Battles

  Rest in God Isaiah 57:1-2 1 Those who are right with God may die, but no one pays attention. Good people are taken away but no one understands. Those who do right are being taken away from evil 2 and are given peace. Those who live as God wants find rest in death. Has anyone else thought about how thick the Bible is? Think about all the words that God has written down and how much material we have to direct us into the kind of relationship God wants to have with us. We have a God who wants to talk to us and wants us to know how the world works. God hides nothing and speaks about the human condition with clarity and certainty. The more time I spend in God’s word the more my faith grows just because of the sheer volume of stuff God talks about. From the very beginning God discloses how broken we are but instead of letting us be destroyed by our sin God then spends millennia explaining how He can fix us if we will let Him. One of the things that used to be a problem for me...

Leadership Isaiah 56:10 The leaders who are to guard the people are blind; they don’t know what they are doing. All of them are like quiet dogs that don’t know how to bark. They lie down and dream and love to sleep. A part of my thinking and study over the last few years has been looking into the nature of God. What things do we know about God and how do they all fit together? Developing this understanding has helped build a faith that stands when all other things fail. Everyone knows the big things about God. First is that God is The Truth and then we know what flows from that is God’s righteousness and love. It is the next level of things that have caught my attention. How does God’s righteousness and love work in everyday situations? A quality that often gets bypassed when considering things about God but seems central to who God is and what our faith is all about is that God is a generous God. As we look at how God operates and what God does we see that God just gives th...

  A House of Prayer Isaiah 56:7 I will bring these people to my holy mountain and give them joy in my house of prayer. The offerings and sacrifices they place on my altar will please me, because my Temple will be called a house for prayer for people from all nations.” The church’s positive influence on the world cannot be understated. Making that statement might be considered controversial in today’s political climate but as a historian the data is clear. No other evidence need be advanced but the fact that it was Christian nations that ended the legal slave trade in the modern world. England not only outlawed the slave trade but then sent navel forces out to prevent the slave trade from even happening. William Wilberforce was the man who drove the political fight to end legal slavery and he did it because of his Christian faith. The power of the church to affect society over the centuries and millennia is not in dispute. A clear movement of God has shaped large groups of pe...

  Good Rules Isaiah 56:2 The person who obeys the law about the Sabbath will be blessed, and the person who does no evil will be blessed.” Does anyone else remember the American Bicentennial? It was my blessing to be a young person at that time and I remember the celebrations and the talk of the freedom that people experienced because America was a nation based on the idea of people being empowered not government. It is a little disappointing that we are now in the two hundred and fiftieth years of America and it just does not seem to have the same sense of celebration that I remember in my youth. Freedom is a fundamental desire of the human heart and we should commemorate any nations that have worked hard to make freedom a central part of who they are. Humans long for freedom because we have a God who wants us free to be the people we were made to be and that is why one of the subjects that often occurs in scripture is the idea of humans being free. We are told that Jesus co...

  Celebration Isaiah 55:12 “So you will go out with joy and be led out in peace. The mountains and hills will burst into song before you, and all the trees in the fields will clap their hands. Of all the stories about World War Two the one that resonates with me the most is the work of General Eisenhower and the pressure that he felt about D-day June 6th 1944. The actual scheduled date for the invasion of German occupied Europe was not June 6th but the 5th. The problem was that on that day a storm was raging in the English Channel and it was not possible to safely land the thousands of men involved in the invasion. The choice was to cancel the landing for a much later date or to wait twenty four hours. Each of those choices had real consequences attached to them. It fell to the general to make this hard decision and the general choose to wait the twenty four hours. As it turned out this was a good move and things turned out great. But the general had also written a communi...

  Things Happen Isaiah 55:11 The same thing is true of the words I speak. They will not return to me empty. They make the things happen that I want to happen, and they succeed in doing what I send them to do. A few years ago our family had a real crisis on our hands. My grandmother who we affectionately called “Granny” died without leaving a recipe for her pie cookies. The whole “pie cookies” issue is a story for another time but the loss of her famous pie cookies was a real problem for all our holiday celebrations. Over the next few years there was a friendly competition between family members to figure out how Granny made her pie cookies. When I looked at this, I noticed that the recipe problem had two parts, first was the list of ingredients needed to make the cookies and second the instructions of how to put ingredients together. Both of those things are needed in the right way to make the cookies. It struck me that God, unlike Granny, has left us a recipe for our fait...