The depth of God’s love (Matthew 27:46)

Today’s Readings: Matthew 27:46

About three in the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eli, Eli,[a] lema sabachthani?” (which means “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”).

How can I know God listens to my prayers? How can I know God meets me where I am? How can I have the assurance God can reach the depths of my sins when I know the things I’ve committed against Him and others? How can He ever forgive the things I’ve done?

We can look back at this verse in Matthew and understand the depths of God’s love for us. Jesus hung on the cross for about six hours on that day before the Sabbath. Usually it took longer for men to die under the cruel execution methods of crucifixion, but Jesus didn’t die at men’s hands. He gave up His life voluntarily. Remember He was God. He was eternal. Yes, Jesus was fully man, but He is also fully God.

This verse tells us, though, that the God-Man, Jesus, separated Himself from the triune Godhead long enough to become sin for us. He felt the full weight of the world’s sins upon His shoulders and felt the complete and utter aloneness that comes from the sin that separates us from a holy God. Jesus, by taking all the sin of all the world descended to the very deepest, darkest, depths of hell to pay the price for our sins. He knows the penalty, because He paid it. He went there for us.

How deep is His love? He plunged Himself deeper than anyone can go into the pit of hell so we don’t have to. He did that to liberate us. Three days later, He burst forth from the tomb that held Him proving that sin and hell and the grave had no hold on Him. He tasted death and overcame it. He overcame death for all of us. He overcame sin for all of us. He overcame hell for all of us.

God loved us enough to become man and separate Himself not only from His triune relationship, but to take on the sin of the world and enter the depths of hell for us. He cried from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”, as He assumed the sins of the world for us. He took them with Him to the place of eternal separation from God and endured that place of eternal punishment for three of our earthly days, thousands of years for an eternal timeless God. For the psalmist tells us a thousand years is as a day and a day as a thousand years to God, to whom time has no meaning in eternity.

So when we pray, we have the assurance God knows the depths of our depravity. He went there during those three days after the cross. He descended into the very depths of hell and knows how dark and deep sin can go. But it wasn’t too deep for Him to get Himself or us out of it. He overcame. We have the assurance nothing we do is so bad He can’t help us recover from it. He can bring us through it, if we accept His gift of love and follow Him through the paths He sets before us. Just follow Him.

Join me next time, won’t you?

Richard

Our mediator is perfect! (Hebrews 4:14-15)

Today’s Readings: Hebrews 4:14-15

Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has ascended into heaven, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin.

Almost every religion has temples or some edifice it uses as a place where priests or some specially designated person with special training intercedes with their gods for the rest of their community. Mankind for millennia felt they could not approach the gods because of the gap between us. A relationship between the superior gods and inferior man seemed an impossibility.

Even the Israelites demonstrate difficulty in communing with God when He invites them to do so. Remember their comments when God spoke from the mountain? “Moses, you speak to God for us. We’re afraid to talk with Him. We’re afraid he’ll kill us if we speak to Him!” Every religion faces the same fear of gods so powerful and us so weak. We cannot compete against God!

The difference between our God and the false gods of other religions, though, is our God invites us to speak with Him. Since Jesus ‘came and dwelled among us,’ He has intervened with God, the Father, on our behalf. He has served as mediator for us so that we can speak with God – personally. Not only that, He is God, Himself! So when we pray, we pray to God, whether to the Father, the Son, or the Holy Spirit. As a triune Godhead, they are all the same, one God, manifest in three persons.

But Jesus lived among us. He lived through every temptation we live through. Even though He is God, He wrapped Himself in human flesh to experience the frailties we face in our humanness. He felt every emotion we feel. He understood pain, sorrow, suffering. He knew joy, happiness, peace. He experienced, in complete human form, all the things we experience. Yet Jesus never sinned. He is the perfect mediator as both God and man.

When we pray, we talk to one who knows what our life is like. We talk to one who understands the temptations we face. We talk to one who listens and has felt the pain we feel, the agony we know, the sorrow that breaks our heart. We talk with one who has been there and knows life happens. He lived among us. He saw it all. And since He is God, He can do something about all those things. He has the answers.

Join me next time, won’t you?

Richard

The price for our prayer (Psalm 27:10)

Today’s Readings: Psalm 27:10

Though my father and mother forsake me,
the Lord will receive me.

I listen to the stories of some of the people who I counsel and it’s hard to keep from reacting with visible shock to their stories. When I hear about the kinds of treatment some receive at the hands of relatives, sometimes from parents, I’m appalled. Incest, rape, even selling children for sex to others. Alcohol and drugs used openly in the home (if you can call them homes). Adults who as children suffered through multiple divorces and wonder why their marriage is on the rocks.

Adults reeling from abandonment from parents, fathers, mothers, or both as small children or teens or even as adults, come to church and we talk about God as our Father. They have few earthly models to use to think about an ideal or perfect heavenly Father. Even the concept of a perfect Father eludes them and God as Father doesn’t mean much in a society with a divorce rate now above 50% and many fathers absent from their children.

I count my blessings often as I think about growing up in a Christian home. My father a pastor taught me the importance of devotions and prayer as I watched him sit in his chair with his Bible studying for his sermons many times. I think about my grandmother who ended every day in prayer in her room and started every day the same way. I think about my mother-in-law whose very-used Bible sits on the nightstand the bed for her daily use. The influences on my wife and I in our early years kept us faithful to our own devotions through the years as an important part of our personal discipleship.

Today’s verse may seem a little strange as one aimed for our experience with prayer. But It points to the blessing we receive because of Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross for us. Review Jesus’ prayers throughout the New Testament and you’ll find that in only one instance does He fail to address God as Father. That instance is when He hangs on the cross and takes our place receiving the full punishment for all our sins. He quotes the Psalmist in His prayer and says, “God, why have you forsaken me?”

As Jesus carries the burden of all our sin and becomes sin for us in those moments on the cross, God the Father turns His back and God, the Son, pays the penalty for us. He pays the price so He can intercede on our behalf and keep the promise that He will never leave us or forsake us. My wife and I were privileged to grow up in devout Christian families. Some, as mentioned earlier, grow up in homes far from Christ. Neither equates to being right before God, though. It has been said, “God has no grandchildren, only children.” We must accept Him personally, or not at all. Our parents, no matter how good or how bad, make our decisions about God for us.

Timothy Keller says, “Prayer turns our theology into experience.” It’s a great statement. Jesus death on the cross. His payment for our sins. His sitting at the Father’s right hand gives us the opportunity to build a relationship with an all-powerful, perfect, holy God. Prayer allows us to commune with Him and turn faith into reality. Prayer lets us learn who our perfect Father in heaven really is.

Join me next time, won’t you?

Richard

Pray to the real God (Exodus 20:18-20)

Today’s Readings: Exodus 20:18-20

As all the people witnessed the signs of God’s presence—the blast of the ram’s horn, the roaring thunder, the flashing lightning, and the smoke-covered mountain—they shook with fear and astonishment and wisely kept their distance.
Israelites (to Moses): We are afraid to have God speak directly to us; we are certain that we will die. You speak to us instead; we promise to listen.
Moses: Don’t be afraid. These powerful manifestations are God’s way of instilling awe and fear in you so that you will not sin; He is testing you for your own good.

Our culture often impacts how we prayer because it influences how we think about God. The problem in our Western culture is we fail to read and understand God’s word and rely solely on what we hear from pulpits or television or what our friends tell us about God. Consequently, we sometimes get a perverted view of who God really is and we end up praying to God in perverted ways.

Before I lose you in this discussion, let me explain. In the last 20 to 30 years, we more and more think about God as a benevolent cosmic agent who exists to give us all things we want. Pray and get rich, or at least get more comfortable in earthly possessions. Pray and get well. Pray and get family peace. Pray and win your husband or wife back. Pray and have all your problems solved.

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We view God as a cosmic Santa who grants our reasonable wishes, but we understand that sometimes we ask things that might fall out of bounds and even our cosmic Santa won’t fulfill every desire. For many in the Western world, that’s a pretty good description of God. And when God doesn’t come through with an “answer” to prayer, we decide He doesn’t exist.

But God does exist and He hasn’t changed from before creation until now. Yes, He is a benevolent being full of grace and love. He is still the God of the Old Testament, though. I’ve chosen the verses in Exodus to share how His chosen people described Him when they came into His presence in the deserts of Sinai. “They shook with fear and astonishment and wisely kept their distance.”

In the Western culture, we don’t like to hear about that side of God, but remember, He hasn’t changed. He remains a holy and just God who withholds His justice in this dispensation of grace so that all who choose can find salvation through His Son, Jesus. But be sure His wrath will come. The Old Testament God didn’t die with the coming of Jesus. God, the Father, God, the Son, and God, the Holy Spirit have always existed and always will exist just as they are. Never changing. The only change in any of the three is the addition of the scars in Jesus hands, feet, and side.

When we converse with God in prayer, it is always best to know who you talk to. The best way to know Him is to read and study the word He gave us through the many writers that have come to us in the message we call the Bible. No other written document has stood the academic or scientific scrutiny given the Bible with such amazing accuracy through the centuries. We can rely on it. We can know who God is. We can learn from Him. I urge you to take up a good Bible reading plan and read the Bible through each year. It isn’t a hard task, about fifteen minutes a day is all it takes.

If you’d like to join me, I’ll be leading you through another reading plan beginning January 1, 2015. I hope you will be there with me to the end.

Join me next time, won’t you?

Richard

A filter to see God (Ephesians 2:18)

Today’s Readings: Ephesians 2:18

For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit.

I’ve always enjoyed science. I remember my brother and I getting a chemistry kit for Christmas one year and trying to blow up the basement. What fun putting together all those chemicals just to see what would happen! I still can’t believe some of the things they put in those sets all those years ago. Today the set would have so many warning labels and tags on the bottles, you’d never get them open in the first place. My have times changed!

One of the areas of science I really enjoyed, though, involved astronomy and the heavenly bodies. I remember the first time I saw the corona of our sun through a telescope. I think it was in the third or fourth grade, when the our teacher took us on a field trip to an observatory. Those days we raced against the Soviet Union to the moon and all of us had visions of vacationing on Mars or Venus. We thought about an age or routine space flight and knew all of us would one day become as adept at tooling around in rockets as our parents were in their new automatic transmission cars.

At the observatory, we got a short lecture on the telescope, then got to peer through the filtered lens at the sun. I’d never looked directly at the sun for very long, of course. You can’t help but close your eyes when you look at the sun because it is so bright. But that day, I saw something I’d never seen before except in pictures. I saw the sun’s corona during some of its major eruptions.

Lost in the brightness when viewed by the naked eye, solar flares burst out from the surface for millions of miles. The telescope filtered the brightness by covering the bright central disc of the sun and letting the glory of the corona shine through. An incredible sight.

In some ways, that’s what Jesus does for us. He lets us see God. John says He was with God in the beginning and is God. We don’t understanding the Triune nature of God completely, but we can believe it. We don’t have to understand everything around us to know it is true. Jesus lets us see a part of God without destroying us. Remember Moses, Elijah, and many of the other Old Testament prophets who feared to look upon God because of the brightness of His glory. They knew they would die if they saw Him directly.

Jesus gets us around that problem while He dwelled among us. He let us see God through Him. Like looking at the sun through the filter in the telescope, we see a part of the Triune Godhead without fear of death by looking at Jesus. We can see the corona of the sun with the filter in place. We can see God through the presence of His Son, Jesus. He is our filter to the Father so the angels can say, “Do not be afraid. For unto you is born this day in the city of David, a Savior. . .”

Join me next time, won’t you?

Richard