Will Davis Jr.'s Blog, page 51

Trash Talking

Trash Talking

Thus says the king, ‘ Do not let Hezekiah deceive you, for he will not be able to deliver you from my hand; nor let Hezekiah make you trust in the Lord, saying, “The Lord will surely deliver us, and this city will not be given into the hand of the king of Assyria.”” 2 Kings 18:29-30

The devil is a world-class trash-talker. Don’t let him intimidate you.

The King of Assyria had surrounded Jerusalem and was threatening lay siege to it. Behind his army was a trail of devastated nations, none of whom had been able to stand up to the Assyrian’s power.

The King sent out a spokesperson who simply said: Don’t let your naïve king comfort you with tales of the God of Israel who will rescue me from my hand. Look behind me and know that there is no force on earth that can stand up to my King. Give us the head of King Hezekiah and we will go easy on you. But know this, your God will not deliver you.

Have you ever heard trash talking like that? I certainly have. Maybe you’ll recognize some of Satan’s favorites:

You’ve gone too far. God won’t forgive you this time.
You’re not a Christian. Real Christians don’t act this way.
God can’t hear you. Your prayers are worthless.
God is not going to come through for you. Quit wasting your time waiting on him.

When you hear that kind of satanic junk, remember this story. God came through for Hezekiah and the Israelites. He made a mockery of the Assyrians and sent them running home in fear.

Satan loves to trash talk, because that’s all he can do. Don’t listen to him. Fill your mind with God’s truth and use it to repel the stupid lies of the enemy.

No weapon forged against you will prevail, and you will refute every tongue that accuses you. This is the heritage of the servants of the LORD, and this is their vindication from me,” declares the LORD. Isaiah 54:17

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Remember the Poor

Remember the Poor

They only asked us to remember the poor— the very thing I also was eager to do.  Galatians 2:10

Before we get too busy today, before we rush off to our meetings and games and carpools, we need this reminder:

Remember the poor.

When Paul met with several church leaders in Jerusalem to discuss how to incorporate Gentiles into the church, they faced some serious questions:

Were Gentiles equal to Jews in their standing before God?
Did Gentiles need to convert to Judaism before becoming Christians?
Should Gentile men be required to be circumcised?

It was a serious discussion. Was a Gentile’s faith in Jesus enough, or was something additional necessary in order for him or her to be saved? The Jerusalem leaders decided rightly to not require anything additional of their Gentile brethren. But they did encourage them to abstain from sexual sin and to “remember the poor.”

I love that they felt so strongly about remembering the poor that they included it as a normal part of following Jesus. The call to sexual purity is obvious, as the Gentiles would have brought a load of poor thinking and behavior with them. But the call to remember the poor is a pleasant and important surprise.

What did they mean? Was this a challenge to be sure and pray for the poor around them? Was it a call to think about the poor every day so they would be more appreciative? Actually, it was much more than that.

Remembering the poor meant doing something about their plight, and it means the same for us today.

It means that in our budgeting, our spending and even as part of our daily routine we need to do something to lighten the load of those in poverty. Remembering the poor isn’t thinking; it’s acting.

Will you remember the poor today? Will you do something tangible, something overt and something sacrificial for someone in poverty today? It can be someone across the world or just across the way, but do something for someone.

Remember the poor.

Are You Ready to Get Naked?

Have you ever thought about these profound words?  ”For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh. The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame,” (Genesis 2:24-25).

Several interesting ideas can be found in these profound words, all of which we need to keep in mind when praying and working for our marriages. First, God described the union between a man and a woman as one flesh. It’s difficult to overemphasize the significance of this idea. Remember that the event leading to the creation of Eve was Adam’s survey of the animal kingdom and finding no suitable partner: Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds of the air and all the beasts of the field. But for Adam no suitable helper was found (Genesis 2:19-20).

Aren’t you glad that Adam didn’t see something he liked?  I think Adam showed great levels of insight and discernment there. What if, while God was parading the animals before him, Adam had suddenly said, “Hold on, God. Stop right there. Helloooo, Kangaroo!” I’m really glad that didn’t happen.

God wanted Adam to see just how special Eve was going to be. He wanted Adam to know that what he needed was a special creation of God, someone with whom he could be completely one. His phrase one flesh is the highest compliment God could pay a human relationship. It’s also the high standard he set for our marriage commitment. God wants and expects us to experience in marriage a level of unity unmatched by any other relationship we have. He wants us to be one.

Second, God established marriage as our number one priority next to our relationship with him. He instructed all men and women who choose to marry to leave their family of origin and create a new family unit. That new family is to be their relational priority and merit their best efforts. It’s like God is saying, “If you’re going to be married, then I expect you to fully throw yourself into the relationship. I want you and your spouse to cling to each other more than anyone else.” When that type of no-holds-barred commitment is manifest in marriage, it will help build serious marital intimacy.

Finally, God expects us to be fully exposed to and vulnerable with each other in our marriage relationship. The words naked without shame are both descriptive and poignant. It’s obvious that Moses was referencing, at least, Adam and Eve’s physical nakedness. He was describing the time before sin entered the picture and shattered the union that Adam and Eve had with God and with each other. After their rebellion, God clothed them with animal skins. They were no longer innocent and thus, their physical nakedness was no longer appropriate.

But Moses’s words refer to much more than just Adam and Eve’s initial lack of clothing. Implied in the Hebrew phrase are the ideas of vulnerability, authenticity and safety. Neither Adam nor Eve felt any need to hide from the other. They had no secrets, and they certainly had no fear of feeling shame or rejection. They were completely exposed to each other—physically, emotionally, and mentally—without any fear of a negative reaction from the other. It was the safest, purest relationship in the world, and it represents exactly what God wants you to know in marriage. Such intimacy is impossible to achieve without you and your spouse both having meaningful, thriving relationships with God.

Nakedness isn’t in our nature. Even though we’re born naked, we quickly learn to cover ourselves and to stay that way. But as I look again at the crowd around me, I see something else. I see men and women who are equally clothed—protected—emotionally. Almost as quickly as we learn to cover ourselves physically, we learn to also cover up emotionally. Conventional wisdom tells us that the world is a rough-and-tumble place. If we’re going to survive, we had better guard our hearts. And so we learn to protect our innermost feelings—our fears, our hopes, our hurts, our needs—even in marriage. Few of us do relational authenticity well. Most of us just fake it.

How good are you at being real and authentic? It doesn’t take much to make us shut down our hearts and take a vow of emotional celibacy. Has something caused you to build a wall around your heart? Did your parents divorce or did you lose a parent when you were young? Were you the victim of emotional, verbal or physical abuse? Did you have few healthy friendships growing up or too many failed dating relationships? Were you overweight, not very athletic or pretty, or were you an underachiever? Did you experience the ridicule that often goes with not hitting the cultural high bar for what makes you “acceptable?”

Any of these situations can have a major negative impact on your emotional health and your willingness to be vulnerable. If you go into marriage without the healing of God’s Holy Spirit in these areas, you can bet that naked without shame isn’t going to happen easily. But these types of issues don’t have to be relational deal-breakers.

From Pray Big for Your Marriage–On sale this week only for $1.99 (e-version).

You can order it here: Barnes and Noble, Amazon,  CBD 

Professional Seekers

Professional Seekers

But he used to enjoy listening to him. Mark 6:20

I call them “professional seekers.” They’re men and women who enjoy exploring spiritual things, new ideas and cutting-edge thinking. They just have no intention of embracing anything. They’re willing to learn, but they’re not willing to change.

King Herod was a professional seeker. As a Hebrew king, he needed to be up on the latest thoughts, trends and ideas that were being promoted in his kingdom. He’d heard of a fiery prophet (John the Baptist) who kept calling for repentance and announcing the Kingdom of God, so he decided to check him out.

Herod found John to be amusing and maybe even a little convincing, but he had no intention of doing anything that John said. That wouldn’t be politically prudent.

Even when John confronted the king on his errant sexual behavior, Herod just laughed him off as old-fashioned and closed-minded. Sound familiar?

Are you a professional seeker? Or are you serious about discovering truth? The danger in seeking truth is that it’s going to ask for a commitment when you find it. It will cramp your style, cap your independence and conflict with some of those new ideas you’re so fond of promoting.

Being a professional seeker requires no courage. It’s very much like going to a museum to view beautiful art or walking a car lot on a Sunday when no sales guys are around. You can browse at your leisure wit no expectation of any response or action on your part.

But when you are actually confronted by truth, everything changes. The nature of truth is that it requires action. It can’t merely be observed; it calls for a response.

Do you have the courage to respond to the truth of God when it’s standing before you? Are you willing to make the appropriate changes when God’s Word calls out your behaviors, values, priorities and relationships?

Don’t be a professional seeker. Be man or woman enough to not just learn, but to change.

Will’s Letter to ACF, November 13, 2013

The Day

The Day

For those who are weary . . .

For those who are sick of the bad headlines . . .

For those who are suffering . . .

This is for you:

So it will happen in that day, that the Lord will punish the host of heaven on high, and the kings of the earth on earth. Isaiah 24:21

The Day is coming when God will bring ultimate justice to the earth. The capital D in Day isn’t a typo. That day will be unlike any other in history, and it will change everything.

For while today the forces of evil in the heavenly realm (demons and the devil) and on earth (those who are deceived and manipulated by them) still have some freedom to create chaos, the Day will come will God will end their tyranny.

God will judge them.

God will silence them.

God will punish them.

And God will lock them away forever.

That Day is coming; it’s not fiction and it’s not wishful thinking. And every day we live takes us one day closer to the Day. It could even be tomorrow.

So shore up your heart and take a deep breath of encouragement. God isn’t done. The pain will end. The bad news will cease. And the devil and his henchmen will get justice.

Oh Lord, hasten the day.

 

When It’s Good to be Fat

My wife Susie is at it again. Here’s her most recent Dear Daughters post, called Five Good Reasons to be Fat. Well done Susie.

Swing Away

Swing Away

For the Spirit God gave us does not make us timid, but gives us power, love and self-discipline. 2 Timothy 1:7

Susie and I had dinner last night with close friends. As we lingered over dessert and coffee, our conversation turned to the things of God. We were each taking turns answering the question, “What did you last hear God say?”  One of the people at the table responded, “Swing away!”

If you don’t know the term, it’s from baseball. It’s when a batter has permission from the coach to swing at the best pitch he can get. It’s a swing for the fences, go for broke, try to get a homerun kind of instruction, and one that batters love.

When a batter gets the swing away signal, he knows that the coach trusts both his judgment and his abilities. It’s permission to go for it without fear of repercussions, even if he strikes out.

So my friend at dinner felt that God had said this to him:

Quit worrying about how you look and how well you perform. Just play the game and have fun. I’ve got your back; I’m responsible for the outcomes. Go for it. Just swing away.

What a liberating message, and the point of this Wake Up Call is to tell you that God has the same message for you. Swing away!

As Paul told Timothy, the Spirit doesn’t give us fear, but power. You’ve got permission to live in wild abandon to Jesus and not worry about how it looks or how effective it seems. Just play the game and let God worry about the outcomes.

I really needed to hear that last night. And today, I’m playing differently. My steps are a little lighter, my path a little more spontaneous.

I’m betting you may need to hear it today as well. Swing away! Go for it! God has not made you timid! The very Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead lives in you. Your future is secure, you are irreversibly loved and the royal blood of Jesus flows through your veins.

Check your fear at the door. You’ve got nothing to worry about. Swing away . . . and have fun in the process!

The Blessing Bulls-Eye

The Blessing Bulls-Eye

For there the Lord commanded the blessing. Psalms 133:3

Are you in conflict with a Christian brother or sister today? Are you holding a grudge against someone? Do your best to work it out. There’s more at stake than your realize.

Psalm 133 paints a beautiful picture of unity. The psalm ends by telling us the importance of our unity before God.

What is unity? It’s more than just getting along, more than really liking each other and definitely more than agreeing to disagree.

Unity is a gift from God. It’s not a condition believers can achieve on their own. It’s a divine state, a heavenly gift, which is why Jesus prayed so hard for it.

Unity is also God’s “zone of blessing.” As Psalm 133 says, it’s there that the Lord has “commanded blessing.”

What does that mean? It means God honors Christian unity. It means that when brothers and sisters look past theological, political, racial, social and cultural differences and choose to love each other, honor each other and defer to each other, then God pours out his spiritual favor on those Christians.

It means that unity is a pre-condition to any significant movement of God. It means that without unity, the Church will be impotent. And, it means that you have to promote it in your relational sphere.

Do you want God to bless your church, your city, your nation? Promote and pray for unity. Be a peacemaker. Blow up barriers. And you will find your life right in the crosshairs of God’s blessing.

Will’s Letter to ACF, November 8, 2013