Year: 2015

Those of us who follow Jesus possess a kind of dual citizenship. We live in an external kingdom of family and cities and nationhood, while at the same time belonging to the kingdom of God. In his command, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s,” Jesus underscored the fundamental tension that can result. For the early Christians, loyalty to God’s kingdom sometimes meant a fatal clash with Caesar’s visible kingdom. Historian Will Durant, in The Story of Civilization, concludes:
      “There is no greater drama in human record than the sight of a few Christians, scorned and oppressed by a succession of emperors, bearing all trials with a fierce tenacity, multiplying quietly, building order while their enemies generated chaos, fighting the sword with the Word, brutality with hope, and at last defeating the strongest state that history has known. Caesar and Christ had met in the arena, and Christ had won.”
–Philip Yancey

This is important for us to consider and to remember as we worry about the state of our own nation. We are to bear our own trials with fierce tenacity as we quietly multiply while fighting the chaos of our own nation with the Word of God. If we will do so faithfully, we will find that Christ can be triumphant in our nation again, just as He was in Rome.

God — eternal, incomprehensible, and infinitely powerful — does great and inscrutable things in heaven and on earth, and there is no searching into His marvelous works. If all the works of God were such that human reason could easily grasp them, they would not be called wonderful or beyond the power of words to tell.
–Thomas à Kempis

Along with à Kempis, I am glad that God is beyond my understanding. If I could understand everything about God, then what kind of God would He be? Pretty small. So I’m extremely glad that God is not small, nor able for me to fully comprehend. The things I need to comprehend about God, He has revealed to us in His Word. That means that I need to continue studying the Bible so that I can continue increasing my comprehension of how great He is.

Have you taken time to read God’s Word today and grow in your comprehension of the fully incomprehensible God?

If we are not willing to wake up in the morning and die to ourselves, perhaps we should ask ourselves whether or not we are really following Jesus.
–Donald Miller

Self dies hard.
However, it is the requirement of all followers of Jesus:
“If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross daily and follow Me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake, he is the one who will save it.”
–Jesus (Luke 9:23-24)

Have you died to self today so that you can live for Him – with His goals, for His plans, speaking His words, for His kingdom to increase?

People who are crucified with Christ have three distinct marks:
1. they are facing only one direction,
2. they can never turn back, and
3. they no longer have plans of their own.
–A. W. Tozer

Do you have all three of these characteristics?
Are you facing toward God?
Have you been transformed by Him such that you could never reject Him?
Have you given up all of your own plans so that you could embrace all of His?

In a discussion about prayer…
Poverty-stricken as the church is today in many things, she is the most stricken here, in the place of prayer.

Failing here, we fail everywhere.
–Leonard Ravenhill

Will you spend significant time in prayer at any point during this week? during this day?

Maybe you could even start right now by praying that God would increase your passion for prayer.