us. Regularly participating in the Lord’s Supper causes us to stop and remember the sacrifice that he made for us on the cross. In the midst of a life constantly bombarded with information it makes us remember the thing that matters most- our relationship with Jesus.

But it is also essential that we remember how he has specifically been involved in our story.

The moment Israel miraculously crosses the Jordan is one of the most pivotal events in Israel’s history. When the people crossed the Red Sea they were transitioning from a group of slaves to free people. As they cross the Jordan, they are transforming from a wandering band in the desert to a nation.

In Joshua 4:1-7, God tells Joshua to send a person from each tribe back into the dry seabed and bring out a stone to mark the occasion. They are to use it as a tool to teach their children and remind themselves of the great day when God stopped the flow of the Jordan river so they could pass through. It was to be a continuous reminder of God’s commitment to his covenant and people.

Like Israel, we are fickle. We have a tendency to forget his faithfulness in our lives. We need ways to mark crucial events in our own spiritual pilgrimage.

All of us have a story of how came to faith in Christ. Maybe you also have a story of how he healed you or a family member of some disease, guided you to make an important decision, shielded you from some physical danger, or helped you get through a tough season of your life.

These moments may not seem as significant as the splitting of a sea in two, but they are significant because they are moments where God changed your life. They are significant because they are your story. Remembering these events cause us to remember that the God who parted the Jordan is still alive and working in our lives today. They remind us how God has changed us.

There is a painting in my home that I bought on a mission trip in Haiti that serves as one of these reminders for me. I remember sitting on top of the roof one morning looking out at the city and I felt God asked me, “if I sent you to a place like this, would you go?” I paused. This would be a hard place. I sat for a few minutes and quietly looked out across the city of Port-au-Prince. I reflected on his faithfulness in my life and remembered that I have never regretted being obedient to him. Then full of faith I gave the response, “Yes, Lord. I’ll go wherever you want. I want to be obedient to go where you want me to go. I know that your plan for me is best.”

When I look at this painting it takes me back to that moment. It reminds me of God’s faithfulness in my life and his blessing in moments when I decided to be obedient instead of doing the thing I wanted to do.

How has his story shaped your story? Take a few moments and consider God’s faithfulness in your life. What moments have shaped you? When did he change you? What moments can you look back on and realize that he must have showed up, because it’s the only way you got through?

We need to remember these moments. Take some time to associate a couple of these memories with your own “memorial stone.” Each time you see it make a habit of remembering that moment. Let it be a constant reminder that the God who created the world and parted the Jordan is alive and working in your life as well.