Month: August 2020

It comforts Christian hearts while galling rebels. Whatever we do, God will be glorified. He will be glorified through our choices, in spite of our choices, or both. His glory is in flourishing human obedience, tolerating human rebellion, and destroying his enemies.

Egypt was at the height of power when God delivered his people. Rome was at the height of power when Christ commissioned his disciples. Both empires imploded in sparkling displays of God’s power to deliver his own. The God of sparrows and flowers is the God of epic rescues. Rescues are epic because powerful tyrants, evil antagonists, and impossible odds make the real hero look good.

Adoptee or enemy, Jacob or Esau, you glorify God.

What if God, willing to shew his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction: and that he might make known the…

Ever need to choose a gift for someone who already has everything? God is one of those, times ten to the power of infinity. Using the mathematical symbol for infinity, the lemniscate, we could write it One of Those x 10∞

That is to say, God has everything, and we can give him nothing he doesn’t already have.

Yet God is pleased to accept the glory that we are pleased to give Him.

Where do you get that, Luke?

From Joshua’s words to Achan.

Achan had disobeyed God, was responsible for thirty lives lost and had dug himself into the hole of a situation that would become his grave. The night before, when the culprit was still unknown by name, God had pronounced the sentence, capital punishment for a capital crime.

To Achan, the culprit, the persistent rebel, the troubler of the nation, the condemned, Joshua’s invitation was startling…

Two men went up into the temple to pray; the one a Pharisee, and the other a publican. The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, God, I thank thee…

Luke 18:10-11a

The Pharisee’s prayer begins by reporting to God what he was doing, thanking God. “God, I thank thee….”

Mirrored here is the autobiographical self-reporting so prevalent in prayer. Examples include, “God, we thank thee…”, “Father, we are thankful…”, “Father, I pray…”, “We ask you, Lord…” Once you begin listening for the Pharisee’s gramatical style, you’ll hear it in prayers everywhere. Isn’t it an irony how easy it is to make prayer an excercise of informing God and men of our own prayerfulness, thankfulness, etc?

In contrast, the publican was direct. None of this “I pray”, “I ask”, but, “God be…” Jesus comments:

I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other: for…