Will Davis Jr.'s Blog, page 52

Give Him No Rest

Every weekday I write a devotional called Wake Up Calls. Below is today’s entry. I thought you might like to see a sample. You can subscribe on my blog’s home page. Blessings!

Give Him No Rest

 On your walls, O Jerusalem, I have appointed watchmen;

All day and all night they will never keep silent.

You who remind the Lord, take no rest for yourselves;

And give Him no rest until He establishes

And makes Jerusalem a praise in the earth. Isaiah 62:6-7

These verses are great encouragement for all of us who grow weary in prayer.

Have you ever prayed for something for years, even decades, with no apparent answer? It’s easy to conclude that your prayers are falling on deaf ears. You are still burdened, still convicted and still motivated to pray, but Heaven seems silent.

You think things like:

If God was going to answer this he would have by now
Surely God is sick of hearing me talk about this
Maybe I’m a nuisance and God runs when he sees me coming
This is futile. I need to stop praying about this.

These great words from Isaiah tell us otherwise:

God calls us to pray. We are his watchmen!
We should never fall silent
We are to remind the Lord of what he promised
We are to give ourselves no rest from prayer
We are to give the Lord no rest from our asking
We are to ask until fulfills his promises

Are you praying for something? Are you growing weary? Don’t stop! You’re not nagging God and you’re not a nuisance. You’re a holy watchman and you’re doing the very thing God called you to do.

Stay on the wall. Keep praying. Dawn is coming.

Give Him No Rest

Give Him No Rest

 On your walls, O Jerusalem, I have appointed watchmen;

All day and all night they will never keep silent.

You who remind the Lord, take no rest for yourselves;

And give Him no rest until He establishes

And makes Jerusalem a praise in the earth. Isaiah 62:6-7

These verses are great encouragement for all of us who grow weary in prayer.

Have you ever prayed for something for years, even decades, with no apparent answer? It’s easy to conclude that your prayers are falling on deaf ears. You are still burdened, still convicted and still motivated to pray, but Heaven seems silent.

You think things like:

If God was going to answer this he would have by now
Surely God is sick of hearing me talk about this
Maybe I’m a nuisance and God runs when he sees me coming
This is futile. I need to stop praying about this.

These great words from Isaiah tell us otherwise:

God calls us to pray. We are his watchmen!
We should never fall silent
We are to remind the Lord of what he promised
We are to give ourselves no rest from prayer
We are to give the Lord no rest from our asking
We are to ask until fulfills his promises

Are you praying for something? Are you growing weary? Don’t stop! You’re not nagging God and you’re not a nuisance. You’re a holy watchman and you’re doing the very thing God called you to do.

Stay on the wall. Keep praying. Dawn is coming.

The Day I Realized How Poor I Really Am

I grew up rich; I just didn’t know it at the time.

My father grew up in a single parent household. He and his mother were poor. For my father, provision was a great way to show love. He figured that if he could give his family what he never had, he’d be a pretty successful dad. So he worked long and hard to make sure we had every opportunity a family could have. For that, I’m very grateful.

I’ve never known what is to want or lack for anything, not even close. In reality, I lived a very cushy life growing up: ski trips at Christmas and Spring Break, my own bedroom and bathroom in a nice house in an affluent part of town, long family trips in the summer, new clothes, new cars and a summer house on the lake, complete with ski boat, and world class educational opportunities. I don’t think these things spoiled me, but I do believe they numbed me to the reality of how people live who aren’t so financially favored. I graduated from college, graduate school and then became a pastor without ever having really come face-to-face with poverty or suffering. But God would soon change that.

In the summer of 2002, I took a much-needed sabbatical from my job as a pastor. My church was gracious enough to give me eight weeks off and my wife was gracious enough to allow me to spend much of that time hiking in the Rockies with our son. We spent several weeks climbing fourteen-thousand-foot mountains in Colorado.

In the next-to-last week of my break, I agreed to accompany my daughter and several other kids in our student ministry to Reynosa, Mexico, with a ministry called Mission Discovery. Mission Discovery is a Nashville-based ministry that builds homes for the impoverished and builds and supports orphanages in Mexico, Africa, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Haiti and the US. Our job was to build a small one-room home (it’s about the size of a small storage shed that you might have in your backyard, without electricity or running water) for a family. Reynosa is just south of the Texas/Mexico border and is the final stop for thousands of families trying to work their way north into the U.S. Because most of them are unable or unwilling to enter the US illegally, and because most are desperately poor, they are forced to create makeshift shelters out of anything they can find. Some families or groups of families live in those pitiful dwellings for years. It’s hard to imagine, but the little cubicles we build for these people improve their living conditions exponentially.

This is embarrassing to admit, but that trip was my first real missions experience. I was a church leader and had been a Christian for over thirty years, but I had never personally been involved in any form of missions. As a result, I really didn’t know what to expect and I certainly wasn’t looking forward to the trip. I was going to support my daughter and our student ministry, not because I had any sense of responsibility to serve the people in Reynosa.

In short, I got ambushed. It was without question the best week of my sabbatical. Don’t get me wrong; this was no easy or restful week. The temperatures were well over a hundred degrees each day on the worksite, and we had to drive over an hour each way, including crossing through the US/Mexico border just to get there. But what I saw, heard, smelled and felt changed me. It broke me and marked me for the rest of my life.

I had never before looked directly into the face of poverty. I had never stared into the eyes of a widow who was uncertain if she could feed her kids the next day. I had never seen children running about and playing in the dirt roads of the colonia in their underwear, simply because they had no other clothing. I had never seen a special needs child roaming the streets alone like an abandoned pet, because her parents could no longer care for her. And I had never seen men, stripped of all sense of dignity and self-worth because of the generational ravages of poverty, using drinking and sex (actually rape would be a better word) as a means of passing the time. I had never seen any of that before.

What I saw made me angry. That’s a common emotion for many people who experience poverty for the first time. I got mad and was even a little ashamed of how I’d lived with such wealth and such waste. I probably throw away more food in a year than some of those people will consume in a lifetime. I was mad at the disparity that existed between them and me. Here they were, just a few hours drive from my back door, and yet our worlds couldn’t have been further apart.

What do we do with that? How do I justify the inequity? Should I feel guilty because I was blessed enough to be born in the U.S. where life and opportunities are so much different from theirs? And, where was God in all this? How could he sit quietly by while so many people suffered just a few hours away from so close to so many who had so much? I didn’t have the answers to these troubling questions, and I ended up just being angry and frustrated.

But if I’m honest, my anger isn’t what marked me the most. It was the joy of the people whom we served. Rarely in my life had I seen such high levels of passion for Christ and sheer, unadulterated joy. Many of these people had deep, profound relationships with Jesus. They didn’t feel overlooked or abandoned by him. That’s what got me the most. In the face of such terrible living conditions and such chronic suffering, they had levels of faith that humbled me.

There I was, the rich gringo who has was there to help them, and yet I was the one who felt poor. I was the one who didn’t seem to get it. From an earthly, material standpoint, I had everything and they had nothing. But from the standpoint of God’s Kingdom, they had something I envied and desperately needed. They were the ones who were rich.

I couldn’t explain away this unlikely juxtaposition: These poor people, who had nothing, seemed to have everything. And I, who had everything, when compared to them, seemed to have nothing. That’s when I began my journey toward enough.

From Enough: Finding More by Living with Less .

Nothing

Nothing

Apart from Me you can do nothing. John 15:5

It has taken me a long time to understand this verse.

Jesus says that I can do nothing without him; and frankly, I beg to differ.

I know Jesus is the Son of God and everything, but I do stuff every day that I don’t really consult him on, so maybe he’s wrong. Surely Jesus expects us to be independent, smart individuals who don’t hound him all the time. Right?

Then, after years of starting fires that only Jesus could put out, I realized what he was saying.

I can do nothing of significance without him.

I can do plenty of things without Jesus; I just can’t do anything that matters without Jesus. I can gossip without Jesus, I can lie without Jesus and I can lust without Jesus. I can work really hard and sit in lots of meetings and write sermons, books and blogs, but none of it will matter without Jesus.

 

So when Jesus looked at is disciples and said Apart from Me you can do nothing, he meant nothing eternal. We can do plenty without Jesus; we just can’t do anything that matters for eternity.

What are you doing today? It seems to me that you have two options:

Nothing. This is basically anything you do in your flesh without Jesus’ anointing.
Something that matters. This only happens when you declare your dependence on God and beg his Spirit to move through you.

I choose option 2. How about you?

 

Three’s Company

Three’s Company

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with you all. 2 Corinthians 13:14

Here’s a three-fold reminder of how much you matter to God.

In Paul’s conclusion to his second letter to the Corinthian church, he offered this blessing. Notice the Trinitarian format:

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ. Grace is God’s undeserved, unmerited favor. It’s getting from God what we don’t deserve.

It’s curious to me that Paul lists Jesus first in the order here. It may be because no matter how much God loves us, we can’t receive his grave or know it until he removes the barriers between us through Jesus.

Paul connects grace to Jesus, because through Jesus’ work we have access to God’s grace. Here’s an acrostic for Grace–God’s Riches at Christ’s Expense.

The love of God. Behind Grace is Love. Behind Jesus is God. The motivation for how God works with us is his passion for us.

As God’s grace in Jesus is unmerited, God’s love to us is unbounded. It knows no limits. Remember what Paul prayed for the believers in Ephesus:

And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge . . . . Ephesians 3:17-19

The fellowship of the Holy Spirit. God’s Spirit ties everything together. He is the great unifier. Paul’s word for fellowship is koinonia. It means to have in common. Our words community and communion come from it.

What do the Father, Son and Spirit have in common? Us. What do we have in common? The Father, Son and Spirit. And, we have each other. That’s what it means to have the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.

Paul prays that Jesus’ grace, God’s love and the Spirit’s fellowship be with us all. I agree. Let it be so, God. Let it be so.

 

 

 

Big, Hairy, Audacious Praying

Here’s a dangerous question: What are you praying for today that will require a miraculous answer from God? What are you asking for that only God can do? If you seem to be stuck in a prayer rut, if your asks are limited to the token God bless Joe and God be with Sherri kinds of requests, then it’s time for you to start taking some risks in prayer. It’s time for you to start asking big.

Let me offer you an example: An elderly man moves silently about his priestly work in the inner chambers of the Temple. His name is Zechariah, and he has been chosen by lot to perform the priestly duty of interceding for the nation and offering incense and prayers to God. It is a high honor. Many priests would live their entire lives and never be chosen for such a task. Zechariah would only get to perform this priestly function once in his life. While he is inside offering prayers for the nation, a crowd has gathered outside the inner courts and is praying for him. They were interceding for the intercessor. Now there’s a concept.

As Zechariah moved about inside the Temple, the inner court was suddenly flooded with white light and Zechariah realized that he was in the presence of an angel. Needless to say, he was terrified. It seems that the angelic messenger brought unlikely news: But the angel said to him: “Do not be afraid, Zechariah; your prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you are to give him the name John,” (Luke 1:13).

Now that may not seem like such a big deal, certainly not one meriting angelic announcement. Couples find out every day that they’re expecting without any fanfare whatsoever. But this was obviously no ordinary pregnancy. Scripture tells us that Zechariah and his wife Elizabeth were well beyond their childbearing years. Besides that, Elizabeth’s womb was barren. She had never been able to bear children. For a woman in First Century Palestine, few fates could be worse. Much shame and scorn fell upon a woman who could not preserve her husband’s name through childbirth. Elizabeth and Zechariah were facing the end of their lives without having the ability to do anything about their childlessness.

But did you catch what the angel said? Just before he announced that they were to be proud parents, he said, “Your prayer has been heard.” What prayer? Had Zechariah and Elizabeth been praying for a child? Had they been patiently asking God to end Elizabeth’s barrenness and to give them a baby? Apparently so, because the angel declared that their son would be born as a direct result of their requests to God.

Knowing that about Zechariah and Elizabeth makes me like and respect them even more. Can you imagine anything bolder, anything more daring than asking God to give an elderly couple a son? These two “believers” had the spiritual gumption to not only believe that God could open a closed womb, but that he would do it. These weren’t God be with Tom and God bless Joe pray-ers. They knew what they wanted; and even though it was humanly impossible, they had the audacity to ask God for it.

You have to admire their faith. No doubt they had heard the accounts of God granting Abraham and Sarah a son in their later years. They knew that God had done such a thing before, and they were just courageous enough to ask him to do it again. They were asking God to do something that they could not, something only he could, and something that would no doubt be registered in the “miracle” department when he came through.

Think about your prayers. What are you asking of God that only he can do? Are you seeking that which could only be registered in the “miracle” department when it happens? In short, are you asking big? If you were really sure that God hears and answers your prayers, would it change the way you pray? And, do you believe that we should ask big things of God? Is he pleased or put off when we seek the miraculous from him?

The Bible teaches that such praying is neither arrogant nor irresponsible. In fact, both Testaments of the Bible endorse the principle of praying big. It’s the kind of praying that the Old Testament leaders and heroes engaged in. It’s the kind of praying that Jesus both modeled and encouraged. And, it’s the kind of praying that we need to practice.

Do you make big asks of God? Don’t be timid in your prayers. Prayer should be as big as God’s promises and as full as God’s resources. Your requests should require the full power and provision of God.

 

From The Power of Praying Boldly, formerly titled Pray Big.

Gold-Plated Living

Gold-Plated Living

All that my eyes desired I did not refuse them. Ecclesiastes 2:10

If there ever was a man who had everything, it was King Solomon. In Ecclesiastes, Solomon reflected on his adventures in life and his efforts to find what would and would not satisfy him. And when he says that he got everything he wanted, he was serious.

He had money, comfort, power and over a thousand women ready to meet his sexual needs.

Sounds dreamy, right? It was a nightmare. Here’s more of what Solomon wrote:

I did not withhold my heart from any pleasure, for my heart was pleased because of all my labor and this was my reward for all my labor. Thus I considered all my activities which my hands had done and the labor which I had exerted, and behold all was vanity and striving after wind and there was no profit under the sun, Ecclesiastes 2:10-11.

Talk about depressing. Solomon’s pursuit of happiness left him broken and empty.

Here’s our lesson. Humans haven’t changed since Solomon’s day. You STILL can’t satisfy the needs of an eternal soul with gold-plated living. It’s a lie, a farce and an insult to your eternal soul to think that throwing stuff at it will fulfill it. You were designed for eternity, and you have to pursue the eternal if you’re going to find purpose, meaning and truth.

Don’t waste your time today chasing after things that will not satisfy you. Be smarter. Learn from Solomon. Aim higher.

 

No Shrinking Back

No Shrinking Back

But we are not of those who shrink back to destruction, but of those who have faith to the preserving of the soul. Hebrews 10:39

There is no Reverse in the transmission of a Jesus-follower, only Drive and Neutral. He may call you to rest, but he will not call you to back up. He will only call you forward.

If you find yourself in Reverse in your faith, God is not behind it.

The Hebrew writer says that we are not of those who shrink back. Let me give you mental picture for what shrinking back is:

Imagine a major league batter backing out of the batter’s box because the pitches are coming in too fast
Imagine a major presidential nominee dropping out of the race because he doesn’t like the criticism from his opponent
Imagine a man or a woman walking out of a marriage just because he or she doesn’t want to try anymore.

That’s what it means to shrink back. At its root the word means to apostatize and it describes a mental decision that inevitably leads to a behavioral change. As a driver of a car makes a mental decision to shift his car into reverse, the person who shrinks back makes a choice to pull away from God. Bottom line: To shrink back is to lose faith.

But this isn’t a verse about shrinking back. This is a verse about NOT shrinking back. Hallelujah!

Let me speak over you what the Hebrew writer spoke over his readers:

You are not one to back up, you are not one to lose faith, and you are not one to shrink back. You are tethered to the One who never backs up. You don’t have to keep pushing forward, you only need to stay connected to the One who does.

Keep looking to Jesus. Look to him right now. Don’t look at your problems or obstacles. Look only at Jesus. There is never a risk of shrinking back in fear for the one who only sees Jesus.

Yea God.

 

Will’s Letter to ACF, 11/1/2013

A Good Joke

A Good Joke

But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Romans 5:8

I met Margie today at the grocery store. She was working check-out in the express line. Our conversation went like this:

Me: Hello Margie
Margie: Hello
Me: How are you today?
(Margie just kind of nods)
Me: Just OK?
Margie: Yep, just OK.
Me: Margie, do you know how loved you are today? You are greatly loved.
Margie: (Just sadly smiles) Well that’s a good joke.

My heart sank. That obviously wasn’t the reply I expected from Margie. Whatever she was dealing with today, she certainly wasn’t feeling very loved.

I responded to Margie:

Me: Look at this face and know that I am not joking. You are loved today Margie, more than you can ever know.

And then, after a pause for me to complete the transaction:

Me: Jesus, Margie. I’m talking about Jesus. He loves you more today than you can ever realize. He loves you for free, unconditionally, right now.
Margie: He loves me for free?
Me: That’s right Margie, no strings attached. Right here, right now, as you stand at this check out counter, you are loved.

Friends, if the Gospel doesn’t meet people in their everyday pain and insecurity, then we’ve got nothing to offer. Jesus didn’t just die to give us the heaven-life, he died to give us love in this demon-infested life as well. God’s love will meet you anywhere, any time and at any place, regardless of what you’ve done and how sinful you may feel.

You are loved today, and that’s no joke. Jesus loves you today. Let him meet you where you are. And then, go love a Margie in Jesus’ name.