Seeing a Familiar Passage in a New Light

Do you know the feeling when you read a passage that is so very familiar to you, and you notice something you’ve never noticed before? That happened to me a few weeks ago, and the passage was the well-known chapter 40 of the book Isaiah. Interestingly enough, I’d even memorized portions of this passage in years past. On this particular morning as I opened my Bible, I was longing to sense God’s presence, to be reminded again of his care for me as an individual. My devotional had me begin reading at verse 12, “Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand and marked off the heavens with a span, enclosed the dust of the earth in a measure and weighed the mountains in scales and the hills in balance?”

I am sure you know this passage; it goes on to explain that God is far above us, that he is not like us, that he needs no counselor to tell him what to do.  “Behold, the nations are like a drop from a bucket, and are accounted as the dust on the scales. […] It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers” (verses 15 & 22). While this is an incredible passage of God’s “otherness,” showing us his power and his glory, it makes us feel small and unimportant. If I am a “grasshopper” or a “speck of dust,” what do I matter to a God to whom earth is just a footstool?

But the beauty of this passage is that it not only shows us God’s “otherness” but also his nearness. This is what my heart needed that morning.

“Why do you say, O Jacob, and speak, O Israel, ‘My way is hidden from the Lord and my right is disregarded by my God’? Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the faint, and to him who has no might he increases strength. Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted; but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint” (verses 27-31).

Yes, God is far beyond us in every way. We are as nothing before him, but he cares about us as individuals in our nothingness. Ultimately he showed this in sending his Son to be our rescuer, but even before Christ came, his care is seen. It is seen all throughout the stories of the  Old Testament, but also in passages like this one that remind weary and needy hearts that the same God who is transcendent and sovereign is also near. He sees us and cares.

Your way is not hidden from God. We may not understand everything he does in our lives, for “his understanding is unsearchable,” yet we can know that he is near and that he gives power, strength, and perseverance to those who wait on him.  Be encouraged, my dear sister in Christ.

[As a side note, for further encouragement from this chapter, meditate on verse 11: “He will tend his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms; he will carry them in his bosom, and gently lead those that are with young.”]

--Amy O'Rear

Unencumbered: Running the Race

My son-in-law is a runner.  I say that with pride because I never have been one, not in my entire life, as far as I can remember.  Bill began training for a marathon about a year ago.  He was running, but in June he got serious about that training.  He began running between 15 and 40 miles a week, running even in temperatures of 95 degrees and up.  The race came, and he finished!  But the running didn’t stop there.  He’s still running, down now to 9-15 miles a week.  That’s hard for me to even imagine.  I’m lucky to walk a mile right now.

I thought of Bill because of a couple of verses, Hebrews 12:1 and 2, “Therefore we also, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which so easily ensnares us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.”  There is so much in those two verses, but the two words that caught me are “weights” and “sins”.

First, weights, and I’ve had a hard time distinguishing between weights and sins.  Perhaps we can just say there is an overlap.  The Amplified version says, “stripping off every unnecessary weight.”  The New Living translation says, “strip off every weight that slows us down.”  The Good News Bible says, “Let us rid ourselves of everything that gets in the way.”  That’s means the things that slow us down or keep us from running the race well.

My list of weights includes memories of the past, fear, weariness, physical weakness, even a lack of faith.  Sometimes memories hold me captive.  A line from Martha Snell Nicholson’s poem, Judgment Day, says, “While memory runs like a hunted thing down the paths I cannot retrace.”  I admit that this is one of my weights.  I grieve, I weep, I regret things that I cannot change.  Those memories can handicap me, stop me from being and doing what I should.  Do you have those memories that are weighing you down? What about fear, fear of what might happen as you run this race, fear of what others may think of you, fear of consequences?  Perhaps physical pain or weakness has kept you from running the race.  No two races are alike.  You are not a clone of anyone.  God does not expect you or me to run anyone else’s race, but we are to strip off the weights that slow us down in our races.

Sins.  Now that’s a heavy one.  The Amplified Bible says, “the sin which so easily and cleverly entangles us.” The New Living Translation describes “the sin that so easily trips us up,” while the Good News Bible talks about the “sin which holds on to us so tightly.” Each of us has personal sins that entangle us and cause us to trip.  If you’ve been a Christian for a longer time and have had more time to take care of the sins that are easy for others to recognize, your sins have probably gone underground.  I think those are actually harder to get rid of.  Sin is anything, no matter how “small,” that separates you from God.  These could include self-righteousness or pride, judging, laziness, gossip, discontent, self-centeredness, prayerlessness. . . . Fill in your blank.  I think these could be summed up as lack of love.  Jesus said the first commandment was to love God with all your heart and the second was to love your neighbor as yourself.  (Matthew 22).  I Corinthians 13 says if you don’t have love, you are nothing. Wouldn’t love take care of pride and self-righteousness?  Would we need to compare ourselves to others?  Wouldn’t gossip disappear if we truly loved?  Wouldn’t we pray more for others if we loved them?  But without that love we will be tripped up, will be easily entangled, will be thwarted in the race God has given us to run.

            Verse 2 of chapter 12 gives us the ultimate coaching for a well-run race.  We are to run with endurance, fixing our eyes on Jesus (NASB). We are to run with endurance and active persistence (looking away from all that will distract us) and focusing our eyes on Jesus (AMP).  Reliance on Him is the key to a well-run race.

            Are you ready to run your marathon?  Will you run with me in the race? My goal is to be found faithful at the end of my race.  Paul said, “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.”  (II Timothy 4:7) May I be able to say the same when I have run my race.

                                                                   ~~Faith Himes Lamb

About Face! March!

When I was a youngster, though we attended churches of several different denominations for several years each, my family couldn’t seem to find a Bible-believing church in our small rural Midwestern community.

I wanted to know the Bible, so I wanted to go to a Bible college. When I was in high school, I had the opportunity to visit a Bible college in Minnesota for a weekend, where an older girl from our church was a student. I was very excited, as I knew this was what I wanted for my future.

The visit was a disaster. My older friend and her friends, both guys and girls, had no interest in the Lord. Their behavior in class was disrespectful; their behavior in the dorm and at work ranged from ungodly to criminal. I was heartbroken. I tried to make good decisions. I wanted to please God. So I made a good decision. I decided never to go to a Bible college. I would go to a Not Christian College, where I expected people to act like that. I couldn’t bear to be hurt like that again.

My plan worked well. There were all kinds of people at the Not Christian College and I found places to fit in and found a small church to attend. But by summer, I was feeling spiritually lost and lonely. My parents had finally found a Bible-believing church, and, as I had no transportation of my own, I had to go with them, though I was tired of moving from church to church. The pastor and young people there kept talking about their nearby Bible college, which was not the one I had visited earlier. But I was going to stick with my plan. I was firmly resolved to ignore them. I would never go to Bible college.

So I went to summer church camp. I truly wanted some Bible knowledge. I’m pretty sure all the teachers knew about my resolution, which I had never told anyone, and they were all plotting against me, even though none of them knew me. In every class, every teacher, at least once that week, said, “If you want to know the will of God, you have to know the Word of God.”

I cried out to God in desperation. “God! You KNOW I want to know your will! And I know I don’t know your Word.” I went home from camp on Saturday, talked to our pastor on Monday, and was living in the dorm at Bible college on Thursday. I think I was at least as surprised as the Apostle Philip who was told to go to the desert road toward Gaza, performed a baptism, and suddenly “found himself at Azotus.” I loved everything about Bible college, every second of it, the whole time I was there. And it has profoundly affected my life.

That was not the first time nor the last that God has upended my plans and moved me in a totally unexpected direction. Not always has the change been happy. One of the most recent startling turns in my life took me on a hard road. Because I absolutely knew the Lord was leading (or pushing or dragging) me, I kept on, but I still wonder about the significance of it. Surely it was more important than is evident so far. After all, God had to put so much direct effort into it.

You have had your own turnarounds. Wonderful surprises. Disappointments. Fizzled plans. New developments.

As we read the stories of real people in the Bible, we realize that most of those participants never did see the significance of the happy, terrible or ordinary events in their lives. But we also see that God was relentlessly directing.

Bible contributor James, a rather practical fellow who has quite a bit to say about living a Godly life, advises, “Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit’— yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring….  Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.’” (James 4:13-15). Well, of course. Centuries earlier, God had said, “A man’s heart plans his way, But the Lord directs his steps.” (Proverbs 16:9). Job said, to his wife, “Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble?” (Job 2:10). 

If we can accept the changes, bad or good, as from His hand, we can learn and grow. Otherwise, when things go “wrong,” we may choose to be hurt, angry, or rebellious. When we have “good luck,” we may choose pride and idolatry.

We can spend all the time we wish drawing blueprints, filling in the daily planner and arranging our people, schedule and stuff. But we are not in charge. God is our immediate supervisor, the plant manager, and the company owner. Let us not just say, “If the Lord wills…” Let us desire it, pray it, live it.

--Lynda Shenefield

Contentment

My favorite Shakespearean sonnet is #29.  I'll let you find it and read it for yourself if you're interested, but the main idea is that the speaker is unhappy with his lot in life. He feels that other people are better looking, smarter, and more skilled. He claims that even God isn't listening to him.

I think most of us have felt that way at some point in our lives. It's so easy to put ourselves down and notice how well others are coping, how well-adjusted their children are, how nicely their hair is done. I generally have a pretty good self image, but I can't help wishing, at times, to have "this [woman's] art and that [woman's] scope," as the Bard says. This is one reason I enjoy the poem; it's so completely universal.

But it gets better. The speaker, in the midst of his gloom, happens to remember someone who loves him, and it completely changes his mood. He likens his situation to that of birds singing and says he wouldn't change places with kings.

What a blessing to have someone who can make that kind of difference. But what if you live alone? What if your family won't talk to you? What if you have no friends?

While it's hard to imagine that there isn't one single person who raises your spirit this way--a person who cares for you and would love to hear from you--it is possible that you feel completely alone. Hebrews 13:5 says this: " . . .be content with what you have, for He has said, 'I will never leave you nor forsake you.'" It's true that the context in Hebrews is speaking primarily about being content with the money you have, but the reason for this contentment extends to every area of life: God will never leave you.

I Timothy 6:6 says that "godliness with contentment is great gain." Contentment. Not wishing to be someone else, have someone's else's job, house, kids, husband, wardrobe. This kind of life is priceless.

I hope you have a great week, but in those rare moments when discontent begins to creep in, I pray you remember One who loves you. He is the one who gives you all good things, and He knows best.

--Sherry Poff