Tim Hetzner – Daily Devotions

Never Stop Learning – Part 2/2

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ (Mark 12:30)

Loving God with all your mind means managing your mind and making the most of it. It means loving God logically and creatively, intuitively, and thoughtfully. Albert Einstein, one of history’s greatest minds, said: ‘The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity.’ Downplaying his genius, Einstein said, ‘I have no special gift, I am only passionately curious.’

The Bible says, ‘The earth is the LORD’s, and all its fullness, the world and those who dwell therein’ (Psalm 24:1). So, your curiosity should be boundless and without limits. The Latin word for ‘education’ means ‘to draw out’ rather than ‘to cram in’. Most academic programmers focus on force-feeding knowledge rather than releasing curiosity. The result? We know some things – but we lose what’s most vital: the love of learning. In one study of a top university, the highest- scoring graduates were given their same final exams one month after graduation. All of them failed. When you attempt to cram the truth into your mind, it seldom gets past the short-term memory. And it assuredly doesn’t get into the soul. Sadly, sometimes that’s what happens in church each weekend. What’s the answer? Put God’s Word into practice every chance you get.

Prayer

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Never Stop Learning – Part 1/2

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ (Mark 12:30)

God has created us with the capacity to keep learning until the day we die, which is something we shouldn’t take for granted. The average brain weighs approximately three pounds, yet neurologists approximate that we have the ability to learn something new every second of every minute of every hour of every day for the next three hundred million years. Awesome, right? But it’s more than that. It’s an awesome obligation. Learning isn’t an indulgence; it’s a stewardship matter.

Jesus said, ‘You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ It’s impossible to determine the percentage of our minds we use, but all of us have untapped potential. Your imagination is capable of considerably more than you can dream. Yet somewhere along the way, most of us stop living out of imagination and start living out of memory. We stop designing the future and start copying the past. And that is the day we cease living and begin dying. Why? Because we stop educating ourselves.

Loving God with all your mind requires maximizing your mind by learning as much as possible about as much as possible. The true litmus test of spiritual maturity isn’t the quantity you know. It’s knowing the quantity you don’t know. It’s reconciling yourself with the reality that God is not an object of comprehension as much as He is a source of wonder. And that sacred sense of wonder ignites a holy curiosity to keep learning more about the Creator and His creation.

Prayer

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God and Your Work – Part 3/3

“See, I have chosen Bezalel son of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah.” (Exodus 31:2)

The first person in the Bible who was said to be ‘filled with the Spirit of God’ was Bezalel. And if his name doesn’t ring a bell, it’s because he wasn’t a prophet, priest, king, or apostle. He was a craftsman, skilled in design. He had an eye for color and a flair for management, and when it came time for building the Tabernacle, he oversaw the job. Here is what God said about him: ‘I have chosen Bezalel…and…filled him with the Spirit of God, with wisdom, with understanding, with knowledge and with all kinds of skills – to make artistic designs for work in gold, silver and bronze, to cut and set stones, to work in wood, and to engage in all kinds of crafts’ (Exodus 31:2-5).

Imagine being Bezalel. From your youth, you loved to work with your hands. You don’t know God is involved in this – but He is! He actually placed these desires within you. When you’re working, the joy you feel is actually the presence of God. You have certain strengths; you were born with them. They will always be your strengths, and you delight in them. Wonderful things happen when you discover those strengths, put them to use, and focus on improving them.

Trying to develop in an area where God hasn’t gifted you is like trying to instruct a rabbit to swim or a snail to run. When you’re in your God-given slot, working with your God-given strengths, you’re at your best. When that happens, you are blessed, and so is everybody around you. The point is, in God’s plan, Bezalel was every bit as important as Moses. So, take heart; what you do matters!

Prayer

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God and Your Work – Part 2/3

“Now it is required that those who have been given a trust must prove faithful.” (1 Corinthians 4:2)

Most adults spend about half their waking lives at work. Your work is a huge part of God’s plan for your life. He designed a specific vocation just for you in which you should find personal fulfillment, meet the needs of your family, and help to perpetuate His purposes in the earth. The fourth commandment covers all seven days of the week, not just the Sabbath. ‘Six days you shall labor and do all your work…for in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth’ (Exodus 20:9,11).

Sometimes you hear sermons designed to make you feel guilty about not keeping the Sabbath, but have you ever heard a sermon designed to make you feel guilty about not honoring the six-day workweek? The point is that just as God made and loves the Sabbath, He also made and loves work. The Bible says, ‘The kingdom of God is in your midst’ (Luke 17:21). Whether you’re a farmer, butcher, baker, or candlestick maker, you’re required to demonstrate integrity in the workplace. It’s embarrassing when nonbelievers say, ‘I’ll never do business with a Christian again.’

The Bible says, ‘O LORD…how excellent is thy name in all the earth!’ (Psalm 8:1). You should strive to be excellent in your work. Lateness, clock-watching, messing around, water cooler gossip, flirting, speaking evil about your boss – these things should have no place in your life. The Bible says, ‘It is required that those who have been given a trust must prove faithful.’ You should go to work praying, ‘Lord, today I want to do a good job and bring credit to Your name.’

Prayer

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God and Your Work – Part 1/3

“Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might. (Ecclesiastes 9:10)

In the Bible, you will notice that everybody works! And most of its heroes had secular vocations. Isaac developed land, Jacob was a farmer, Joseph served God best by staying in his well-paying government job rather than starting a non-profit, faith-based organization to do charity work. Daniel was an immigrant who attended Babylon’s version of Oxford and grew to be prime minister. Lydia was a profitable businesswoman in textiles.

Conceivably the ultimate expression of how much God values work is Jesus the carpenter. More than three-quarters of His life, He occupied Himself in the building profession, creating benches and tables, and was probably engaged in construction. The word we translate as ‘carpenter’ comes from the Greek word tektón, from which we get our word technology, and would contain the capability to do stone or masonry work. The Bible was penned by workers, about workers, and for workers. Work was God’s idea. ‘The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it’ (Genesis 2:15). The first man, Adam, was a landscaper.

By identifying what you have been called to do in life and giving yourself fully to it, you are as ‘ordained’ as any pastor who stands in a pulpit. It’s a pity we use the word secular when it comes to any kind of work other than church work because God doesn’t see it that way. All honest work earns His smile of approval. When it comes to work, the thing He requires from you is wrapped up in these words: ‘Whatever you do, do well.’

Prayer

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You Are under God’s Protection

“Whoever dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty.” (Psalm 91:1)

What is ‘the shadow of the Almighty’ ? In the wilderness where Israel wandered for forty years, temperatures could get up to 120 or 130 degrees. There was no shade except what was provided by the tents in which the people lived. So they understood this powerful metaphor, ‘under the shadow of the Almighty’.

If you were lost in the desert the children of Israel were required by the law of hospitality to satisfy your need for food, water, protection from an enemy, and shade from the blistering sun. It worked like this: first, you had to find out the chief shepherd’s name. Then you would take hold of the cord on his tent and cry out for help. When you did that, the law of hospitality required him to take you into the safety of his tent. Indeed, that same law said he had to protect you with his very life. Are you getting the idea?

God’s name, El Shaddai, describes two wonderful aspects of His character. ‘El’ speaks of His power and strength. ‘Shaddai’ literally means ‘strong-breasted-one’, which refers to the gentleness of a nursing mother. Some days you have to go to God for the strength needed to withstand the enemy’s attack; other days you just need to go to Him and let Him hold you in His arms and comfort you. The poet wrote, ‘Let me no more my comfort draw, from my frail grasp on Thee; in this alone rejoice with awe – Thy mighty grasp of me.’ When things get too ‘hot’ for you, run to ‘the shadow of the Almighty’.

Prayer

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God’s First Commission to Us

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” (Genesis 1:28)

The first thing God told Adam and Eve to do was ‘fill the earth and govern it’. Because Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden of Eden doesn’t mean they were limited to the Garden of Eden. God told them to ‘fill the earth and govern it’. Stop and think about it. God was inviting Adam and Eve to explore. Everything outside Eden was uncharted territory. They could travel 24,759 miles in any direction and never see the same landscape twice. There were 196,949,970 square miles of virgin territory to explore.

One way we glorify God is by exploring and educating ourselves about everything He has created. One author explains: ‘The astronomer who charts the stars, the geneticist who maps the human genome, the researcher who seeks a cure for Parkinson’s disease, the oceanographer who explores the barrier reef, the ornithologist who studies and preserves rare bird species, the physicist who tries to catch quarks, the chemist who charts molecular structures, and the theologian who studies God have one thing in common. All of them are explorers. They are fulfilling the Genesis commission. And their exploration honors God if it’s done for the right reasons and results in the right response: to know Him and to worship Him.’

There will always be some scientists who arrive at atheistic conclusions. But rather than abandon science, we have been called to reclaim it. If God created everything, then everything carries His holy fingerprint. All truth is God’s truth. Abraham Kuyper said, ‘There is not one square inch of the entire creation about which Jesus Christ does not cry out, “This is mine! This belongs to me!”’

Prayer

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