A Time For Everything - Purity 845
Purity 845 09/24/2022
Good morning,
Today’s photo of a the sun over cornfields and woods
on the horizon just before setting comes to us from yours truly as I stopped
for a moment to capture its blazing glory while I accompanied my canine friend,
Harley, on our walk back to our countryside home yesterday afternoon.
I’m not sure what the weather was like in your neck
of the woods yesterday but in upstate New York a brisk chill was in the air
throughout the day that pointed to the undeniable fact that Autumn is here. While the sun was still shining the chill in
the air caused me to don my Carhartt hoody for all but a few moments of the day
and the seasonal turn to colder temperatures sent a shiver into my soul as my life
experience and, perhaps the enemy, whispered “Winter is coming.”
But first things first, even though there is
Christmas stuff in the stores already and its wise to see the changing signs of
the times and to be prepared, let’s slow it down a little so we can enjoy the
current season rather than fearing what will come.
While our direction as travellers on the path of
Christian Discipleship is always forward, the way we experience the fruit of
the Spirit of peace and joy is to not to be overly focused on the days ahead
and its uncertain destinations so much that we fail to enjoy the journey in the
here and now.
This morning’s Bible Study brought me to Ecclesiastes
chapter 3 and the text points to the fact that there is a time for everything,
that man is to enjoy his life and labors on the earth, but is to do so in the
fear of the Lord, knowing that our lives are finite and that the content of
them will be judged by the One who gave them to us. I was so moved by the wisdom of the text
that I am sharing it today because I know that the wisdom of the word of God is
the best thing I can share and I share it with the hope that it will encourage others
to seek the Lord’s presence, wisdom, and ways.
Ecclesiastes 3:1-22 (NKJV)
1 To everything there is
a season, A time for every purpose under heaven:
2 A time to be born, And a
time to die; A time to plant, And a time to pluck what is planted;
3 A time to kill, And a time
to heal; A time to break down, And a time to build up;
4 A time to weep, And a time
to laugh; A time to mourn, And a time to dance;
5 A time to cast away stones,
And a time to gather stones; A time to embrace, And a time to refrain from
embracing;
6 A time to gain, And a time
to lose; A time to keep, And a time to throw away;
7 A time to tear, And a time
to sew; A time to keep silence, And a time to speak;
8 A time to love, And a time
to hate; A time of war, And a time of peace.
9 What profit has the worker
from that in which he labors?
10 I have seen the God-given
task with which the sons of men are to be occupied.
11 He has made everything
beautiful in its time. Also He has put eternity in their hearts, except that no
one can find out the work that God does from beginning to end.
12 I know that nothing is
better for them than to rejoice, and to do good in their lives,
13 and also that every man
should eat and drink and enjoy the good of all his labor--it is the gift
of God.
14 I know that whatever God
does, It shall be forever. Nothing can be added to it, And nothing taken from
it. God does it, that men should fear before Him.
15 That which is has already
been, And what is to be has already been; And God requires an account of what
is past.
16 Moreover I saw under the
sun: In the place of judgment, Wickedness was there; And in
the place of righteousness, Iniquity was there.
17 I said in my heart, "God
shall judge the righteous and the wicked, For there is a time there for
every purpose and for every work."
18 I said in my heart,
"Concerning the condition of the sons of men, God tests them, that they
may see that they themselves are like animals."
19 For what happens to the
sons of men also happens to animals; one thing befalls them: as one dies, so
dies the other. Surely, they all have one breath; man has no advantage over
animals, for all is vanity.
20 All go to one place: all
are from the dust, and all return to dust.
21 Who knows the spirit of
the sons of men, which goes upward, and the spirit of the animal, which goes
down to the earth?
22 So I perceived that
nothing is better than that a man should rejoice in his own works, for
that is his heritage. For who can bring him to see what will happen
after him?
Well I am not as wise as Solomon, who wrote this, or
the Holy Spirit, who inspired it. But I have the answer!
Who knows that the spirit of the sons of men go
upward? And who can bring us to see what will happen after we die?
The Lord knows that and the Lord can bring us to see
what will happen! And God gives us this
knowledge through His word and through the Holy Spirit revealing its truth to
us.
But the Lord was even more gracious to man by
sending His living Word, Jesus Christ to earth to tell us the truth and to make
a way to reconcile us to God.
We don’t have to go “down to the earth”, to Hell,
when we die because Christ came to earth to pay for our sins and when we place
our faith in Him, just like He ascended into Heaven after His resurrection, we
can be lifted up to a new life in God’s kingdom forever when we put our trust in
Jesus.
So enjoy your life this weekend, it is a gift of God.
But fear the Lord and respect His righteous judgement, by acknowledging His sovereignty
and by surrendering to His will for your life by making peace with Him through
faith in Jesus Christ and by pursuing His purposes for you.
Have a wonderful Autumn weekend and keep walking and
talking with God.
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Today’s Bible verse comes to us from “The NLT Bible
Promise Book for Men”.
This morning’s meditation verse are:
Psalm 46:1-2 (NLT2)
1 God is our refuge and
strength, always ready to help in times of trouble.
2 So we will not fear when
earthquakes come and the mountains crumble into the sea.
Today’s Bible verses assure us that
God is our refuge and strength and that we need not fear the calamities that we
will face on the earth because He is always ready to help us in times of
trouble.
As someone who has walked through the
fires of tribulations and trauma at various times in my 50 years of life, I can
attest that it is much better to have a relationship with the Lord though faith
in Jesus Christ in times of trouble rather than being all on your own.
Other Bible verses tell us that God
is close to the broken hearted and I know that is true as trauma breaks us out
of the normal conceptions of our world view of “how life is” and reveals to us
the harsh realities of life and death in times of loss. In that stark shock of
our world being torn apart by loss, God who is omnipresent is available to comfort
and to help us and we have a decision to make: will we come to Him and seek His
help or will we turn from Him in bitterness and anger?
I lost my infant son Holden, in March
of 2002, as our nation was still overcoming the national tragedy of 911, and
this personal loss ripped away the final shreds of an illusions I may have had
about our lives being “safe” or secure. These losses woke me up to “ice cold
world of life and death” but in the midst of my grief in the stark clarity of
my new view of the world I simultaneously felt all alone but also had the sense
that “I wasn’t alone”, that there was a presence with me that sought to comfort
me.
At the time, I think I thought that I
was just seeing the world with eyes wide open but in hindsight I know that the
feelings I had of how I was all alone but somehow wasn’t can easily be
explained as God being present in my broken heartedness and that He was
patiently sitting with me in my grief and would further reveal Himself to me
when the time was right and I had stopped being angry and running away from
Him.
Of course, I was very angry, and very
stubborn, and very rebellious, and purposely shut God out of my life by
abandoning all semblances of Christianity in my life, but after the darkest
days of my depression I sought meaning again, and even though I went in the
wrong direction, my search for truth was rewarded in an instant by God’s
grace.
The truth of the gospel was allowed
to come into my life by a seemingly chance encounter, as in the midst of my
confusion of following the philosophies of Buddhism, I happened upon a gospel
radio message and decide to mock it only to be brought to my knees in humble surrender the my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ when I understood that faith in
Him was all that was require to live.
So 8 years later (just put that
together this morning – 8’s are a significant number in my walk) , again in the
month of March (just put that together this morning), the Lord showed me that
He could be my refuge and strength and be my constant help in times of
trouble. I didn’t have to be alone
anymore. I didn’t have to keep Him at a distance anymore. And so that day in
March of 2010 I invited God, The Presence that I have known to be with me at
various times throughout my life, to save me through His Son, Jesus Christ.
SO let me encourage you, no matter
how the earth quakes or the mountains crumble into the sea, either literally or
figuratively, in your life The Lord can be your strength and refuge. He is
always ready to help us in times of trouble.
He may not stop the tragedies from happening,
but sometimes He will. But either way, He knows the end from the beginning and
He knows that even the traumas we suffer can be used for good to help us to grow
and to know Him and our place in His kingdom. So trust the Lord with your life
by putting your faith in Christ, and seek Him at all times for His strength, wisdom,
and love.
_____________________________________________
As always, I invite all to go to mt4christ.org where I
always share insights from prominent Christian theologians and counselors to
assist my brothers and sisters in Christ with their walk.
Today we continue sharing from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s
“Discipleship”, also known as “The Cost of Discipleship”
As always, I share this information for educational
purposes and encourage all to purchase Bonhoeffer’s books for your own
private study and to support his work. This resource is available on
many websites for less than $20.00.
Chapter Three
Simple
Obedience – continues
How is such a
reversal possible? What has happened that the word of Jesus has to endure this
game? That it is so vulnerable to the scorn of the world? Anywhere else in the
world where commands are given, the situation is clear. A father says to his
child: go to bed! The child knows exactly what to do. But a child drilled in
pseudotheology would have to argue thus: Father says go to bed. He means you
are tired; he does not want me to be tired. But I can also overcome my
tiredness by going to play. So, although father says go to bed, what he really
means is go play. With this kind of argumentation, a child with its father or a
citizen with the authorities would run into an unmistakable response, namely,
punishment. The situation is supposed to be different only with respect to
Jesus’ command. In that case simple obedience is supposed to be wrong, or even
to constitute disobedience. How is this possible?
It is possible,
because there is actually something quite right at the basis of this wrong
argumentation. Jesus’ command to the rich young man or his call into a situation
that enables faith really has only the one goal of calling a person to faith in
him, calling into his community. Nothing finally depends on any human deed at
all; instead, everything depends on faith in Jesus as the Son of God and the
mediator. Nothing finally depends on poverty or riches, marriage or the single
state, having or leaving a profession. Rather, everything depends on faith. To
this extent, we really are right that it is possible to believe in Christ while
we have wealth and possess the goods of this world, so that we have them as if
we did not have them. But this is a last possible form of Christian existence,
a possibility of living in the world, only in light of the serious expectation
that Christ would return in the immediate future. It is not the first and
simplest possibility. A paradoxical understanding of the commandments has a
Christian right to it, but it must never lead to the annulment of a simple
understanding of the commandments. Rather, it is justified and possible only
for those who have already taken simple obedience seriously at some point in
their lives, and so already stand in community with Jesus, in discipleship, in
expectation of the end. Understanding Jesus’ call paradoxically is the
infinitely more difficult possibility. In human terms it is an impossible
possibility, and because it is, it is always in extreme danger of being turned
over into its opposite and made into a comfortable excuse for fleeing from
concrete obedience. Anyone who does not know that it would be the infinitely
easier way to understand Jesus’ commandment simply and obey it literally—for
example, to actually give away one’s possessions at Jesus’ command instead of
keeping them—has no right to a paradoxical understanding of Jesus’ word. It is
therefore necessary always to include a literal understanding of Jesus’
commandment in every paradoxical interpretation.
Jesus’ concrete call
and simple obedience have their own irrevocable meaning. Jesus calls us into a
concrete situation in which we can believe in him. That is why he calls in such
a concrete way and wants to be so understood, because he knows that people will
become free for faith only in concrete obedience.
Wherever simple
obedience is fundamentally eliminated, there again the costly grace of Jesus’
call has become the cheap grace of self-justification. But this too constructs
a false law, which deafens people to the concrete call of Christ. This false
law is the law of the world, matched by an opposing law of grace. The world
here is not that world which has been won over by Christ and is daily to be won
over anew in his community. Rather, it is the world which has become a rigid,
inescapable law of principles. But in that case grace is also no longer the
gift of the living God, rescuing us from the world for obedience to Christ.
Rather, it becomes a general divine law, a divine principle, whose only use is
its application to special cases. The principle of struggle against the
“legalism” of simple obedience itself erects the most dangerous law of all, the
law of the world and the law of grace. The struggle based on principle against
legalism is itself the most legalistic attitude. It is overcome only by genuine
obedience to Jesus’ gracious call to follow him. The law is fulfilled and done
away with by Jesus himself for those who follow.[1]
---------------------------more
tomorrow------------------------
Join our “Victory over the Darkness”, “The Bondage
Breaker”, "Freedom in Christ" series of Discipleship Classes via the
mt4christ247 podcast!
at https://mt4christ247.podbean.com, You can also find it on Apple podcasts
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Email me at mt4christ247@gmail.com to receive the class materials, share your progress, and
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My wife, TammyLyn, also offers Christian
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Podbean (https://feed.podbean.com/tammalyn78/feed.xml)
[1]
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship,
ed. Martin Kuske et al., trans. Barbara Green and Reinhard Krauss, vol. 4,
Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003), 79–81.
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