Guidelines For Living Devotional

When I was in Jerusalem years ago, our Jewish guide began to tell about his birth in Germany and the persecution that followed in the early days of World War 2.  With growing emotional intensity, he told how his father was seized by the Gestapo and never heard from again.  The family escaped to another country in Europe.  With growing anger, the tempo of his conversation increased, and then almost as though he was venting some of his wrath, he said, "Where was God when the 6 million Jews were cremated?"  It was an old question.  Where is God in times of disaster?  Where was God when 4 million Cambodians were slaughtered in 1975 and 1976?  Where was God when men and women were slaughtered in the other conflicts?

How big is God?  That's a pretty tough question, right?  Ask ten people, and you will get ten different answers.  Ask a South American deep in the jungles of Colombia and he may lead you to a primitive hut.  From a narrow shelf just under a hand‑thatched roof, he may take down a beautifully polished statue and hold it out saying, "God is this big...."  As you observe the artifact he holds in his hand, you notice that it bears a striking resemblance to the man who holds it.

If ever a man went from hero to zero, it was Michael Parker.  His exotic cars, and yachts, and expensive club memberships, and connections to the high and mighty are all gone.  His expensive suits were traded for prison garb.

When the U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia spoke to a group of law students, he said that Christians are "destined to be regarded as fools in modern society." "God," said the Justice, "assumed from the beginning that the wise of the world would view Christians as fools…and He has not been disappointed." Devout Christians are destined to be regarded as fools in modern society," Scalia warned.  "We are fools for Christ's sake. We must pray for courage to endure the scorn of the sophisticated world. If I have brought any message today," he concluded, "it is this: Have the courage to have your wisdom regarded as stupidity. Be fools for Christ. And have the courage to suffer the contempt of the sophisticated world." [1]

 

[1] Baergen, P. (2016, March 10). Blog. Retrieved July 21, 2020, from https://generationjoshua.org/GenJ/blog/liberty's-call/2016/03/10/remembering-justice-antonin-scalia

If you want to know how tolerant you really are, do not look at your own mistakes but look at the mistakes of your worst enemy.  Do not measure your tolerance when you got a scratch on the new car because the parked one was way too far out from the curb.  Measure your tolerance when your wife roundly smashes the left front fender.

If God really is supernatural, should we think it so strange when the miraculous occurs? Put more personally, can we trust Him for that which has no human explanation today?  Or should we conclude that God put our world into operation and then withdrew, leaving our world to run itself?  There is one thing for certain.  The twelve men who walked with Jesus Christ experienced a great deal of the supernatural, for Christ, according to the Gospels, touched blind eyes and men saw.  He cleansed the lepers.  He unstopped deaf ears, and the lame walked.  This, of course, was very unsettling to some of the people who were present, especially the religious leaders who were convinced that God could, but to actually see it, was rather distressing.  How could they account for it?

Is there any room for optimism today?  That may depend on your definition of optimism.  If you see it as looking for a black cat in a dark room, or feeling for a light switch that has been removed, originally connected to a burned‑out bulb, I guess there is not room for much optimism today, but if you believe that it is still God—not chance or fate—who is in control of our universe, there is still room for hope.  When we look beyond the headlines and read the last chapter, we come to understand that the scope of God's power can be brought to bear on the difficulties of life whether they are national or personal.

When Lyndon Johnson was asked how he was getting along, he replied "Fine!"  He explained that he had adopted the formula once given to him by an old woman many years ago. She said, "When I walks, I walks slow.  When I sits, I sits loosely.  When I sees a worry coming on me, I just go to sleep."  It seems that nearly everyone has his own concerns over which he worries.  We worry about the weather, about taxes, about the world situation and about government.  We worry about the spread of global terrorism.  Single folks worry about getting married, and a lot of married folks that I know worry about staying that way.

G. K. Chesterton told the story of a yachtsman who set sail from England, determined to reach an exotic South Sea island. But after many stormy days at sea, he sighted land. Beaching his boat, he ventured inland to find a pagan temple before him. In the spirit of Indiana Jones, he was determined to claim it for England so he scaled the walls and bravely planted the Union Jack at its pinnacle, only to discover that what he had scaled was the Brighton Pavilion on England's south coast. He thought he had sailed in a straight line, but in the storm he had been blown off course and had actually gone in a circle without knowing it. As David Wells put it, "He imagined that he was the first in the land, but it turned out that he was the last."

Have you ever felt that you were stuck in an "in-between-time"?  Looking back over human history, the world has languished in the midst of pandemics, societal unrest, fires, droughts, floods, famines.  People have suffered in times of transition, leaving their old homes to seek new ones, sometimes trying to escape persecution and violence.  In times of war, no one knows what will end up being left of their personal worlds.  "In-between-times" are part of the human condition on this earth. Sometimes it can feel as if we are stuck in misery and uncertainty, unable to move forward through these present troubles.