“Whatever you do for one of the least of these…”

I often see poor people begging for money or food. More often than not, they’re just standing at a busy intersection, holding a sign, hoping someone will stop a hand them a few dollars or maybe a cheeseburger from the nearby McDonald’s.

A long time ago I used to automatically give them something. After all, Jesus tells us to give to those who ask (Matt. 5:42). But then I heard that so many of these people use the money for alcohol or drugs. So I began to pray in each case about whether or not I should give, erring on the side of not giving. I also started to give food when I could, either taking the person into McDonald’s or buying them a meal on my own.

But then I heard someone who actually worked with the homeless tell how even gifts of food could be sold for money for drugs. So I really backed off and only gave reluctantly and if I only judged that the person was truly deserving and would use my gift for good.

Two days ago I saw a neatly dressed man, probably in his thirties, clean shaven, standing mutely beside a sign that told us all that he had been robbed, had no one to call and needed $56 for a bus ticket home. But now I was wiser than in my youth and was well informed about such scams. Even the amount was calculated to be believable. Not a nice round $100 but a more realistic $56. Of course there had been no robbery, there was no need for a bus ticket, and, if I gave this man what he asked for, he would thank me profusely, ask God’s blessing on me, and be back again tomorrow hitting up other suckers.

But how did I know? And was it even my business to know? Jesus tells me to give to those who ask. Simply ask. He doesn’t tell me to do His job and do a background check and get a complete family and criminal history. Just give because they ask. Someday soon when He says to me, “You saw Me hungry and you gave Me no food, you saw Me thirsty and you gave Me no drink” (Matt. 25: 42), will He excuse me when I say, “But Lord, I knew that You would just spend anything I gave you on drugs and alcohol”?

I could end there but I’ll go further and look at how Jesus responded to those in need. When ten lepers came to Him asking to be healed (Luke 17:12-19) did He consider that only one of the ten would thank Him and give glory to God? When the multitudes crowded around Him seeking bread, looking for healings, did He dismiss them knowing full well that they would take the food and the cures and then, at best, return to their everyday lives or, at worst, seek His death shortly thereafter?

No, Jesus had compassion on them. He saw their immediate pain – that they were hungry, blind, deaf, lame, that their precious, beloved child had died – and He did whatever was within His power to relieve their suffering.

Should I do any less for Him?

Promises

Last Sunday in church we were singing a song with the refrain, “I am yours, I am yours.” I’ve always thought I was saying this to God in the way that a person says this to a person they love. Seemed right. After all, I’m the one singing and I love God.

Then there are the lyrics to another song:

I sing for joy at the work of your hands,
Forever I'll love You, forever I'll stand.
Nothing compares to the promise I have in you.

Pretty straightforward: I’m promising my eternal love to God. What could be better?

But I’ve come to think the real beauty in these lines is in God’s eternal love for us. Let’s put a colon at the end of the first line:

I sing for joy at the work of your hands:
Forever I'll love You, forever I'll stand.

You see? The work of God’s hands – which I joyously sing about – is that I will love Him forever! He is the one who makes me stand and who enables me to love Him forever. And this is the incomparable promise that I have in Him.

So when I am singing “I am yours, I am yours” now, I realize that I am not making a promise to God but am rejoicing that He has made me His. I can do nothing apart from Him: He is the one who causes me to stand, to believe, and to love Him.

Coincidence

I’m standing out in the backyard staring up at the most beautiful star-filled sky. My attention is drawn to threes stars arranged in a perfect triangle. “How neat is that?” I think.

Then God gently taps me on the shoulder and points out that these three stars, viewed from any other angle, do not form the neat little equilateral that I see. These stars are actually separated by unimaginable distances, the light from one beginning its journey to my eyes millions of years before the light from the others, with those other two stars also removed from each other in space and time by million of years and billions of billions of miles.

All of this was set in motion long before my birth just so I could look up and see this perfect triangle.

And so God could talk to me about His planning and His love for me.

If God could set things in motion 13 billion years ago at the Big Bang or 6000 years ago when He set the stars in place (you take your pick; it doesn’t really matter here which one you believe) so that the light from these three stars would reach my eyes at the right time and from just the right directions, then God can certainly set up events in our every day lives for our good. In fact, I’ll go further, everything, yes, everything, in the history of the universe has been set in motion for this very moment – to bless you and make you everything that God has dreamed about you becoming since before He created the world. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s good stuff or bad – stars being born or stars dying – it’s all for you, the apple of God’s eye.

Napoleon at Waterloo? God worked that out to bless you today. Launch of the Apollo 11 mission? God had you in mind. Tsunami in Indonesia? Terrible, terrible tragedy but God will work good from it in your life if you’ll let Him.

So, if God can set stars in motion billions of years ago to bless you, and if God had you in mind during the signing of the Declaration of Independence, then God certainly has His eye on you today and desires to bring all of your both difficult and pleasant circumstances into perfect alignment.

We need only look up and see.

The Beloved Son

Most people wouldn’t know it, but I can be a very fearful person. Oh, I’m not afraid of the dark or heights or spiders or any of the usual things. I’m afraid that the other shoe is going to drop. Life can be going along quite well but I know, I just know, that waiting around the corner is some disaster. And I have every reason to expect this. It’s been my experience time and time again, day in and day out for most of the last four years.

It had gotten to the point where I avoid getting the mail or at least opening it because time after time it contains unwelcome news: letters from the IRS, lawyers, ex-wives (I have two), you name it. The sound of the ringer on my cell phone so regularly caused my heart to jump that I changed the ringer. The sight of a stranger walking up to my house instantly makes me think of process servers and social services case workers.

So many times have I gone to pick up my kids and have been denied visitation for no good or legal reason. So many times I have made an agreement in good faith thinking the matter was finished only to have the other side continue as if there had been no promise made. And how often have I entrusted my heart, my hopes, my dreams and plans – or even my suffering – to someone only to find the secret shared, the dreams laughed at, the suffering trivialized or used to hurt me further.

You see that I have some very, very good reasons to doubt that the good times will last, the friends will stay true and the pain will pass. I’m older now – and wiser. I know what life holds.

But God has other plans for me.

First He pointed out that I was idolizing those who would hurt me. I was placing my ex-wives, the courts, lawyers, the IRS, everyone on a pedestal higher than God. Although I was sure I had good reason (my experience, after all!) and could hardly be blamed for how I felt, my behavior, my thoughts and my fears were sin, plain and simple. I needed to recognize that even if it didn’t change the way I thought.

But now God has begun to train me in new ways. He does this relentlessly, day after day, hour after hour, no matter how slowly I learn. He blesses me with little things and big things. He makes things go smoothly that I thought would be huge problems. He gives me favor with strangers, bureaucrats and sales clerks. Even when things don’t go just the way I’d like, He shows me how much better – for me – His way is. And He doesn’t do this because that’s the way things always are in this fallen world. He does it because He loves me so very, very much and wants me to find out just how much. He’s going to keep blessing me and loving me and hugging me until I cry out, from the depths of my soul, “You DO love me!!) And then He’s going to love me some more. Thank you, God.

For the Glory of God

We’ve talked a bit about one reason for painful things happening in our lives (see Pruning, Job, Heading into the Storm, and The Little Stuff). But there are three other reasons I can see in the Bible. One of these Jesus calls “for the glory of God” (John 9 and 11). But what does that mean? In simplest terms, it means something that reveals – and hopefully advances – the Kingdom of God.

In John 9:1 we meet a man who has been blind all his life. The disciples, only being aware of a connection between suffering and sin, ask Jesus, “Whose fault is it that this man was born blind: was it his sin or the sin of his parents?” Jesus replies that it was the fault of neither but so that the hand of God might be displayed in this man’s life.

Wow. This grown man had been blind (never an easy thing but possibly even worse back then) since birth just so Jesus could come along and heal him? Seems a bit much.

But look at the results. God is revealed to the man, his parents, his neighbors and the religious leaders. To all it has an effect. The man becomes a follower of Jesus while his parents and the leaders choose to reject Jesus.

We see the same thing with the story of the death of Lazarus (John 11 and 12:9-10). Jesus could have saved Lazarus from dying but He didn’t. Not only that, but when He heard that Lazarus was sick, Jesus delayed His response for two days. So Lazarus not only died but, by the time Jesus arrived, Lazarus had been entombed for longer than the three days that Jewish tradition taught that the soul stayed with the body after death.

Why all the seemingly needless pain and suffering (on the part of Lazarus, his family and his friends) when Jesus was going to restore Lazarus to health and life anyway? Again, to reveal the handiwork of God. As with blind man, everyone one was affected by this miracle. Many put their trust in Jesus while others rejected and sought to kill him.

One final example since, in an earlier post (Heading into the Storm), I spoke of how storms can be used to mature us. In Acts 27:13 – 28:10 Paul encounters a life-threatening storm. It is through no fault of his and, furthermore, there is no clear indication that the storm brings about an increase in Paul’s maturity and closeness to God. Rather, the storm is used (successfully) to declare God to the soldiers and sailors on board the ship as well as to the inhabitants of the island on which they are finally shipwrecked.

So when a storm comes in your life (as they so often do), one thing to look for is how it can positively influence others for the Kingdom of God. It’s not what most people think of when they think of evangelism but it may be the very thing needed to save those around you.

“Innocent” Mistakes

It’s generally understood that a lack of knowledge of the law does not excuse breaking it. But I think we only understand this in the abstract and when it applies to other people. We don’t really think this principle has any effect on us.

But think of the children who are raised by parents who, by word or deed, make it clear that there are no harmful effects of drinking copious amounts of soda, of a sedentary lifestyle or even of smoking. Despite their “innocence”, these children often grow up to suffer the ravages of diabetes, heart disease and cancer. No matter how unfair it may seem, a lack of knowledge of the laws that govern our health does not preclude the consequences of disobeying those laws.

When I was thirteen I was introduced by my grandmother and parents to the writing of a psychic, Edgar Cayce, who would purport to help people with various ailments by entering into a trance and then pronouncing the steps necessary to produce a cure. He also made predictions about the future. I found this to be heady, exciting stuff and it had the imprimatur of those I looked up to. I certainly had no idea how seriously God commands us not to have anything to do with such things (Lev. 19:31, 20:6, etc.).

One of the psychic “readings” that Cayce performed directed a man with poor eyesight to crack his neck on a regular basis and his eyesight would be restored. Having needed glasses since I was nine, I jumped at the idea of healing my eyes and began cracking my neck. Over the next thirty-three years I would never be able to stop what was, at the very least, an annoying habit. I could not not crack my neck – no matter the time or place – although I tried many times. Even the pinched nerves and chronic aches that resulted could not induce me to stop. I was slavishly committed to this habit.

Then one day, almost two years ago, God said to me, “Every time you crack your neck you are paying homage to that which is not God.” I immediately saw the truth of what God had said (i.e. I agreed that I had been sinning against Him every time I cracked my neck) and I asked Him to forgive me and free me from committing this sin. I immediately felt a weight lift from neck and I have not felt a need to crack my neck since.

Bottom line: it was only by acknowledging my sin – something that I had started in what we call innocence and which I had never, ever considered a sin – repenting of it and asking God for His forgiveness and healing that I was miraculously healed from an oppression of over three decades.

Does this sound too incredible to you? Or does the idea that cracking my neck was, for me, a sin sound preposterous? If so, I ask you to reread what I’ve shared here. Consider the sequence of events and the reasoning. But more importantly, ask God. Read the Bible. Ask God to make things clear. He is not only able, He’s very willing.

Black Holes and Light

Been thinking about black holes (objects so massive that not even light travels fast enough to escape their gravity) and light. Some amazing connections:

Time slows down as one goes faster and faster. If you could go as fast as light (670 million miles per hour), time would go so slowly it would come to a stop.

Time also slows down as gravity increases. So time moves more slowly on earth than it does on the moon where the force of gravity is less. If you got to a place where the gravity was so strong that you’d have to travel at the speed of light just to get away (like near a black hole), time would go so slowly it would come to a stop. So what’s the connection between gravity and speed?

Also, things become more massive (“weigh more”) as they go faster and faster. If something was moving at the speed of light it would be more massive than everything in the entire universe combined. So if you travel fast enough (close to the speed of light), you will become a black hole.

But as you become a black hole, the distance from you at which light cannot escape will be someplace inside you. This doesn’t make any sense. Fortunately, as you travel faster, you also become smaller – so no problem. Isn’t it weird the way everything works out so nicely?

Isn’t God amazing?