Month Four
DAY 1
HIS OR OURS?
The property on the sea is now ours. We can hardly believe it.
“But it was what you had dreamed of, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, Lord.”
“Did I not promise long ago to give you the desires of your heart? This is one of them. Often I cannot give them in the form you dream of because it would not, in the end, give you happiness. This time I give exactly what you asked. What will you do with it now?”
“First we thank you, Lord. Then we offer it back to You. Do with it, for us, for anyone who comes here, as You choose. Make it a place of peace, a desired haven.”
“I receive your offering. Whose is it now?”
“Yours, Lord. Help me to remember this as King David remembered it when he prayed, ‘Everything comes from thee, and it is only of thy gifts that we give to thee. We are aliens before thee and settlers. . . . Everything is thine’” (1 Chron. 29:14-16).
DAY 2
AN ENCIRCLING SHIELD
Different phases of life have different sets of fears. A newborn baby demonstrates fear of falling and of loud noises. Swaddling clothes, used for thousands of years, are still wound tightly around the babies of the Quichua Indian tribe in Ecuador. As soon as a child is born, his arms are bound to his sides, his legs straightened in a neat firm package. When this is removed, the baby feels insecure and cries.
Adolescent fears about popularity, pimples and peer pressure give way to adult anxieties about responsibility and life’s major decisions.
As we grow old we are beset by the fear of aging, which may bring us weakness, pain, dependence on others and loneliness. We wake in the early dark and find ourselves the targets of many fiery darts of fear. We may think we are on guard, and suddenly a dart comes at us from an unexpected angle. We can’t cover all the possibilities. We dodge and duck, but some of the fears get to us—unless we take refuge in the Lord. The psalmist calls Him “my encircling shield, my glory” (Ps. 3:3, JB). No need to stare into the darkness, allowing our imaginations to torment us with the what-ifs—“Now I can lie down and go to sleep and then awake, for Yahweh has hold of me” (v. 5, JB).
DAY 3
THY LIST BE DONE
I am a list maker. Every day I make a list of what I must do. I have an engagement calendar and an engagement book. I have a grocery list on the wall beside the refrigerator, last year’s Christmas list in this year’s engagement book (so I won’t duplicate gifts), a master list for packing my suitcase (so I won’t forget anything), a prayer list (a daily one and a special one for each day of the week) and several others.
Recently a wholly unexpected minor operation badly interrupted my list of things to be done that week. But because God is my sovereign Lord, I was not worried. He manages perfectly, day and night, year in and year out, the movements of the stars, the wheeling of the planets, the staggering coordination of events that goes on on the molecular level in order to hold things together. There is no doubt that He can manage the timing of my days and weeks. So I can pray in confidence, Thy list, not mine, be done.
DAY 4
SPIRITUAL EQUILIBRIUM
Sometimes a hope or desire lays hold on one with such power that it becomes almost burdensome, even though the thing is a delight to contemplate. The ordinary business of life must be attended to, but this thing carries a lot of weight in soul, mind and heart. It has a strong pull. And when you are carrying a heavy weight, you have to compensate in order to keep your balance. The best means to spiritual equilibrium, I find, is to look repeatedly at the things that are not seen, that is, at things that are eternal. What Evelyn Underbill calls “the pressure of the Divine Charity” forever urges me forward, counteracting the pressure of my emotions and human desires, reminding me with great patience and great persistence that this thing—this love, this longing, this huge desire—is the very thing God Himself gave, in order that I might have something to offer. He will see to it that it does not come to nothing, provided we lay it before Him, put it at His disposal.
Lord, all that I long for is known to you, my sighing is no secret from you. . . . I put my trust in you, Yahweh, and leave you to answer for me, Lord my God (Ps. 38:9,15, Phillips).
DAY 5
ABLE TO RECEIVE
A young woman asked recently why it is that godly professors in her seminary are on opposite sides of certain doctrinal fences. A partial answer is that we know only in part. None of us sees the whole truth, and what we do see is “through a glass, darkly” (1 Cor. 13:12, KJV). We are at different stages of the journey. Sometimes I sympathize with the author of Psalm 119—“Gusts of anger seize me as I think of evil men who forsake thy law” (v. 53)—and wish I could force people to accept what I see as truth. Jesus did not force them. “With many such parables he would give them his message, so far as they were able to receive it” (Mark 4:33, emphasis added). There may be some who are willing but not able to receive, others able but not willing. Only God can be sure who’s who. We are to be faithful in transmitting the message and willing to respect the hearer. If God grants him freedom of will to receive or reject, so must I. If he is as yet unable to receive it, I must entrust him to God, remembering the narrow limits of my own understanding as well.
DAY 6
SUNRISE IS AN ACT OF GOD
The night sky, when I went to the front window early this morning, was a clear dark blue, with a few sharp stars. Now, as it reddens toward dawn, a thick quilt of slate-colored cloud is moving over the whole sky, leaving only a strip of rose gold. But I am sure the sun will rise even though covered with a quilt.
We assume the sun will always rise. It always has. But it rises because God continues to will it so, not because it must in and of itself. I breathe, not because I am a smoothly functioning breathing machine, but because He who holds my breath in His hand wills me to breathe, as He wills the squirrel to breathe in the oak grove beside my house and the crow that perches in the scrub pine.
The will of God is not a given quantity. It is creative, dynamic, flowing action. Jesus participated in that action by submitting to the Father’s will and moving with power along the appointed way, according to the appointed time (see Matt. 26:18,24).
The sun does no choosing. God chooses—every morning so far—to make it rise. Yet the Lord of the universe asks me to choose to follow Him—to participate, as Christ did, in the flowing action that is His will. “Dwell in my love. If you heed my commands, you will dwell in my love, as I have heeded my Father’s commands and dwell in his love” (John 15:10).
DAY 7
TIME FOR GOD
It is a good and necessary thing to set aside time for God in each day. The busier the day, the more indispensable is this quiet period for prayer, Bible reading and silent listening. It often happens, however, that I find my mind so full of earthly matters that it seems I have gotten up early in vain and have wasted three-fourths of the time so dearly bought. (I do love my sleep!) But I have come to believe that the act of will required to arrange time for God may be an offering to Him. As such He accepts it, and what would otherwise be loss to me, I count as gain for Christ (see Phil. 3:8). Let us not be “weary in well doing” (Gal 6:9, KJV), or discouraged in the pursuit of holiness. Let us, like Moses, go to the rock of Horeb, where God says to us what He said to him: “You will find me waiting for you there” (Exod. 17:6).
DAY 8
IRON SHOES
When some out-of-the ordinary supply is needed in order for us to accomplish the job given, we can be confident it will be provided. Shoes of iron were asked in Moses’ blessing for Asher, an impossibly long-lasting provision from God (see Deut. 33:25, KJV). The old spiritual says, “I got shoes, you got shoes, all God’s children got shoes,” but not all God’s children have iron ones—only those who need them. Our heavenly Father knows exactly what we will require to fulfill His purposes for us. It is wrong—it is, in fact, a sin—for us to worry about where the “shoes” will come from. “Trust Me!” God says to us. “I’ll give you iron ones if only iron ones can do the job.”
I worried this morning about the seeming impossibility of doing everything that needs to be done before Wednesday, when we are moving to a new house. Then I remembered that strength according to my day’s need is promised in the same verse, and any special need—iron shoes or whatever—will also be forthcoming.
DAY 9
A FAITH UNTRIED
A faith untried is no faith at all,” someone has said. Today I declared my faith before a hundred women and came home to a startling piece of bad news. Hopes were dashed, plans ruined, over a seemingly trivial thing. We did not know what to do. “Trust Me” is always the word at such a time.
“But Lord, we did trust You. You answered us and everything was working so beautifully. Now this. What shall we do?”
“Keep on trusting Me. That is My assignment for you tonight. Commit your way to Me; trust in Me; stand still and see.”
“Why, of course, Lord! I see what You mean. How could I be sure I’m trusting You unless You keep giving me pop quizzes?” These are the exams in the school of faith.
More precious than perishable gold is faith which has stood the test. These trials come so that your faith may prove itself worthy (1 Pet. 1:7).
DAY 10
CONSTRUCTIVE LOVE
Today will be full of turmoil, for we are moving. Decisions to be made, complicated sorting and packing to be done, hard physical work, confusion and misunderstanding. I will be tempted to “manage” things that are not mine to manage, to be impatient and anxious and vindictive—I can see it coming! But there is a quiet, steadying power—the love of Christ, and “this love of which I speak is slow to lose patience—it looks for a way of being constructive” (1 Cor. 13:4, Phillips). It is not in me. That brand of love is not a part of my nature. So I simply ask for it. Lord, Your love alone, at work in me, behaves like that.
Love through me, Love of God.
Make me like thy clear air
Through which, unhindered, colors pass
As if it were not there.
(Amy Carmichael, Toward Jerusalem)
DAY 11
THE FACT OF THE RESURRECTION
A metropolitan (bishop) of the Orthodox Church in Russia was faced with an atheist in the congregation who loudly declared, “Today nobody believes in the resurrection of Christ.” Instead of answering the claim, the metropolitan cried out, “Christ is risen!” and the hall, which was supposedly filled with atheists, responded with a roar, “Indeed He is risen!”
This is the proclamation of faith. It is often a waste of time and energy to argue with doubters—including ourselves. If we are assailed with unbelief, let us return to the bedrock of faith, the Resurrection, for without this our faith is certainly vain. Let us shout (even alone with our private doubts), Christ is risen! It is a fact. Everything else is trivial by comparison.
DAY 12
THE POWER OF DARKNESS
When the chief priests, temple officers and elders came to the Garden of Gethsemane to arrest Jesus, they succeeded only because a sovereign God permitted them to succeed. Jesus pointed out that He was teaching daily in the Temple, yet they never laid a finger on Him. Now they were after Him with swords and staves. “But this is your hour and the power of darkness is yours” (Luke 22:53, Phillips). Who gave them that hour? Who allowed them the power to capture Him? It was God, without whose leave not even a sparrow can fall to the ground. God is omnipotent, never slumbering, just, righteous and forever in control. He was not taken by surprise. All was working then, as it is always working, into a pattern for good.
Our own difficulties often appear to be random. Our tragedies look wildly uncontrolled. They are not. They are subject. Limits are set. God is quietly at work, standing in the shadows, ceaselessly watching over His children.
The light shines on in the dark, and the darkness has never mastered it (John 1:5).
DAY 13
RESPONSIBILITY
An important sign of maturity is the acceptance of responsibility. One quits depending on everybody else and acknowledges that certain duties are his alone. If he doesn’t do them, nobody will. Every day there is, for example, a “cross” to take up. Who else is going to carry it? It is mine. It lies in my pathway, and unless I accept it—and accept it gladly for Christ—I simply am not following Him. He has made it perfectly clear that there are two prerequisites to following, that is, to being his disciple: denying oneself and taking up one’s cross. To know yourself is to know your cross. Francois Mauriac says, “To flee one’s sorrow and evade and ignore one’s cross is the whole occupation of the world; but that occupation is at the same time a fleeing from one’s own self” (or, we may say, from our proper and assigned responsibility). We may not always see a particular task laid before us, but one thing is sure: To trust Him is a task, proper to every Christian, assigned to us every minute of every hour of every day, and to flee this task is worldly, irresponsible and immature.
The LORD is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? (Ps. 27:1, KJV).
I will trust, and not be afraid (Isa. 12:2, KJV, emphasis added).
DAY 14
NOT TO BE SERVED BUT TO SERVE
It is the mark of a mature man that his sense of responsibility takes precedence over his own feelings. It is a mark of godliness that he acknowledges God’s care of all men, not only of himself. Moses was such a man. When God told him that he must go up Mount Nebo, look over the land promised to Israel and then die without entering into it because of his disobedience at Meribah, there is not a word of resentment or self-pity or self-justification from Moses. Instead his concern was for the people he had been shepherding, that they might be brought home (see Deut. 32—34). The God to whom he addressed the prayer was the God of the spirits of all mankind. Moses saw things with a vision that encompassed far more than his own horizon.
Lord, deliver us from smallness and self-pity.
Make us masters of ourselves that we may be the servants of others.
(Sir Alexander Patterson)
DAY 15
A STRANGE GODSEND
King Saul was tormented in a strange way from time to time by an evil spirit from God (see 1 Sam. 16:14). His servants suggested that harp music might drive it away. One of them told the king about Jesse’s son David of Bethlehem, who could play and who was also a brave man, a good fighter, wise in speech and handsome. Furthermore, the Lord was with him. David was sent for, and besides these God-given gifts, he brought with him a homer of bread, a skin of wine and a kid. The king loved him and made him his armor bearer. Whenever the evil spirit came upon Saul, David would take his harp and play so that Saul found relief and the spirit left him alone.
This story shows us that among the baffling intricacies of the sovereign plan of God, there is often evil that is not only permitted but sometimes actually sent by God. We wonder why. Surely part of the reason is that we may learn our own helplessness and need of Him. Saul was a powerful king, but it took his servants, who happened to know of a small-town boy, to suggest a remedy for the king’s trouble. God sent the trouble. God sent the boy. That boy had been prepared by God, equipped with gifts that the king needed. Picture the boy, idly strumming his lyre as he passed the time of day in the pasture with the sheep. He could not have dreamed of the use God would someday make of that skill—to comfort a king’s tormented spirit and later to become the sweet singer of Israel.
Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief. Give me a trust big enough to embrace the baffling intricacies and to find in times of helplessness that You are a very present help.
DAY 16
CHOOSE TO BE GLAD
The Bible is full of commands to be joyful. The Lord commanded the people of Israel to set aside certain days for celebration, and on those days they were to rejoice. There was no provision made for any who might not happen to feel like rejoicing. This was what they were to do, young and old, slaves and free, aliens, orphans and widows—in obedience to the command. The pilgrim feast of Weeks was celebrated seven weeks after the time “when the sickle is put to the standing corn” (Deut. 16:9). The people were commanded to bring a freewill offering and to rejoice: “You shall rejoice in the place which the LORD your God will choose. You shall rejoice in your feast. . . . You shall keep the feast with joy” (vv. 11,14-15).
The rhythm of life is one of God’s mercies, meant to keep us from sinking into individual ruts. We are called away from our personal inclination by the dawning of each new day; by the sun’s going down so that we may cease from our work; by the changing seasons, which require changes of habit, work and dress; and by the regular occurrence of “feasts” when, without reference to how we happen to feel, we may join with others in purposeful rejoicing. We may choose to be glad.
Although the fig-tree does not burgeon, the vines bear no fruit, the olive-crop fails . . . and there are not cattle in the stalls, yet I will exult in the LORD and rejoice in the God of my deliverance (Hab. 3:17-18).
DAY 17
AN ANTIDOTE FOR PRIDE
The basis of all sin of whatever kind is pride. This was what inspired the disobedience of Adam and Eve, and it is always with us. One very common form it takes is the pride of privilege. When a man is given a special position, he forgets that it was given. He becomes proud, as though his own arm had brought him the victory. God knows well the heart and made provision for this sin of pride when He instructed the Israelites about appointing a king. The king was to make a copy of the law. This would be the antidote, necessary for him and likewise for all of us. (For “law” read “Word.”)
He shall keep it by him and read from it all his life, so that he may learn to fear the LORD his God and keep all the words of this law and observe these statutes. In this way he shall not become prouder than his fellow-countrymen, nor shall he turn from these commandments to right or to left (Deut. 17:19-20).
The attempt itself to keep the commandments, one by one and day after day, will be sufficient to humble us, for the “straight-edge of the Law” (Rom. 3:20, Phillips) will only show us, as Paul found, how crooked we are. We will find, in fact, that we cannot keep it. “The whole matter is on a different plane—believing instead of achieving” (v. 27, Phillips). Pride won’t find much foothold on that plane.
The real test of being in the presence of God is that you either forget about yourself altogether or see yourself as a small, dirty object. It is better to forget about yourself altogether (C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity).
DAY 18
WHERE THERE IS INJURY
Have you ever found the taste of revenge sweet? When you are hurt, does there lurk in your heart, as in mine at times, a desire for at least the milder forms of revenge—a desire to see the person apologize, an urge to remind him that he was nasty to you, or even the temptation to pay him back somehow? It was not God’s plan that man should take revenge. That He has reserved for Himself, and when we seize that power we are taking a huge risk. It is, in another form, the risk Adam and Eve took when they ate the forbidden fruit—arrogating to themselves powers, lethal burdens, for which they were never designed.
What if God paid us for our sins? What if He were not love? His mercy is everlasting and has brought us salvation and forgiveness. Remembering that, and how we ourselves have offended Him times without number, shall we dare to retaliate when someone sins against us? Think of the measure of forgiveness God has offered us. Think of the price. Think what the Cross means. Then pray the prayer of Saint Francis:
Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace—
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon . . .
For it is in forgiving that we are forgiven,
It is in dying that we are born again to eternal life.
DAY 19
SATAN’S OPPOSITION OR GOD’S PUNISHMENT?
Sometimes when we are in trouble we are not sure whether the trouble is the opposition of our enemy Satan or a punishment from God. It may be both, and in either case the thing to do is pray—first, confess sin that is known; second, ask to be shown sin that has not been acknowledged; third, pray for deliverance in God’s way and in God’s time.
When the people of Israel were in great trouble and disgrace and the wall of Jerusalem had been broken down, Nehemiah sat down and wept. Then he mourned and fasted and prayed “for some days” (Neh. 1:4) before the God of heaven. The exile of the people and the destruction of the wall were surely the work of evil men, but they were also the means employed by a sovereign God to punish the people: “If you are unfaithful, I will scatter you” (v. 8, RSV, emphasis added). Nehemiah reminded God in his prayer of this threat, but he also reminded Him of His promise: “If you return to me and keep my commandments, . . . I will gather them” (v. 9, RSV). Nehemiah became the intercessor and the means in the hand of God for their restoration, just as their enemies had, under His sovereignty, been the means of their punishment.
It is not required that we sort out all the possibilities—“Is this God?” or “Is this Satan?” It is required that we confess our sins and put our whole trust in the God who is in charge.
DAY 20
SIGNS DO NOT NOURISH
It is the enemy who tempts us, as he tempted Jesus, to demand always some visible proof of the miracle-working power of God: “Tell these stones to become bread” (Matt. 4:3). A miracle would validate our own claim to be in close touch with the Father. But the important thing in life is not to be vindicated, nor to see miracles, but to walk by faith—that is, to take God at His word. So shall we live. So shall we follow Christ, content to do without the startling, the dramatic evidences that God is God, believing instead—in the face of all the enemy’s taunts—the spoken word of Him who calls Himself the I AM. Even in the wilderness, even in our isolation and hunger, we need not ask for more than the Bread of Heaven.
Give us this day, Lord,
Not the miracles our human hearts long for,
Not the proud but brief satisfaction of saying to doubters, “I told you so!”
But give us daily bread—only that which You see will truly nourish us in our pilgrimage towards home.
DAY 21
WHY GUIDANCE IS NOT GIVEN
Sometimes we are perplexed because guidance does not come when we ask for it.
Some of the elders of Israel came to consult the Lord and were sitting with the prophet Ezekiel. The word of the Lord through him was, “As I live, I will not be consulted by you” (Ezek. 20:3). Then followed a long account of Israel’s deliberate disobedience: idolatry, desecration of the Sabbath, human sacrifice, revolt, rebellion and trespassing all God’s laws.
“You are still defiling yourselves. . . . How can I let you consult me?” (v. 31). Only the pure in heart—those who desire nothing but the will of God—can expect His counsel and guidance.
Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me (Ps. 51:10, KJV).
To pray that prayer is to accept the obligation to be obedient in all that is known of God’s will.
DAY 22
AS SOON AS YOU BEGIN TO PRAY
Prayer sets spiritual forces in motion, although the effect is often invisible, perhaps for a long time.
In the first year of the reign of Darius, Daniel was reading and reflecting about the 70 years of Jerusalem’s lying in ruins. He turned to God “in earnest prayer and supplication with fasting and sackcloth and ashes” (Dan. 9:3), confessing Israel’s sins and beseeching God for forgiveness and restoration. The angel Gabriel came close to him in the hour of evening sacrifice, “flying swiftly” (v. 21).
“As you were beginning your supplications a word went forth” (v. 23), he said. The answer was already beginning to be processed when the prayer was offered. It took a very long time. Periods of weeks and years for the nation, and times of mourning, solitude, weakness and fear on Daniel’s part were required before the answer could come to pass.
We should take heart from Gabriel’s message. Though our prayers seem feeble and sometimes appear to have gone unheard, a word has gone forth. Spiritual agents from the throne room of the King of kings are mobilized against spiritual forces from the headquarters of evil, and there will be ultimate victory.
Tremendous power is made available through a good man’s earnest prayer (Jas. 5:16, Phillips).
DAY 23
DISTRACTIONS TO PRAYER
No one who has tried to pray for more than a few seconds at a time would claim that he is never distracted. It is astonishing to note how insistently and immediately irrelevant matters come to mind, noises occur, things to be attended to are remembered, people interrupt and even physical discomforts or pains that we had not noticed until we tried to pray bother us. These things are, of course, the work of the master saboteur of souls, who knows how to render our spiritual machinery useless by the loosening of the tiniest screw or the loss of the smallest nut.
Distractions can be useful. They provide constant reminders of our human weakness. We recognize in them how earthbound we are and then how completely we must depend on the help of the Holy Spirit to pray in and through us. We are shown, by a thousand trivialities, how trivial are our concerns. The very effort to focus, even for a minute, on higher things is foiled, and we see that prayer—the prerequisite for doing anything for God—cannot be done without Him. We are not, however, left to fend for ourselves:
The Spirit too comes to help us in our weakness. For when we cannot choose words in order to pray properly, the Spirit himself expresses our plea in a way that could never be put into words, and God who knows everything in our hearts knows perfectly well what he means, and that the pleas of the saints expressed by the Spirit are according to the mind of God (Rom. 8:26-27, JB).
DAY 24
RUNNING THE COURSE
Today there are just too many things to do. My natural response is to fret and fear. Both are forbidden: Fret not; fear not. That tells me what not to do. What, then, should I do?
I will run the course set out in thy commandments, for they gladden my heart (Ps. 119:32).
There will be both time and strength today to run that course, for it is always possible to do the will of God. The course He sets for us in His commandments is not an obstacle course but is one carefully planned to suit our qualifications—that is, not too rigorous for our limitations, not too lenient for our strengths.
The plan of God for me, for this one day, is meant not to trouble but to gladden my heart. Christ’s yoke, according to His own promise, is not hard but easy—if we bear it together with Him and if we bear it as Christ bore it, in meekness and lowliness of heart.
We must . . . run with resolution the race for which we are entered, our eyes fixed on Jesus, on whom faith depends from start to finish (Heb. 12:1-2).
DAY 25
Zero Faith
I had zero faith,” a young woman said to me yesterday. “I believed in nothing at all. I wished I could, but it just wasn’t there. I began praying, without faith, that God would help me to believe. He did. I know He answers that kind of prayer.”
This young woman is a conscientious wife and mother, a faithful church member and a growing Christian. Her life witnesses to the answer to her prayer. She started with nothing.
Sometimes we start with a small measure of faith, like that of the distraught father who asked Jesus for the healing of his son. “I have faith,” he said, and then, aware that it was not enough to support the weight of the thing he was asking, petitioned, “Help me where faith falls short” (Mark 9:24).
Unbelief is a stronghold of such spiritual power that only mighty spiritual weapons can storm it. We have those weapons—“not merely human, but divinely potent to demolish strongholds” (2 Cor. 10:4). Prayer is one of them. Must we be experts in its use? The young woman’s testimony shows that we need not. We must only come, aware that our faith is not enough, aware that the Lord Himself waits to help us if only we ask.
Satan trembles when he sees
The weakest saint upon his knees.
DAY 26
IT IS HARD TO ENTER
The kingdom of God stands over against all other kingdoms—that is, over against all other authorities, sources of power, objects of trust. It is hard to enter the kingdom of God—not because an angel is set to keep us out, not because God would surround Himself with a highly selected elite, but because the condition for admittance is renunciation of all other kingdoms.
The wealthy stranger who ran up to Jesus and knelt and inquired how he might receive eternal life “went away with a heavy heart” (Mark 10:22). He did not want to pay the price of entrance—a shift in the source of his trust from money (which seemed concrete and dependable) to this “Good Master” (v. 17) (who asked everything visible and dependable in exchange for what was invisible and seemingly very undependable).
Every day we are asked which kingdom we choose. Is it, in the last analysis, “Thine” or “mine” that I most desire? What is it that my most earnest prayers are directed toward?
DAY 27
WHAT CAN I DO FOR GOD?
Most of us would like to do something special in life, something to distinguish us. We suppose that we desire it for God’s sake, but more likely we are discontent with ordinary life and crave special privileges. When Israel asked if they should offer some spectacular sacrifice—thousands of rams, ten thousand rivers of oil, a firstborn child—the answer was, “He has showed you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8, RSV).
There is nothing conspicuous about those requirements. It is not a special service for which one would be likely to be decorated or even particularly remembered. But it is worth more to God than any sacrifice.
Lord, deliver me from the delusion of imagining that my desire is to serve You, when my real desire is the distinction of serving in some way that others admire.
DAY 28
SEED AND YEAST
When we see things we believe need to be changed, most of us are impatient to see them done at once. The kingdom of God does not operate spectacularly, with a sudden rush of irresistible force, but rather like seed and yeast. These are small and wholly unimpressive and go to work only when buried. They need an appropriate medium in which to generate change; but the life-principle is there, latent but powerful, ready to begin the slow and marvelous process of transformation.
Our prayers for change—in people, in situations—are summed up in the old petition, “Thy kingdom come” (Matt. 6:10, KJV, emphasis added). But when we ask for that, we are asking for what may seem an excruciatingly drawn-out business. We will need the patience of the farmer and the baker who, having done the one thing needful, then quietly (and with calm faith) wait for the thing to happen.
DAY 29
THE ANSWER IS ALWAYS ENOUGH
We often hope to be spared trouble or suffering, and surely it is legitimate to pray that we may be. (“Lead us not into temptation” [Matt. 6:13, KJV] is a prayer Jesus taught us to pray.) Jesus Himself asked the Father to take away the “cup” (Luke 22:42); Paul prayed for the removal of his “thorn” (2 Cor. 12:7, KJV). In both cases, the answer was no. But God did not give a mere no—He sent what had not been asked: strength to endure. An angel was immediately dispatched to Gethsemane, “bringing him strength” (Luke 22:43). His suffering did not cease—in fact, “in anguish of spirit he prayed the more urgently; and his sweat was like clots of blood” (v. 44).
The apostle was suffering in some physical way, it seems. The thing was called “the messenger of Satan” (2 Cor. 12:7, KJV), and he did well to ask for its removal. The answer was no—but something unasked was given: grace. There was plenteous grace to enable Paul to endure. What God gives in answer to our prayers will always be the thing we most urgently need, and it will always be sufficient.
DAY 30
RESPONSIBLE TO PRAISE
We cannot always or even often control events, but we can control how we respond to them. When things happen that dismay or appall, we ought to look to God for His meaning, remembering that He is not taken by surprise nor can His purposes be thwarted in the end. What God looks for is those who will worship Him. Our look of inquiring trust glorifies Him.
One of the witnesses to the crucifixion was a military officer to whom the scene was surely not a novelty. He had seen plenty of criminals nailed up. But the response of this Man who hung there was of such an utterly different nature from that of the others, that the centurion knew at once that He was innocent. His own response then, rather than one of despair that such a terrible injustice should take place, or of anger at God, who might have prevented it, was “praise” (Luke 23:47).
This is our first responsibility: to glorify God. In the face of life’s worst reversals and tragedies, the response of a faithful Christian is praise—not for the wrong itself certainly, but for who God is and for the ultimate assurance that there is a pattern being worked out for those who love Him.
DAY 31
FORSAKEN? IMPOSSIBLE
Twice in my life I have heard Christians claim, in all seriousness, that God had forsaken them. This is an impossibility. Does Christ live in us? He does. The living Christ dwells in the heart of all true believers—He in them and they in Him. There are no words that adequately describe the intimacy of this relationship. Jesus, in His last recorded prayer for those whom the Father had given Him, asked “that they may be one, as we are one; I in them and thou in me . . . that the love thou hadst for me may be in them, and I may be in them” (John 17:23-26).
Jesus Christ, in the extremity of His agony on the cross, asked why God had forsaken Him. In becoming sin for us He experienced a terrible alienation from His Father, a sense of total dereliction. God did not and could not forsake the Son, who was one with Him. He cannot and will not forsake us, who are not only His sons and daughters but also the dwelling places of His only begotten Son. “I will never, never, never, never, never [the Greek has five negatives] leave you or forsake you” is His promise (see Heb. 13:5). At times we may be overcome with a feeling of helpless forsakenness. This is surely not from the loving Father but from the father of lies. The best way to answer that father is the way Jesus answered when tempted by Satan: “It is written” (Matt. 4:4, KJV). Take God’s own promise with its five negatives and hold on.