Birthday celebration

Zanelle’s Papa came to visit us the other day.  Please pray for opportunities to share the gospel and the love of Christ with him.

Meditations on Psalm 8

Our worship often needs fuel.

One of the best places to fill up on fuel for worship is in the Psalms.  It is often helpful to read the Psalms and simply identify what they teach you about God. 

Take Psalm 8. 

It tells us that:

God has set His glory above the heavens. 

He has established strength out of the mouths of babes and infants.  

(What a contrast.  

We look up and we are reminded of the absolute transcendence of the God we serve. He is above the heavens.  He sets the glory above the heavens.  Yet at the same time, He is close.  He chooses the weak and helpless to bring Him glory.)

He has set the moon and the stars in place.

He is mindful of man.

He cares for man.  

(I wonder if we are seeing the two contrasting attitudes we need to have if we are going to walk through life correctly.  We need this overwhelming sense of the bigness, the awesomeness of God and we need to be convinced at the same time of that God’s care and love for us.)

You have made man a little lower than the heavenly beings.

You have crowned him with glory and honor.

You have given him dominion over the works of your hands.

You have put all things under his feet.

It seems to me…

Very often there are people who are balanced and then there are people who actually get things done.

Our Three Four Year Olds

Quotable

“Years ago, it was my very great privilege to hear one Mr. Hotchkiss, a missionary who had spent fourteen years in the long grass country of Africa.  Month after month he toiled at the task of learning the language of those whom he had come to teach.  But there was one word for which he had to wait with great patience.  That was the word for save. Then one night after three long years of waiting and working, Mr. Hotchkiss sat by the campfire talking with the chief.  In the course of the conversation the latter said:  ’I was coming through the bush today and a man eating lion got after me and this servant of mine saved me. ‘  There was the word at last.  At once the missionary sprang to his feet and putting his hand on his friend’s shoulder, asked ‘What did you say he did for you?’ ‘Saved me’ was the ready reply. ‘That’ answered the missionary ‘is what the man Christ Jesus did for you.’  And the chief’s face lighted up just as millions of other faces have lighted through the years at the hearing of that transforming story.  ’O my brother’ he said brokenly ‘that is what you have been trying to tell me for all these weary moons.’

Then the speaker added this word of testimony that I shall never forget, ‘I have been for fourteen years in Africa.  I have worked for four years without a companion.  I have lived fourteen months on ants and rhinoceros meat and curded milk.  I have had forty two cases of African fever.  But know all that would it would mean in loneliness, privation, and suffering I would gladly go through it all again to get to see that one face light up the camp fire as it did that night.”

Clovis Chappell, Sermons from the Psalms, p.112,113

I was touched recently up in Uganda when I attended a concert/preaching conference with about 15000 Africans to think about all the unknown missionaries like this man who gave up so much that so many people they would never know in this life so many years later would come to know Christ. 

Meditations on Psalm 8

If I am a peasant and the king notices me it is very likely my attitude will be quite different than if I am the king’s brother.  

King’s brothers tend to want to overthrow the king.  

Peasants tend to be thankful just to be noticed. 

It is important that we have the right perspective when it comes to who God is and who we are.  We need to develop a sense of awe that He would even notice us.  I spent some time this morning trying to look at the world and come up with different reasons I should be amazed that God thinks of me.  I came up with six in a few minutes, maybe you can come up with more. 

1.) I am one of about 6,662,224,175 people on the planet.

2.) Besides all the people, what about all the other animals and then way above that, the angels. 

3.) I live on a planet that is barely a speck of dust in comparison with the size of the universe. 

4.) My life is going to last about one second in comparison with the God’s and even in comparison to the history of the world in which I live. 

5.) Most of my thoughts are pretty mundane and a whole lot of what we do is seemingly pretty inconsequential in the great scheme of things.  I mean, how many hours do we spend over the course of a lifetime blowing our nose, combing our hair, even going to the bathroom?  

6.)  For most people the more powerful they get, the less they care about people like me.  With God, the most important person in the Universe, it is the exact opposite.

No question.  No doubt.  David is right.  ”When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him and the son of man that you care for him?”

A question?

How much is the way you define yourself grounded what God has accomplished in the gospel and how much of it really is influenced by other factors?

Meditations on Psalm 8

When I see a baby the first word that comes to my mind usually isn’t strength.

Babies, nursing babies are helpless. 

If I went out to pick people to join an army to fight my enemies, I wouldn’t generally pick babies.  But that’s the picture David gives us of the kind of people God has chosen to establish His strength and to silence His enemies. 

“From the mouth of infants and nursing babes You have established strength, because of your adversaries, to make the enemy and the revengeful cease.”

I work so hard and we work so hard at trying to be more important and powerful and strong so that we can do ministry for God when in reality what we may need most is to recognize our weakness, our inability and insignificance and come to God in absolute one hundred percent dependence if we are actually going to do ministry for Him.

It was such a pleasure to have these men over.  They came to church and then for dinner.  Four of them are from the D.R.C. originally, one of them is from Burundi.  Marda made apple pie.  That was a real hit.  They had never had pie before.  Come to think of it, they hadn’t hardly ever had anything we had.  It is just such a different world.  In their country, somebody who has eaten a chocolate bar before is considered a rich person.