Minute Devotionals
BY CAMI TAPLEY
A Personal Take On the Beatitudes
Devotional Bits
Anne & Ruby
Non-Fiction
What Are We Preaching?
Whenever we make denominationalism, culture, semantics, or personality bones of contention in sharing the gospel, we exalt humanism, not Christ. In 1 Cor. 1:23, Paul states, “…we preach Christ crucified, to Jews a stumbling block, and to Gentiles foolishness.” Our preaching today is to have the same aim as Paul’s. The Jews represent the religious thinking that prevents people from entering into an obedient love relationship with Jesus Christ, and the Gentiles represent the worldly thinking that prevents people from accepting the wisdom of God for their own personal lives. Paul countered both these problems with the simple, powerful message of the cross. Jesus said, “If I be lifted up from the earth, I will draw all men to Myself.” And He was lifted up; He was lifted up on the cross so “that whoever believes may in Him have eternal life.” That is the whole gospel; anything more or less exalts something other than the gospel. (John 12:32, John 3:15)
Popularity vs. Posterity
It cannot be overstated that what matters most is what our Lord thinks of us. After this, we should look at the lives God has given us to affect with a reverent understanding of how important one life is to Him. Every one of us has a few very important relationships God has put into our lives to make an impact on for eternity. Many people will come into and go out of our lives, and the Lord will use us to plant seeds of righteousness, but the end result will be the responsibility of the Holy Spirit, not ours. Your responsibility and mine can be related to what God charged the children of Israel with as He divided the tribe’s responsibilities into whatever was “within their gate.” Whatever or whoever is in your gate or in mine is a mystery of Providence’s choosing. We minister by the grace of God. A deferential awe and gratitude for what we’ve been given replaces the selfish need for worldly recognition as we do the duty that lies nearest. It is then natural to share this love with those “in our gate.”
Confidence In Him, Not In Ourselves
Humiliation is bread and butter to a disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ, but to anyone who has their thoughts cut out in the pattern of the world, it is poison. It is an old saying, “Pride is the original sin.” In renovation a great stripping away is necessary to acquire newness, and a real ugliness is present for a time in this process when everything is dirty, broken down and chaotic. To stop at this part of the process is a shame; it prevents the new from coming in. If humiliation means that we own up to the mess when it is a mess so that the work can continue, so be it. This is the disciple’s point of view. However, if we become morbidly dismayed by the ugliness when we see it, there will be no end of delays to the regeneration process; pride will deceive a heart into a state of paralysis. Ironically, the more wrong we are in a worldly mindset, the more unwilling we are to be forgiven. Humility frees us to have right relationship with God and others, i.e., to “get it right next time.” 1 Thessalonians 5:23,24
Ministry, or Self-Fulfillment?
If we only minister to those whom we enjoy the company of with the tools we find most personally fulfilling, what is our definition of ministry? Few of us will be literal martyrs, in other words, lose our physical being for sake of the Gospel. Most of us will bear, instead, the responsibility of being “living sacrifices.” This means we submit how, where, when, and to whom we will be a ministry to God. God’s ways are not our ways, they’re best. Often we choose a relationship based on how pleasant we believe it will be, or a task for how capable we think we are to perform it. How many relationships chosen this way, and how many tasks taken on with this in mind leave us empty after they fail to fulfill the deeper need of the heart? The One Who made the human heart is the only One Who can fulfill it. Matthew 10:39
Finding the Meaning
FRODO
How do you pick up the threads of an old
life? How do you go on, when in your heart
you begin to understand. There is no going
back. There are some things that time
cannot mend. Some hurts that go too deep.
That have taken hold.
There is something to these lines that Tolkien wrote, something true—not hopeless, not too sad to take in and believe, but true. From February 18th’s My Utmost For His Highest, by Oswald Chambers: “Sleep on now, that opportunity is lost for ever, you cannot alter it, but arise and go to the next thing.” No one can escape disappointment in this life, but it is another thing to enter into the blackest part of it, continue one’s journey in the midst of it, and come through. It means a death to Self. When something once so alive in you—something you felt just had to be—doesn’t work out, not in the way you felt it should, you realize you must let go, or, begin to lose your very soul bit by bit from that moment on. Letting go is a sweet sadness—and then, there’s freedom; a freedom you couldn’t imagine while filled with so much desire. And then, then, you can begin to receive the meaning, which is the real heart’s cry of every human soul: truth of purpose. Jesus said, “I am the Truth.” Trust it to Him. Romans 8:24
A Time For Everything
Time wasted is time lost. There is a time to search, and a time to keep—but if we do neither when it is time, can something be found if it has never been looked for, or can something be kept after it has already been thrown away? God has equipped the heart of man to be the gage for what is the appropriate time for all things. Ignoring our hearts will mean opportunities lost. No one can recover their youth when they are old, and no one who calls upon the name of the Lord will be unheard. God is a God of restoration. He will forgive actions of ignorant or willful haste, and He will set errant and aimless feet upon level, straight pathways. The past is gone, and the future is God’s domain alone—the truth of real hope—so the present is ours to squander or to live by faith in. Make “today” one that isn’t bitter to recall when it becomes “yesterday.”
Shifting Dreams, Steadfast Faith
Everything in life starts one way, and then develops into another. The process of growth regarding our purpose should grow and change as our human lives do. The embryo is unrecognizable as the initial manifestation of the fully developed human body, but at every stage, it is the same life, changing shape. So should our youthful revelations be. We call them “lofty” upon reminiscence, remembering feelings of passion and hope, and are saddened when we realize we don’t feel the same way after the years we have spent traveling through life. Our purpose hasn’t diminished; our perception of it hasn’t grown with us. It’s the argument for faith. Faith is the seed of all dreams. If our idea of what the seed will grow into is different than what is realized, we might despair, harden our hearts, and say that dreams don’t come true. However, if our seed of faith—at any stage—is handed over to the One Who created all things, we will see His working in our lives all along.
What We Need
It is good to have the faculty of common sense, which tells us to get up in the morning, to eat when necessary, and to do our work thoroughly. Yet everyone knows it isn’t enough to breathe, to eat, and to work; we need fulfillment. If fulfillment came by our wits, we wouldn’t need faith, and faith means waiting. No amount of brains or muscle can achieve fulfillment, and some people would rather forgo it than admit that they can’t make it happen, or worse, have to wait for it. If we know something, we believe it, and if we believe it, we hold tightly to it. Whatever we don’t know has no affect on us. Once we know something, we can be broken by it for the good or for the bad. We are made strong if we believe what we know without seeing it first, but are greatly defeated when we refuse to hang onto anything our common sense can’t accept. “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Hebrews 11:1
A Personal Question
It takes more effort not to believe than to believe, just as it takes more muscles to frown than it does to smile. We don’t wake up in the morning and consciously rehearse in our minds, ” I will not keep my eyes closed”; when we waken, it is natural to open our eyes. “I will keep my eyes closed” is the more difficult thing. This is how many people are in regard to faith. Our hearts are wired to believe, but how many rehearse daily, “I will not believe”? Actually, probably not many, because it is more subtle assertions such as, “It can’t be true…It isn’t practical…It isn’t for me…” God is so patient with us. He has put into each one of us everything we need to believe, and is standing ready, always, to meet us at every point of our need. What will we answer to Jesus’ question, “When the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth?” Have we overlooked something or someone the Lord has sent into our lives to ask us this question again?
Wholly the Lord’s
Billy Graham once said, “God is more concerned with winning all of me than with me winning all the world.” There are new egos born every generation. If we are to escape being ignorant of the fact that what has taken down a previous generation will take us down, we must be truly and humbly born again. Regeneration will never be complete in us if little bits of personal accountability to God are substituted for good works. If we look at anything good we do as a bigger part of a pie in which our uncommitted areas are only a small slice, the trap of relativity will keep us from experiencing the truth of Christ: freedom from sin. Difficult circumstances, heredity, or the stage of life we are in are worn excuses for the failure to completely relinquish something that is keeping us from being wholly the Lord’s. We can say that we haven’t fully understood, but that excuse will only take us so far. If every expression of faith should cease to find an arena, every person who ever claimed to be a Christian were to betray us, every feeling of inspiration were to leave and never grace us again, the reality of God would be staring us in the face. (Romans 1:19,20) Love—the cross—is power and understanding enough for anyone to know God, entirely. “Come unto Jesus.”
Intercessory Feelings
As disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ, we know that our feelings are not to rule us, but do we understand what part they play, as our lives become the will of the Lord? Whenever we are burdened with feelings that we either cannot, or can only roughly connect with something we are going through, we need to cut the introspection short. If we submit to the natural instinct to over-analyze the origin of the feelings, we will miss the opportunity to intercede. Apart from the fact that Christians are not perfect, these feelings should never be confused with things we have committed to the Lord. Rather, it should be a profound indication that it’s time to pray for someone else. The Holy Spirit will press upon our human emotions to lead us into specific intercessions. Sadness, lust, fears, anxiety or despair may fill our knowledge beyond our personal experience, and it is a burden-bearer’s job to take it to prayer. Sometimes we know for whom we are specifically interceding, sometimes we don’t. But Satan’s kingdom takes its hardest hits from intuitive, intercessory prayer.
Salvation Is
No one will leave this life without first being presented with the opportunity to know the reality of God’s eternal love and salvation through Jesus Christ. Some will learn of it from the Bible. Some will come to understand it by the witness of a family member, friend, or neighbor. Some will hear it from a stranger. Some will be inspired to receive it because of a line in a movie, a song, or a reading. Some will be awakened to it by a testimony from nature. A revelation of Jesus Christ will come to everyone at some time, in some way. Once it does, the decision of how to live afterward makes that soul forever accountable to the Living God. No man or institution of men can rightly judge what will become of the life that has had a revelation of Who Jesus is. Many will turn from the revelation of Jesus Christ to follow their own way. Others will follow a form of religion. A few will leave everything to follow Jesus. Our experiences from birth to the point of revelation can only be left at the cross of Christ by our single, willful decision. To be born again, we must ask. We know we have left everything when no one’s care or protection means life to us, but His. Matthew 7:14, Galatians 1:10-24
The Redemptive Cross
It is amazing how so many people approach the cross of Christ and then leave essentially unchanged, except for a heightened sense of personal morality. Jesus didn’t shed His blood so that we could feel better about ourselves or so that we could be more respected by others. He died so that we could receive His death; it is the only way to know real life. Apart from Him our lives are corrupted. In fact, all our efforts to be morally correct and charitably driven will find us empty-handed on Judgment Day. The only way we will ever bring honor to the sacrifice Christ made for us is to die to our own notion of what is good and right. “Many will say to Me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness.’” (Matt. 7:22,23) Paul told us in Galatians that the law of Christ is to bear one another’s burdens—yet how many people walk away from the redemptive cross puffed up with principles of moral refinement rather than emptied out vessels His love can flow through? The Church is Christ’s redeemed Bride, not a creation of men. The gifts of the Spirit are given in different and varied areas according to the wisdom of God, not according to what is impressive or needful in this world. If the meaning of success is that we all end up cookie-cutter clones of one another, and that a set of rules, not personal relationship, is the outcome of believing in God, than Phariseeism is alive and well; Wash the outside of your cup, never allow your principles to be altered, tithe your “mint and dill”—and crucify the Lord of Glory.