Love & Keep

You shall therefore love the LORD your God and keep his charge, his statutes, his rules, and his commandments always.
Deuteronomy 11:1

God did not want to make of His people Israel a nation of blind adherents to the Law. The key to the relationship was love. God loved and cared for them. They loved and kept His commands. The reciprocal nature of the relationship was meant to build the nation into a powerful witness to the world of God's great and unfailing love.

God enters into relationship with us and we should act on our end of that relationship. We should love God. He is always the initiator because we are unable to truly come to Him as dead sinners. But when we feel the call, we must respond! That way that love is expressed is by living for Him, keeping His commands from our hearts. Living as a Christian is all about making our heart's passion that of pleasing our Lord. It is surrender and love in being all consumed in Jesus! It is like what a married person knows in finding joy in the things that delight and please their spouse.

The challenge for me today will be to love God by doing what He loves and commands. It means practicing the right choices, loving people around me even while they are imperfect and even hurtful, just like God loves every sinner while they were still sinners. It means expecting righteous living in my own heart, thoughts, and actions just as God expects that those who love Him would truly love Him from the heart!

- Posted with my iPad. The Apple Kool-Aide tastes fine.

Prayer between friends

And I tell you, ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened.

Luke 11:9-10

Jesus, by His example and in His teaching, shows us that prayer involves effort and hard work. That is the point of the short parable in Luke 11:5-13. The focus is that the person in need makes effort to request from someone who should care for him. I love it that the parable is about a friend in need going to another friend who can help. Even in an inconvenient time, friendship overrides the difficulty. The point is that God will treat His people like His friends.

Jesus tells this tale to make the point that relationship drives two things in prayer. First, it drives the Father to concern because “he is his friend.” God acts out of love when He responds to our prayers. It is not formulaic. It is relational. And that is often forgotten in our mundane and routine thoughts about prayer.

The second observation about prayer involves our effort in praying. It involves active commitment on our part, It is an asking, which is the basis of request prayer. It is seeking which brings with it the need to be worshipful and have an attitude of respectful expectation. And it is knocking, indicating that sometimes we have to stay at the task until the door that is between us and our Friend is opened and the answer is given.

Jesus teaches that prayer with God as our friend is a rewarding relationship. God hears us. When we ask, we receive an answer. When we seek God, He never hides from us and we will find Him. When we knock at His door, He is always ready to open to His children, not because He is obligated to us, but because He loves those who respectfully come to Him as to their eternal Friend.

Technorati Tags: Jesus,Parables,Prayer,Relationship with God.

Show me Your glory.

Moses said, "Please show me your glory." And he said, "I will make all my goodness pass before you and will proclaim before you my name 'The LORD.' And I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy.”

Exodus 33:18-19

Is Moses being presumptuous with this request? After all, hadn’t God been manifesting His presence constantly since Israel left Egypt? A pillar of fire and cloud had been with the nation since God had freed them. That in and of itself had to be awe-inspiring. I know it is not what I see in church visibly every day. But Moses knew there was more. The cloud and the fire were manifestations, but not the entire picture. Moses longed for more of God.

God grants the bold request of Moses. Even after all of Israel’s struggles, Moses is faithful. And God is faithful to Him. God answers the desire on His own terms. Moses would see the good glory of God, but God would hide him in the crack of a rock face, cover the leader with His hand, and only allow the back of God’s glory to pass before Him. That would suffice. God was allowing this because He chose to be gracious and merciful to Moses. Moses did not somehow deserve this. God was being gracious in allowing Moses to live through this experience.

At the heart of Moses’ request is a desire for intimacy with God. He did not seek to gain from the experience. It wasn’t so that he could manipulate Israel with it. He longed to be closer to God. He met with God in the tent of meeting. He received God’s revelation on the mountain. He saw God lead through fire and cloud. And all that revelation left him wanting more! That is the way it is with the heart that longs after God. It always needs more.

I must continue to commit to regularly looking to God’s Word. It is when I see His glory in its pages that my heart is pulled toward Him. It is when I know Him leading me in that way that I long for more. All too many times I am content with just a couple of minutes in my morning. God wants to graciously give me more. And my heart needs to be burned with the desire for more. The passion of Moses for the glory of God should become my desire as well.

Lord,

Burn me up with the strong fire of wanting You! May I look and long for Your glory until it is all that I want in my life!

Amen

Technorati Tags: Exodus,Relationship with God

A calling, a promise, a small start.

1    Now the LORD said to Abram, "Go forth from your country, And from your relatives And from your father's house, To the land which I will show you;
2    And I will make you a great nation, And I will bless you, And make your name great; And so you shall be a blessing;
3    And I will bless those who bless you, And the one who curses you I will curse. And in you all the families of the earth will be blessed."

Genesis 12:1-3

In the call of Abram to leave his familiar surroundings and follow the Lord’s direction we have the beginning of what has been an ancient relationship God has had with a unique people: Israel. And in “father Abraham” we see the standard for what faith, following, and friendship with God are all about.

First, the faith… Abram simply was told to leave and that God would show him a land that would be his own. He was to live the life of a faithful nomad, trusting God’s call more than his own security. From that step God would make of this childless old man and his wife a great nation. He would be blessed, become someone of fame, and be a blessing to the world.

Then there had to come “the following”. I would not be commenting on this story if Abram had not believed. But the old man took God at his word (even though we do not know WHY God chose him… I think Abram was equally dumbfounded) and packed up the extended family and headed out into what was for him terra incognita. He followed by faith.

And Abram received a friendship with God. God began the whole thing. Later, as they dwell in Canaan God simply says to him, “This is the land I was talking about.” A series of brief encounters with God occurs from there on it. It is clear that God is talking to Abram and the old man is listening. This conversation is the essence of a faithful friendship with God that persisted through several manifestations of this initial covenant that God made with the patriarch.

It is with Abram that we see the care of God for individuals that ultimately changes the world. The personal desire of God to walk with us did not abate despite Adam’s sin, Cain’s murder of his brother, the generation that died in the Flood, the overt humanism of Babel, or the simple existence of Terah and his nomadic son Abram. And with that patriarch, God began to show us what faith in His Word could do. And through that pursuit by God of us, we have been blessed, for Abram became the father of the Jewish nation, and in Bethlehem, in Judea, in the land God promised Abram, a Savior was born Who has blessed the entire world forever.