“If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; 10.Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me."
Psalm 139 is filled with praise for God. The psalm begins: “O Lord, thou hast searched me, and known me. 2. Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off. 3. Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways.” There is no good or bad thing that we have done that God does not know. God is omniscient – all-knowing. We can take that as a warning, but more than that we can take it as a blessing. Thank God that He is omniscient and sovereign. The two verses under consideration here are a case in point. David rejoices in the fact that God is always present with him: “If I take the wing of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; even there shall thy hand lead me….” If David goes to the most remote parts of the earth, God is there. We should take comfort in God’s presence in our lives, and we should be grateful to Him for it. Realizing the presence of God in my life is both a joy and a challenge. It is a joy because I know that He is always with me and a challenge because I know that God knows everything that I do. He gives two promises based on the presence of God: “Even there thy hand shall lead me, and thy right hand shall hold thee.” We can depend on the hand of God to lead us. In fact, when we forget about this leadership, we go astray. I think that Abraham could go to Egypt during a famine out of the will of God because he neglected the leading hand of God. I think that Moses disobeyed God when he struck the rock that produced water instead of speaking to it as God told him to do because he neglected the leading hand of God. I think that Peter denied the Lord Jesus Christ because He neglected the leading hand of God. It is important that we remember God’s leadership when we make decisions in life. Please don’t imagine that I am telling you that I have always followed God’s leadership in my life. I know how wrong we can go when we neglect His leadership. Thank God for His discipline that reminds us of His leadership. We can depend on God’s right hand to hold us. This is illustrated for us in the New Testament when Peter asked Jesus to let him walk on the water to Him. Jesus told Peter to come on to Him. Peter began to walk on water, but when he noticed the wind and waves, and thought about what he was doing, Peter’s faith faltered and he began to sink. The beautiful picture here is that when Peter called out, “Lord save me,” Jesus reached out His hand and held Peter up. What a picture that is of us as we go through all of the problems and foibles of life, when we look at the wind and waves instead of to Jesus. Isn’t it amazing that He keeps holding us through it all? God will lead and hold you. Let Him do it!. Bro. Joe
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“But I rejoiced in the Lord greatly: that now at the last your care of me has flourished again: wherein you were also careful, but you lacked opportunity. 11. Not that I speak in respect of want: for I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content.”
Paul had received a love offering from the Philippian Church and offered his joy at receiving the gift. But he wanted them to know that his contentment was not derived from money and things. Paul was content no matter what his circumstances. This was not a curt reply to the Philippian Church; rather, it was a statement of faith. The dictionary definition of contentment is “sufficiency in oneself.” Paul turned that definition on its head, for his contentment was not in himself and his material well-being. His contentment was in his faith relationship with Christ. Based on Paul’s basis of contentment, I want to make the following reflections on Christian contentment. Christian contentment is not the result a problem-free life. Paul’s life is a good example, for he encountered all sorts of problems in his missionary encounters in Acts. In fact, in his first visit to Philippi, Paul was thrown in jail. (Read about it in Acts 16.) We need to be cognizant of our reactions to our own problems. Christian contentment depends on our faith in Jesus Christ. We garner strength from the faith that we have in Christ. This is what Paul pointed out in Philippians 4:13: “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” This is not just a slogan. It is a statement of fact in the Christian faith. Paul pointed out in Philippians 4::12 that he knew how to do with little and with a lot because he was strengthened through Christ. I know that this text made me stop and think about the source of my contentment. I had to stop and pray and ask Christ to strengthen my faith in Him in order that I may derive my strength and contentment from Him. We just need to stop and think about the strength of our faith in Christ. Christian contentment comes from the consciousness of Christ’s presence in our lives. Hebrews 13:5 reminds of this: “Let not your conduct be without covetousness; and be content with such things as you have: for He has said, 'I will never leave you, nor forsake you'.” We are never without His presence in all of the circumstances of our lives. The writer of Hebrews added in 13:6: “So that we may boldly say, The Lord is my helper, and I will not fear what man shall do unto me.” We could also add that the Lord is our helper in whatever circumstances we might face. Make your own contentment a matter of prayer! Do it! Bro. Joe “Delight yourself also in the Lord; and He shall give you the desires of your heart.”
We go from not fretting, refraining from envy, to trusting the Lord. Now the psalm takes an unexpected turn. David tells us that we are to delight in the Lord. I chased the word “delight” down to its Hebrew root and discovered that it means the same thing in Hebrew that it does in English, it means to enjoy and to take pleasure in something or someone. (duh?) I had to ask myself if I really enjoy God. Have you ever really thought about enjoying God? As I thought about it, I remembered all of the times that I go to Him in prayer. I get up in the morning thinking of Him and talking to Him. When I am about to go to sleep at night, I talk to Him. Yes, I enjoy God. I am grateful for the opportunity to talk to Him whenever I want. I take pleasure in His presence in my life. I will admit that there are times when I don’t enjoy Him, and that is when I disappoint Him in some way. It is like when I knew that I had done something that would disappoint my mother. I knew that she would not stop loving me, but I sure did dread the idea is that what I did might have broken her heart, and the discipline that I knew would follow. But even the discipline of God reminds us that He loves us. Be honest: Do you really enjoy the Lord? I also had to ask myself if I really take pleasure in God? The answer is a resounding YES. I take pleasure in the Lord, because He is my constant companion and friend. Jesus promised to never leave us. He has given us His Spirit to be with us all of the time. I take pleasure in the fellowship that I have with God on a daily basis. I take pleasure in worshiping Him and thanking Him for all that He has done, is doing, and will continue to do as long as I live. After that, because of faith in Jesus Christ I enjoy His presence for all eternity. Yes I take pleasure in God. He has done the same thing for you that He has done for me. Take pleasure in the fellowship that you can have with Him on a daily basis. You do not take pleasure in God if you think of Him only on Sunday. You certainly do not take pleasure in Him if you have not trusted Jesus Christ as your Savior. Based on all that I have written can you say that you delight in God? The promise is that when we delight ourselves in God, He will give us the desires of our heart. This does not mean that He will give us all we want. What it does mean is that when He is our delight the desires of our heart have to do with our relationship with Him. If that disappoints and bores you, you are not delighting in the Lord. Think about it. Bro. Joe “In the multitude of my anxieties within me, Your comfort delights my soul.” NKJV
Like all of us, the psalmist had to deal with anxiety. But anxiety was not a way of life with him, because he had the comfort of the Lord to allay his anxieties. When I read that, I began to think about my own anxieties and how I have been able to deal with them. I decided that the singular “comfort” could be plural “comforts” in my case. I want to share two of these comforts with you in the hope that they will help you with your own anxieties. The first comfort is faith. I do not mean faith in myself or in any manmade resource. I mean faith in Jesus Christ – period. Ephesians 2:8 tells us that we are “saved by grace through faith.” This saving faith, however, is not meant to just take us to heaven when we die; it is also a resource for living on this earth. One of the sure things of living on this earth is anxiety. Who could read or hear the news today and not be anxious. Every day we are bombarded with negative things about our world. These things are real and not imaginary. Muslims really do cut off people’s heads. China does have a powerful army. Russia is not the friend that we hoped she would be after the fall of communism. People are really being killed in Syria for the sake of a corrupt regime. Children are really abducted and killed by perverts. (Have I made you anxious enough?J) These are just a few examples of what awaits us each day in the news. On top of all of that are the many things that we have to deal with in our own lives. I can’t explain how faith in Jesus comforts me in the midst of all of this; I just know that it does. I take Jesus at His promise that if I come to Him, He will give me rest. He promises me that if I trust Him, He will comfort me. E. Stanley Jones wrote: “Worries and anxiety are sand in the machinery of life; faith is the oil.” How true. Believe today that you can trust Jesus in all of life. The second comfort is forgiveness. A lot of our anxiety is caused by guilt, because we know that we have done wrong from time to time. We have not loved people as we should. We have not treated people as fairly as we should. We have given in to corrupt thoughts that we knew could not have come from God. In order to overcome this guilt, we just need to know that our God is a forgiving God. He has promised in 1 John 1:9 that if “we will confess our sins, He will be faithful and just to forgive us our sins.” You don’t have to “feel” forgiven; you can know that you are forgiven because you take God at His word. If He has promised to forgive you, He will forgive you! You might say: “But you don’t know what I’ve done.” But I do know what David did when he committed adultery with Bathsheba, and he was forgiven. I do know that Simon Peter denied Him, but Jesus forgave him. I do know that He has forgiven me many times, and will do so in the future. I ask you today to embrace the freedom from anxiety that comes with being forgiven by a forgiving and loving God. You will find that He has waited lovingly for you to seek His forgiveness. Give faith and forgiveness and try in your own life. (I do not mean to come across as glib and "know it all" in this article. I have just shared what Christ has done in my life and can do in your life.) They are as available to you as they are to me. Jesus will forgive you and save you if you will come to Him by faith. Jesus will forgive you and sustain you in your faith when you have done wrong in spite of it. Jesus wants to deliver you from the anxieties of this life. Let Him do it through faith in Him and forgiveness by Him. Do it! Bro. Joe “Cast your burden on the Lord, and He will sustain you; He shall never permit the righteous to be moved.” "Wrath is cruel, and anger is outrageous, but who is able to stand before envy?”
I’m sure that all of us have been guilty of envy for one reason or another. We intrinsically know that it is a sin because of the way it makes us feel when we surrender to it. We will all have to admit that envious moments are not among the highlights of our lives. Proverbs 27:4 records that envy is worse than cruelty or anger. Since we are prone to envy, we need to discover its sources to keep it from taking over our lives. Envy, like everything else, is born in our hearts; therefore we need to keep it out of our hearts.. Envy is born in a selfish heart. When we envy someone else, we are not thinking about them, but about ourselves. When we envy people we fail to rejoice with them in their successes. We selfishly wish that their success was ours. We need to guard our hearts against failing to rejoice with others. Envy is born in an unloving heart. Envy and Christian love cannot live comfortably together in our hearts. We do not envy people that we really love. For example, if one of our children, or grandchildren, does something we obviously do not envy them. However, if someone else’s child does something great we, unfortunately, might envy them. Why? We love our own children and grandchildren, but we might love our neighbor’s children and grandchildren enough not to envy them. If we will see envy as a lack of love, we will, or should, want to do something about it. Jesus said that people would know that we are Christians by the love that we have for each other. When envy enters the picture, people cannot see Christ in us. The next time envy rises up in your heart and mind ask yourself if you love the one that you envy. Envy is born in a prideful and strife-filled heart. I put envy and strife/troublemaking together because, according to the Bible, they belong together. Proverbs 13:10a: “Only by envy cometh contention….” 1Timothy 6:4-5: “He is proud knowing nothing but doting about questions and strifes by words, whereof cometh envy, strife, railings, evil surmising, perverse disputing of men of corrupt minds….” James 3:16: “For where envying and strife is, there is confusion and every evil work.” The Bible definitely connects envy, pride and strife. We need to see that connection in our own hearts. A prideful heart is intrinsically given to envy. It cannot help but envy. We need to ask ourselves if we have prideful hearts. Look into your heart and root out every vestige of false pride Envy is born in a bitter heart. James 3:14: “But if you have bitter envying and strife in your hearts, glory not and lie against the truth." Hebrews 12:15: “Looking diligently lest a man fail of the grace of God, lest any root of bitterness spring up and trouble you, and thereby many be defiled.” We need to guard our hearts against roots of bitterness. Only sincere, honest prayer can keep bitterness from taking root in our hearts. Bitterness causes all kinds of defilement, and chief among them is envy. Frankly, we are slow to recognize bitterness in our own hearts. We cannot confess what we will not admit. We might feel justified in our bitterness. We might say: “If you knew that I person like I do, you would be bitter too.” Or we might say: “If you had to endure what I had to endure, you would be bitter too.” As long as we excuse bitterness, it will do its wicked work in our lives. Check your own heart for envy, and if you discover it confess, repent and go on with your life. Bro. Joe “The Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ” 2 Corinthians 1:2 “And Judah said, the strength of the bearers of burdens is decayed, and there is much rubbish; so that we are not able to build the wall.” “When I applied my mind to know wisdom and to observe man’s labor on earth – his eyes not seeing sleep day or night – 17. Then I saw all that God has done. No one can comprehend what goes on under the sun. Despite all his efforts to search it out, man cannot discern its meaning. Even if a wise man claims he knows, he cannot really comprehend it. 9:1: So I reflected on all this and concluded that the righteous and the wise and what they do are in God’s hands, but no man knows whether love or hate awaits him…”
We have a general idea of what a riddle is, but I want to give the definition to give clear direction to what I think our text means. It means a puzzling fact, thing or person. A riddle is something that we have to figure out the meaning of, and quite often we cannot decipher its meaning. I think that the Book of Job shows us the nature of a riddle. The fact is that Job was puzzled as to why all of the bad things that happened to him happened at all, because he lived a good life. Do you realize that Job’s riddle was never solved? He never knew what had occurred between God and Satan that caused all of his problems. In our text, Solomon was dealing with the riddles of life that keep us awake at night: “his eyes not seeing sleep day or night.” We can’t solve all of the riddles of life because we are not smart enough to figure them out. There is too much that we would have to know, for example, why bad things happen to good people. God gave us brains so that we can think, but He did not give us infallible minds. Whenever things occur like the devastating tornadoes and hurricanes that continually destroy life and property there is no “why” answer. All of this being true, what can do with the riddles of life? We can accept that they happen, and when they happen we can pray for those whose lives have been devastated, and many people volunteer to help the people rebuild. In other words, we can pray and minister to people when the unthinkable happens in their lives. The worst thing that we can do is to shake our fists at God for allowing such things. We forget that we live in a fallen world. When Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden of Eden, our perfectly safe world was no more. I have found in my prayers over the riddles of my life that there is no need for me to ask God “Why?” He doesn’t have to explain things to me. We can trust that God knows what has happened and is active in dealing with the lives of those who have been devastated. Many times people come out of devastating things that happen in their lives with a stronger belief in God, because they sought His presence in the crisis. It is understandable that people would be upset over devastating things that happen to them, but they need to understand that bitterness will not make the situation better. We just need to trust that God will take us through the hard times as He does through the easy times. Trusting God is the answer. It does not answer the riddle, but it allows us to sleep at night and know that things will get better. In 9:1 Solomon wrote: “So I reflected on all this and concluded that the righteous and wise and what they do are in God’s hands, but no man knows whether love or hate awaits him…” I interpret this to mean that those who are righteous and wise turn things over to God and accept the outcome – whatever it is. It is very comforting to know that all things – good and bad – that happen in our lives are not riddles to God, and that we can put ourselves in His hands and He will see us through. I would be remiss if I did not remind you of Romans 8:28: "And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to His purpose." I do not mean that God causes all of the puzzling things, merely that He is aware of them and is ministering to us in the process – calling us to Himself. Bro. Joe “These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full.”
When I was little boy, we used to sing a chorus at the Smithville Baptist Church called “Joy Down in My Heart.” It went like this: “I’ve got the joy, joy, joy down in my heart, down in my heart, down in my heart, I’ve got the joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart, down in my heart to stay…” (If you have heard it, you are probably humming the tune as you read the words.) There were other verses, but it is this first verse that always comes up in my memory. One of my favorite themes as a minister has been about joy. I try to make it a theme of my daily life and not just a theme for preaching or writing. If I tried to convince you that I am joyful all of the time, you would know that I was lying. But one thing that I learned from John 15:11 that has helped me to know that though I am not always joyful, I always have joy. Jesus has placed His joy in my heart, “down in my heart to stay.” It is not always easy to explain what this means, because we confuse joy with happiness. They are not the same. A nice lady once asked me if I smiled all of the time. My answer to her was, “Heavens no. If I smiled all of the time, I would be lying a good part of the time.” If I smiled all of the time I would be happy all of the time. I am definitely not happy all of the time, and I doubt that anybody is. You see, happiness is a temporary thing. For example, your team wins the game and you are extremely happy, but the next week they lose and you are not happy. When good things happen to us, or to our children and grandchildren, we are happy, but when bad things happen we are not happy. Happiness just comes and goes, but joy we have always as a gift of Jesus. What does this eternal joy mean to us? It means that whatever we face in this life, we can rejoice in the fact that Jesus is in control. When I think of this, I think of an incident that happened when I was a little boy. We were singing the invitation hymn at a revival service at the Smithville Baptist Church. The preacher asked everybody who knew that they were saved and that they would go to heaven if they died that night to raise their hands. I looked up and my mama had raised her hand. I remember thinking, “I wonder how she knows that.” Well, I know personally now, but when mama died on September 9, 2010, I remembered that. I knew that she was a Christian and that her hope was in Jesus. Since her death, I often think of that incident and the joy of Jesus rises up in my heart. Mama is in heaven. I am not happy that she is no longer with us, but the joy of Jesus in me reminds that I will see her again in heaven. It means that when we are at the low points of life, we are not without joy. This came to me when I went through chemo-therapy in 2011 for lymphoma, and had colon surgery to remove a cancer in 2012. You know that I would be lying if I said to you that I was happy when I was skinny, undernourished, n and bald-headed at one point and in pain from surgery at another point. But I can tell you that I was fully aware of the presence of Jesus during all of this time. I don’t think that I have ever felt His love so fully and completely as I did during those times. I am not lying when I tell you that His joy came to my rescue and kept me from asking Him why, or complaining because of what I was going through, or blaming Him for letting this happen to me. Prayer came alive to me as never before, and the Bible spoke profoundly to my heart as never before. It wasn’t a happy experience, but it was an experience that brought forth the joy of Jesus that comforts me even to this day. I sincerely hope that you can sing, “I’ve got the joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart to stay….” Bro. Joe |
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