Be Kind
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“Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice. Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.” Ephesians 4:31-32
A merry heart
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by John Fischer He wrote it in response to some comments I had made about one of our chihuahuas named Blitzen. “The one on Blitzen made me laugh,” he wrote. “Those poor stupid little dogs! They crack me up. Has the little one gotten any bigger, or is the size that I saw her basically as big as she’s going to get? Whenever I think of you taking care of Chandler, dealing with Mama and all her energy, calming down Anne, helping me out, all the while holding two overgrown rats in your lap I can’t help but smile.” Why am I proud of this? 1) Because he noticed. It’s funny, but it does take patience to love within any family, including what it must take for my family to love me. We all have our nuances and idiosyncrasies to put up with. If he’s noticing this in me, that might mean he will try and do the same thing when he is a dad and husband. Maybe he will love others as they are, and have patience when life is pressing from many different directions. 2) There’s humor in the ordinary and he found it. All of the things he mentioned could be problematic in and of themselves, but taken together they present a sort of collective summary of events that you can’t help but laugh about. We need to be careful not to take ourselves too seriously. We all want control, but we all, when pressed to it, would admit that life feels pretty much out of control most of the time. That’s okay, precisely because we are not in control anyway — God is. We just experience life and trust God to hold us together and make some sense out of the seeming chaos. Which actually leads me to the last thing: 3) God somehow brings meaning to all of our lives — all aspects of them. Not just to what we think is spiritual, but to everything — even those things that seem to be running out of control. My son somehow found comfort in my chaos… and humor too. You know, if you don’t take yourself too seriously, you just might find something in your mess worth remembering… and laughing about. My mother was a kind of walking Bible. One of her favorite verses was Proverbs 17:22. She would always quote it from the King James Bible, so that’s how I’d like you to hear it today: “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the bones.” |
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You are my Savior
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Why celebrate?
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by John Fischer I’m about to fly across the country to attend my second wedding of the summer. Weddings are such a grand excuse to celebrate, and I’m of the opinion we don’t do enough celebrating these days. If you have done any reading of the Old Testament you might recall that there was quite a lot of celebrating going on in the nation of Israel. There was the Feast of Weeks, the Feast of Trumpets, the Feast of Tabernacles, the Day of Atonement and the Year of Jubilee, just to name a few, and these events were built into their annual calendar by none other than God Himself. All of these were multiple day events.
Apparently celebrating is important to God, and yet we secular Gentiles have pretty much eradicated celebrating from our calendar with the exception of the holidays. Weddings are the closest thing we probably experience to what God instituted for His people. They are usually multiple day affairs with lots of eating, drinking, dancing, honoring, toasting, praying, and enjoying of one another.
Why do you suppose this was important to God?
Could it be that God enjoys a good time as much as we do? Could it be that He gains pleasure from our pleasure? Could it be that however hard life is, a time to drop everything and enjoy family and friends is essential to our existence, and he knows that?
Do you ever think about why we are alive and how little time we spend realizing it? It’s the moments like this wedding I’m going to when we are provided with the time and the reminders to do this.
But you have to schedule it; it won’t happen on its own. God knew that so He instituted the feast days. As it is this wedding was scheduled and coming into it, I resented the interruption. But now I’m realizing my family will be together for the first time since the holidays, and I am now anticipating the few days we have together.
My wife was smart. She left her laptop behind. As you can tell, I didn’t, but that’s okay. I can still talk to you, and I do know when to hang it up! Take some time to celebrate God and the dear people in your life!
God’s Plan
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“Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.” Psalm 37:4
Restroom ministry
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by John Fischer
Don’t look now, but one of our readers is closing in on a new ministry. Ben is loose in the restroom! He writes: When I was leaving work yesterday, I saw this guy in the restroom that I knew had been going through some grief, having lost both of his parents over the past year.
My father just passed away on Feb. 27. I told him that I had a book on grieving the loss of a parent that might be useful to him. He said he didn’t like to read a lot of books. I said, “Yeah, I can’t really endorse it either. I haven’t read it myself.” (Good one, Ben!)
I told him that I had the pleasure of leading my father to Christ back in November of 2004. I also let him know that I prefer to limit my reading to recommended books and was currently reading through Randy Alcorn’s Heaven. I was able to share with him some of the fantastic things I have learned about Heaven and how it seems to have taken my grief away quickly.
We walked out together, down the elevator, and to the parking garage. During that time, I was able to talk with him more about his own certainty of eternal life. He has trusted in Christ but said that he “drifts” sometimes. I got to tell him that when he received Christ, he became a new creature and that he was going to go to Heaven. But between receiving Christ and dying, he was going to go through a process of being made more like Christ that wouldn’t be complete until he died.
I told him that God will speak to him through the Bible, prayer, and through meeting together with other believers like we were doing right then. When we finished talking, I could tell that God had done something in him right then. He straightened up real tall and shook my hand firmly. “I want to thank you for taking the time to talk to me. This has meant a lot.”
Now here’s the clincher … I don’t think I mentioned it, but I really don’t like to talk to people in the bathroom more than just, “Hi, how are you …” Oh, sure Ben. We almost believe that! You know, Ben’s story just confirms that most people want to talk if you show even the slightest interest in them. In this case, it was this gentleman’s loss that Ben was able to identify with.
I like this story because Ben is clearly not the professional Christian or the expert witness. He’s just … well … Ben – a guy who doesn’t like to talk to anybody in the restroom, but who did anyway because God moved him to. It’s pretty amazing what you can accomplish from the restroom to the parking lot when you follow his lead.
Opportunites
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“Is anything too hard for the Lord?” Genesis 18:14
A pretty big deal
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by John Fischer One of our readers made the following comment this week, “I concluded that, more than anything, God wants a personal relationship with me, a 24/7 relationship if you will. Within that relationship love, grace, mercy, forgiveness, compassion, and generosity abound.” Fred managed to get an awful lot into those two sentences. The first is the reason for our existence; the second is what it takes in order to have it. God made us because He was lonely. Not to imply that God had a deficiency. More than anything, He had a desire. He wanted to share what He made (the world) with someone. So He made us like Him (in His image) so he could relate to us and us to Him. It’s the driving force behind the universe. You were made for God. This is why our souls find no rest until they find Him, and why anything short of this will leave us empty and unsatisfied. The second sentence is what was necessary for the relationship to work. God had to unleash a large amount of love, grace, mercy, forgiveness, compassion, and generosity on us because we rebelled and went away from Him. He had to go through everything that He did, including forsaking and killing His only son, in order to forgive us and make up the huge debt that we owed. But now it is done and He can forgive us. The requirement of His justice upon sin has been met so He is now able to be in relationship with us — which is what He was after all along. So this was all for you. Pretty amazing, huh? Think about that if you are ever feeling insignificant. The God of the universe created you and arranged history so He could be in a relationship with you. I know there are a lot of important things in your life right now, as there are in mine, but could anything be more important than this? Should you get too bogged down in details today, stop for a minute and reflect upon this one very big fact: You were made by God, like God, and God moved history to get to you. I’d say that was a pretty big deal. |
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Negative feelings
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“You will keep in perfect peace all who trust in you, all whose thoughts are fixed on you.” Isaiah 26:3
How the mighty have fallen
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by John Fischer Those of you who have grown up going to Sunday school celebrating all those great Bible characters of the Old Testament know what it is to suddenly find out what these people really were like. It can be a real shock.
At some point in my life I had to face the disappointing fact that Solomon was a bigamist, Samson was a womanizer, Jacob was a deceiver, Gideon was an idolater, David was an adulterer and murderer, and Jonah was running away from God even after he got to Ninevah. When I finally was old enough to read these stories for myself and see beyond the grid of my preconceived notions, my heroic, grand illusions gradually began to resemble more of a Bible soap opera than anything else, complete with juicy details of lust, jealousy, backstabbing, and betrayal. These people didn’t float down to earth lightly, they fell with a great crash, and the sound of it echoed down the corridors of my Bible hall of fame.
Did this other side of the story crush my idealism? Did finding out about these human weaknesses and sinful lapses endanger my faith? Actually I was surprised to find that these discoveries were, more than anything, a very great relief. Instead of losing heart, I gained it. The more messed-up these Bible heroes turned out to be, the better I felt. Not that I had somehow turned sadistic in my assessments; I was simply relieved to find out how human and fallible these people were, after all. Some of them were guilty of things I have never even thought about doing. And yet in spite of this God worked through them. He loved them, spoke highly of them, and put them to use for his kingdom.
They are still heroes now to me, only in a different way. No longer heroes for their outstanding human attributes; they were heroes for their faith — faith in spite of their foibles and fallibilities. God operates through human imperfection. He does not model perfect Herculean examples; he models faithful human ones. Once these people were heroes of the faith to aspire to but never reach; now they were heroes of faith who were not that much different than me.
As U2’s Bono once said, “That the scriptures are brim full of hustlers, murderers, cowards, adulterers and mercenaries used to shock me. Now it is a source of great comfort.”
If God can use these guys, there’s hope for anybody.
