A Life-Long Pursuit

Proverbs 4:5,6 - Get wisdom, get understanding: forget it not; neither decline from the words of my mouth. Forsake her not, and she shall preserve you: love her, and she shall keep you. 

    Mark Twain once said that the condition of humanity is, basically, laziness. I tend to agree, and I think the Word of God confirms that as well. We cannot idly sit and casually wait for progress and advancement. The blessing and provision of God does not automatically fall on us like ripe fruit falling off a tree. Proverbs is a book of distilled wisdom and this wisdom is always practical and brings results, but, like anything of value, it must be diligently sought after.

    We are commanded here to get wisdom, that is, we are to be proactive about procuring it. Wisdom is available but we must be the ones who hunger and seek for it. The opposite of being a proactive person is being a reactive one. To be proactive is take action ahead of time and ahead of potential trouble, however, to be reactive is to take action only after something has happened and by so doing we are always in crisis mode and seem to be playing catch up. If we are constantly reactive then circumstances and situations are in control of our lives and not us. Those who pursue and acquire wisdom are those who will eventually come to a place of significance, success, and satisfaction.

    Wisdom and understanding are two of the essential elements needed to obtain and maintain long-term viability and usefulness. A wise person is one who is vigilant; constantly looking ahead to see what may be coming. There are always enemies to any progressive venture in life, and the person who is aware and alert can make wise choices to safeguard and defend themselves against opposition. Not only are we to look ahead for possible trouble but wisdom will also look ahead for prospective opportunities. How many of us have missed opportunities that we regret not taking? It may be a piece of land that we didn’t buy; a beautiful girl that we never asked out; a university that we did not go to or, a promotion that we did not accept. Missed opportunities are the lament of the unwise.

    When Solomon assumed the throne, and was invited by God to ask for whatever he wanted, he asked for an understanding heart. An understanding heart is a hearing heart; it is a listening heart. We have many who want to be heard but very few who want to listen. If we want to understand and have keen insight, we have to listen very carefully. Stephen Covey encouraged us to develop the habit of ‘seeking first to understand, then to be understood’. Human nature is such that the desire to be understood tends to eclipse all else. What if we changed our thinking about this? What if, when we pray, we sought to understand God’s heart? What if we patiently listened to our wives and children? What if we took time to really hear the boss’ perspective? How about our Pastors, our friends or our customers? To be the kind of people who sincerely seek to understand others first would radically revolutionize all of our relationships.

    Dr. Edwin Louis Cole, some time ago, wrote that it is always harder to maintain something than it is to obtain it. We are to acquire wisdom and to obtain understanding and then maintain both qualities by not being forgetful. Sadly, all of us seem to have an unusual tendency to forget important things. Any married man knows that there are certain dates that he better not forget, and likewise, any student knows that there are certain facts that he better not forget. That is why we live in a world of reminders; we have them on our phones to alert us of appointments; we have them on our stoves to tell us when the food is ready and we have them on our computers to tell us when updates are needed. We all tend to forget. We all need reminders. God, through His Word is giving us a reminder; do not forget.

    Do not forsake wisdom, that is, do not relinquish your intense pursuit of it. Most men love the chase, but they don’t always love the work needed to maintain what they have gotten; just ask the wives. We are created to pursue; we are created to achieve and, we are created to accomplish but, we are also created to preserve and sustain the results. A wise person is concerned not only about obtaining greater levels of output and productivity, but also, about retaining the principles and maintaining the relationships that brought them to that level.

    I once read the story of how a young man had an opportunity to meet and transport a guest speaker to a conference. The guest speaker was a very successful pastor, having built a large congregation over many years. Full of admiration, the younger man blurted out his assertion that the pastor’s success must have come about because he was a man of such great character and was so powerfully gifted. The wise older man calmly responded, ‘Son, if you are walking down a path and you come across the sight of a turtle on top of a fence post, you can immediately be sure of this one fact; that turtle did not get there by himself. Someone lifted him up and placed him on a higher level. I am that turtle and I have had a lot of help getting here’.

    Now, that is wisdom and understanding worth pursuing. I wonder are there any other turtles out there that would agree?

Grace that is Greater than All

1Cor.15:10 - But by the grace of God I am what I am: and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain; but I laboured more abundantly than they all: yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me. 

    The grace of God is one of the Bible’s big subjects that must be prayerfully and carefully studied. Grace is a difficult word to define because it resides in the very heart of God and hones close to the essence of things that matter most. Without a doubt, there is a world of meaning wrapped up and encompassed within that one word. Someone has once said that to define a word is to also confine it and that is certainly true of the word grace, so we tread lightly and reverently here.

    Many of us have no doubt heard the phrase, ‘But for the grace of God there go I’. This saying is used mostly when we hear of someone who has had a string of bad things happen or maybe ones who have chosen a wrong path in life and are now suffering terribly for it. We rightly acknowledge that we are no better than anyone else but God has made the difference; He has intervened and we have been spared from many disastrous circumstances. ‘But for the grace of God, there go I’.

    However, as we look closer at our verse, Paul gives us some interesting insight into what must be a very important aspect of God’s grace. Paul had just made reference to the fact that before he met the Lord he was Saul, the chief persecutor of the church. His one aim was to hunt down Christians, men, and women, and murder them, or at the very least, shackle them and imprison them for their beliefs. He humbly acknowledged that he was not fit to be an apostle because he adamantly opposed the teaching of the original apostles and stood strongly against everything that was taught by them. He even watched close by with a feeling of gratification as he approved of the heartless and brutal murder of Stephen. Before Jesus had gone to the cross, He had forewarned His disciples that the time would come when whoever would kill Christians would do it with full confidence that they were doing God’s service. There are some extremely hard-hearted people in the world but truly no one is as hard-hearted as murderous religious zealots. This was where the young Saul’s mind was at; he sincerely believed that by killing Christians he was pleasing God.

    Many times we see people who are very vocal and loud in their opposition to faith in Jesus, but we do not know what is going on within them. We can only go by what we see on the outside but, God looks deep within all people and sees the very intentions and motives of the heart. God saw within the man named Saul, a little boy whom He had called from his mother’s womb and had planned a destiny of greatness for him. A couple of years after Stephen’s death, Jesus appeared to Saul in a very dramatic fashion, on the road to Damascus, and did a powerful work in him, turning him from Saul the persecutor, full of hatred, to Paul the passionate, full of love. And all of this was done by the grace of God.

    Notice closely in our verse of Scripture what Paul does not say. He does not say, ‘But for the grace of God there go I’. He was indeed a hard-hearted religious zealot but the grace of God came into his life and transformed him into a servant and called him to be an apostle. ‘I am what I am by the grace of God’. The grace was not something that kept him from the negatives of life; the grace was something that altered him and placed him into the positive plan of God. And not only did that grace change Paul but, that grace became the ongoing, enabling ability of God in his life. He was able to labour ceaselessly because of the grace, he even went so far as to say that he wasn’t the one labouring; it was actually the grace of God which was with him. Sometimes we are amazed at certain people and how they are able to do what they do but, perhaps, we should be crediting God who placed a grace-gift within them that empowers them onward in their service.

    What lessons can we learn from this verse, and what application does it have? One lesson is that it does not matter what our past has been like; it does not matter where we have been; it only matters where we go from here; it only matters that we receive the grace of God and do not cause it to be given to us in vain. Let’s not frustrate the grace of God; let’s cooperate with Him; yield to Him and believe that the past is finished and gone. We cannot even inhale the recently exhaled air; it is used up; it is gone. We only have the present tense moment, right now, to accept the gracious gift of God; a gift that empowers us to forget failure and equips us with what we will need to continue to run our race and to finish the course that we have been assigned to. Someone has aptly said we shouldn’t be surprised that God does indeed work with imperfect people because He only has one kind of person to work with; welcome to the human condition. Oh, how I need this grace and how thankful I am that I have it. How about you?

Freedom from Oppression

Acts 10:38 – How God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power: who went about doing good and healing all that were oppressed of the devil; for God was with him.

    Peter was a direct eyewitness to the ministry of Jesus; he walked with Him and lived very closely to Him for three and one-half years. Peter’s description and summary spoken to Cornelius’ household gives us a very trustworthy, insider’s look at the essence of Jesus’ life and ministry. I am sure there are many things that Peter could have said about Jesus but he carefully and accurately depicted Him in this way. What he discloses to us here, in this power-packed verse, is of supreme importance, so let’s take a closer look.

    ‘God anointed Jesus’. This fact alone teaches us that everything Jesus did, He did as a man who was anointed by the Holy Spirit. According to the book of Philippians, He laid aside His mighty power and glory and became like us. He never reached back into the archives of Heaven and used the unique tools of Divinity but He used only the tools of humanity given to Him by God. Those are the same tools that can be accessed and utilized by us. He did not heal people because he was the Son of God. He did not heal people because he wanted to prove that he was God in the flesh. No! He healed people primarily because he was moved with compassion toward suffering humanity. He could not help himself; compassion urged him on in his healing ministry. If Jesus was trying to demonstrate that He was the Son of God then He had a strange way of promoting Himself. He should have told all those who were healed to go and spread the word, but He did not. Several times that we know of He told those whom He had healed to not say a word to anyone about it. That is a very unusual marketing campaign to be sure.

    The anointing is a fascinating subject to study in the Bible and it deserves our attention. For our purpose today we can simplify things by saying that the anointing is the empowering ability of God to accomplish something we cannot do on our own. I remember hearing a funny story about the old country preacher who was asked by a younger student to describe what the anointing was. The old man of God asked the student, ‘Do you see that cow in the field?’ Yes. ‘That’s not the anointing’. ‘Do you see that tree over there?’ Yes. ‘That’s not the anointing’  ‘But, if that cow flies up into the tree…now that’s the anointing’. While that may not be the scholarly way of defining the anointing, we can gather something profound from this simple man’s wisdom, and that is, that the anointing is that which enables us to do what it is impossible to do without it. Jesus went so far as to say that He could do nothing of Himself but that he relied totally on the Father.

    The Bible almost always links the anointing to the person of the Holy Spirit. They are divinely connected and Peter seems to highlight that fact here. ‘God anointed Jesus with the Holy Spirit and with power’. The anointing has many applications; it is a broad subject. There is an anointing upon those who are called to stand in one of the Ministry Offices of the Church; there is an anointing to testify and witness; there is an anointing to lead others in worshipful singing; there is an anointing to preach and powerfully proclaim the Word of God; there is an anointing to teach and unfold the Word simply to others; there is an anointing to pray; and there is an anointing to heal the sick, to name only a few of the applications. Jesus, among many other things, had a powerful anointing to heal the sick and deliver the oppressed. He was anointed with healing power. When the woman with the issue of blood touched His garment He knew that power had gone out of Him. What kind of power was it? It must have been healing power and, apparently, it actually flowed like electricity from Jesus to the woman. Luke also makes note of the fact that a great multitude sought to touch Jesus for there went power out of Him and He healed them all.

    Jesus accurately demonstrated the heart of our Father as He healed the suffering ones. ‘He went about doing good and healing’. Healing is a good work; it is a display of God’s goodness. If you do not believe that, just ask those that have been healed. We contradict ourselves when we say, as most Christians do, that God is good, but then we do not believe that He heals today. If He is still good, then he still heals. In fact, our Heavenly Father is so good that even the most knowledgeable and mature among us have yet to experience all there is of His goodness. There is so much more to receive and we can only receive His goodness to the degree that our hearts are able to open up by faith and allow more of that goodness to come in.

    If we read the Gospels carefully, we will see that healing was not just an occasional thing in Jesus’ ministry. Luke tells us that Jesus went through the towns, preaching the gospel and healing everywhere. Matthew tells us that a great multitude followed Him and He healed them all. Peter, in our verse above, tells us that He traversed the land doing good and healing; it was an integral and vital part of His ministry assignment.

    The Word of God emphatically states that sickness and disease is an oppression of the enemy, and we know that Jesus came to destroy the works of the devil. ‘Oppressed of the devil’. The Greek word translated oppression means to be forcefully held down under the power of something. When we think of certain countries that have greedy dictators and cruel tyrants as rulers, we know that the people are oppressed; they are restricted, broken, demoralized, and they are not free to live as God designed. Oppression is a terrible thing; it is never the will of God for anyone. This is such an important fact, because if we do not know that sickness is not from God then we will never take a proper stand against it.

    God anointed Jesus for a purpose in the Earth and, in obedience to that purpose Jesus yielded to that anointing and allowed God to flow through His life, bringing blessing, strength, and healing wherever He went. How thankful we are for the record of His life and ministry. He healed those who were suffering then, and He is still the same today; He has not changed one iota; He is Christ the Healer, He is Christ our Healer and, He is Christ your Healer!