Grace for the Race

For you who revere my name, the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its rays. And you will go out and frolic like well-fed calves. (Malachi 4:2)

Oh, what a word of encouragement we have before us today! The promise is for all those who revere the name of the Most High God; in response to their reverence, God will shine His light of grace upon them, and they will go forth joyfully, frolicking like well-fed calves released from their stalls after a long winter. The reverence of our Redeemer will bring us multiple rewards of both healing and health that will not only meet us in our deepest place of need but will far surpass anything we could have ever imagined.

Our Lord Jesus, the Son of God, is rightly compared to the sun, for from Him and in Him is the eternal Light of all creation. In fact, the revelation of John from the Isle of Patmos indicates that Christians are “clothed with the sun” (Revelation 12:1). It is Christ’s glorious, righteous robe that adorns us, not only for our justification, but for our sanctification also . . . and ultimately, when we cross the Jordan, for our glorification as well. Being clothed in the robe of His righteousness brings healing to all that is broken in us, and that healing sends us out as happy, healthy, well-fed calves to jubilantly witness for the advancement of His kingdom and His glory.

Those who revere His name are led beside still waters and into green pastures; and when we enter that season when we go forth into the valley of the shadow of death, we shall not fear anything, because the Almighty will be with us every step of the way.

But notice the promise for those who revere His name: We will frolic like well-fed calves. Isn’t the picture of that promise particularly encouraging to you today? We will exult in the freedom that comes to us through faith in Jesus. This freedom is not from an earthly stall, but from our bondage to sin, Satan, and death.

The witness of well-fed calves is rooted in the joy of knowing that we have been set free from everything that enslaved us in the past. We have been set free from the stall of the sin that so easily entangles us. We have been cleansed from all unrighteousness by the blood of the Lamb of God, and, by the power of the indwelling Holy Spirit, we now have the ability to live a life that is glorifying to God and good for us and all those with whom we come in contact.

Regardless of where this finds you today, rejoice in your redemption, knowing that you have been raised from death to life. Go forth joyfully into God’s perfect plan and purpose for your life, even in all your imperfections, knowing that God has nailed every sin and shortcoming to the cross, freeing you to frolic like a well-fed calf as you witness for the glory and grace of our Savior.

This is the Gospel. This is grace for your race. NEVER FORGET THAT . . . AMEN!

Hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us. (Romans 5:5)

As a pastor, I encounter far too many Christians who witness for their Lord by sharing the love of Christ like a well, rather than a reservoir. Let me explain the difference; and I hope you will be encouraged to understand that you have been redeemed to be a reservoir.

Imagine that both a well and a reservoir are filled with the life-giving water that is the love of Christ. The difference between the two truly makes all the difference in the world when it comes to the impact we make in our walk with Jesus. With a well, others must go to the time and labor to receive the love of Christ that lies deep within. They must lower the bucket, fill it, and pull it back up to the top in order to be refreshed. But with a reservoir, the love of Christ not only fills the reservoir, it fills it to overflowing and continually gushes into the lives of all those who come near it!

We love because He first loved us (1 John 4:19), and that love should infuse and permeate everyone we meet, with no effort required on their part. Because the love of God in Christ Jesus flows to us, it must also flow through us as a testimony to the truth that we are His. People should not have to labor to discover the love of Christ in us; it should spill out of us into their lives. It should be that others can’t help but experience the love of Christ from us because that love is so much a part of our lives.

We are redeemed to be a reservoir of the Redeemer’s love . . . and not only to those whom we find easy to love. We must always remember that our Lord loved us while we were still His enemies (Colossians 1:21), and that amazing love and grace of Christ must move us to love even those whom we would otherwise prefer to have nothing to do with. What grace is at work when we love only the lovable and those who love us? As Jesus said, do not even unbelievers do that? (Matthew 5:47). It is only when we let our love overflow toward those who are unfriendly and disagreeable and even openly hostile that we know for certain that we are truly new creations in Christ.

So . . . which term best describes you as an ambassador of the Almighty: a reservoir or a well? Does it take a great deal of effort for those around you to experience the love of Christ that lies deep within you? Must they do all the work in order to taste and see that the Lord who lives within you is truly good? Or are all those who come anywhere near you being drenched by the divine love that has filled you to overflowing?

Here is a helpful reminder: Consider all the times you have been less than lovable to your Lord, yet He poured out no less love on you. Perhaps you denied Him like Peter, not just three times, but more times than you can count? Maybe you were like Martha, far too “busy” to sit as His feet and learn from Him? Is it possible that you, like Thomas, found yourself in a season of doubt? Whatever it was that made you unloving and unlovely, far from experiencing less of your Lord’s love, you were filled to overflowing, because His love for you is as unconditional as it is unending.

Remember, there are many tasks you can perform and many professions you can pursue that do not require you to display any signs of love. But you cannot be a Christian without the love of Christ flowing through you; that is because you have been redeemed to be a reservoir of the Redeemer’s love.

This is the Gospel. This is grace for your race. NEVER FORGET THAT . . . AMEN!        

I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.  The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (Galatians 2:20)

You may remember the Honey, I Shrunk the Kids trilogy, which portrayed the misadventures of inventor Wayne Szalinski and his electromagnetic shrink ray. Whatever the ray pointed at shrank down to microscopic size . . . including people.

Did you know that sin does the very same thing in the life of the believer? Let’s take a look.

When Adam and Eve rebelled against God’s Word in the Garden of Eden, here is what happened: they shrank the size of their lives down to the size of their lives. Our first parents were created by God for God to serve God as His cultural caretakers, and they were commissioned to expand the borders of their lives to the boundaries of God’s kingdom.

Tragically, Adam and Eve chose the way of sin; instead of living for the kingdom of God, they began living for their own kingdom. Sin caused Adam and Eve to shrink their focus from God’s grand plan and purpose for their lives down to their own puny purpose—which was pleasing themselves. Their greatest concern was no longer for the majestic creation God had given them; now their greatest concern was for the tiny course of their lives.

Sin is Satan’s electromagnetic shrink ray. Every time we sin, we shrink in our service to our Savior. There are countless “shrink stories” in the Bible that make it perfectly clear just how destructive sin is in shrinking our lives.

• Abraham shrank his life when he refused to believe the promise of God and passed off his wife as his sister to save his own skin.
• Jacob shrank his life when he schemed to acquire the birthright of his brother Esau.
• Joseph’s brothers shrank their lives when they sold Joseph into slavery because of jealousy.
• Moses shrank his life when he tried to free his people in his own strength by killing the Egyptian who was beating a Hebrew slave.
• Peter shrank his life when he denied knowing Jesus three times on the night our Lord was betrayed.

If we pause for a moment, we can think of numerous times when we have shrunk the size of our lives down to the size of our lives and began living for self rather than the Savior. When we do that, we find living in community with others incredibly difficult and living in contentment with ourselves virtually impossible. When self is on the throne of our lives, we have effectively squeezed our Savior out.

So how do we avoid Satan’s shrink ray? We must remember whose we are and what we have been put here to do. As image-bearers of the Most High God, we are His by creation; for those of us who have been redeemed by the blood of the Lamb, we are twice His by re-creation. We are not our own, we have been bought at the highest price of all: the precious blood of Christ. When we remember whose we are, we will remember what we have been put here to do: to live for the glory of God, not our own selfish pursuits. We will never shrink ourselves when we seek the glory of “our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father, who loved us and by his grace gave us eternal encouragement and good hope” (2 Thessalonians 2:16).

This is the Gospel. This is grace for your race. NEVER FORGET THAT . . . AMEN!

My soul, wait silently for God alone, for my expectation is from Him. (Psalm 62:5 NKJV)

One of the greatest challenges in this life is in dealing with unmet expectations. It affects both our personal and our professional lives. Is there a way forward for the faithful of God to deal with unmet expectations? You bet there is, and it is found in our verse of the day, which offers the key that unlocks the door to undoing our unmet expectations.

We are all faced with two choices in life regarding our expectations: we can root our expectations in “the good life” or we can root our expectations in the godly life. The good life is the life the world promises us. The world tells us we can have it all and we can have it right now. The world promises rewards that can and sometimes do, for a time, give us a sense of satisfaction. The world can deliver many rewards that satisfy the expectations of the flesh. Yet in the end we find them to be as temporal as they are shallow, leaving our expectations utterly unmet. As the wise preacher said, “Meaningless! Meaningless! . . . Everything is meaningless” (Ecclesiastes 1:2).

But this is not for you! The undoing of unmet expectations is found in living the godly life, wherein our expectations are from Him. This does not mean we will get everything we want in life. What it means is we get everything we need—when we need it and how we need to receive it. Our God has promised to meet all of our needs according to His glorious riches in Christ Jesus (Philippians 4:19), and never once has God failed to make good on one of His promises. When our expectations are from God, we find ourselves seeking His will for our lives rather than our own will. Like Jesus, we cry out, “Not my will, but thy will be done.”

The undoing of unmet expectations is found in living for nothing smaller than our Lord Jesus Christ. We live to accomplish His plan and purpose for our lives by following the foreordained path He has set before us, regardless of the cost or circumstance. And as we go through this life—with God meeting our every expectation and receiving all that God has promised to give us—we discover yet another expectation that is sure to come to pass: On the day when we take our last breath, we can expect to be present with our Lord. We will enter through His heavenly gates with praise on our lips and a song in our hearts, and we shall see and know Him as He is.

Regardless of where this message finds you today, the way to unlock the door leading to the undoing of unmet expectations is for your expectation to be from Jesus Christ and not from this world. Remember, eye has not seen and ear has not heard the glories that await the saints of God when they hear these words: “Well done good and faithful servant. Enter into thy rest.”

This is the Gospel. This is grace for your race. NEVER FORGET THAT . . . AMEN!

For freedom Christ has set us free.  (Galatians 5:1)

The Fourth of July, also known as Independence Day, is a national holiday celebrating the anniversary of the day in 1776 that the thirteen American colonies adopted the Declaration of Independence. The Continental Congress formally declared that the American colonies regarded themselves as a new nation, the United States of America, a nation that was no longer part of the British Empire.

From backyard barbeques to baseball games, from picnics to parades, from family reunions to fireworks, today is a day for Americans to celebrate our independence from British rule. But before you head off to your Fourth of July celebrations, let me encourage you to take a moment to reflect on the greatest freedom you have experienced as a child of God: freedom from sin, Satan, and death.

After Adam and Eve rebelled against God in the Garden of Eden, all of humanity was plunged into sin and death. We were all dead in our trespasses and sins and completely unable to do anything about it ourselves. But God in Christ gave us a way out of bondage and into freedom. Because of His crucifixion and resurrection, we have been delivered, by grace through faith, from our slavery to sin and the power of Satan and death. All those who have placed their trust in Jesus Christ alone for salvation have become a new creation in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17), with new dreams, new desires, a new destination—and a new freedom!

What is that new freedom? We are finally free to live a life that is pleasing and glorifying to our Lord Jesus Christ. By the power of the indwelling Holy Spirit, we have the ability to do what God wants us to do and to do it with joy and thanksgiving. But here is the irony: only to the extent that we are in bondage to Jesus are we free to live a God-glorifying life—and that, beloved, is a freedom truly worth celebrating, today and every day as we make our way into glory.

This is the Gospel. This is grace for your race. NEVER FORGET THAT . . . AMEN!

“Lord God, keep forever the promise you have made concerning your servant and his house. Do as you promised, so that your name will be great forever.” (2 Samuel 7:25-26)

God made a promise to King David after denying David’s request to build God a temple: the Sovereign Lord promised David that his house and his kingdom would endure forever and his throne would be established throughout all eternity. David would not be the builder of God’s temple, for God had chosen David’s son Solomon to perform this task. But God made a profound promise to His servant David, who pleased His Lord by reminding Him of it. God not only welcomes our reminders, but He wants us to plead His promises daily—not for His benefit, but for ours. Omniscience needs no reminding, but we certainly do!

So . . . when was the last time you said to Jesus, “Do as you promised!” When you are feeling distant from God, plead the promise He made to never leave you nor forsake you . . . and soon you will be back in communion with your God. If you find yourself facing a formidable medical challenge, plead the promise of the peace He said He would give you . . . and soon that peace will pass all understanding. Perhaps you are facing some overwhelming challenge at work or in school; plead the promise that all things work together for your good . . . and soon you will see just how much God is for you. And if you feel like you have really blown it—I mean really messed things up—plead the promise of His unconditional forgiveness . . . and though your sins be as scarlet, they will soon be white as snow.

God receives our reminders and returns to us multiple rewards. We have nothing in ourselves to broker God’s favor except His promise to be favorable to us. Plead the promises He has made to you and prepare yourself for His answers to rain down from heaven above. Remember, God did not free the children of Israel from bondage in Egypt after 400 years just to leave them to die out in the wilderness. He brought them out of Egypt to bring them into a living and loving relationship with Himself. A pillar of cloud led them, manna came down from heaven, water came out from a rock, and quail were supernaturally blown in from the sea, for God had promised to bring them into a land flowing with milk and honey.

Regardless of where this finds you today, know that your Father in heaven loves to hear you cry, “Do as you promised!” The problem is that we forget that our God is far more ready to hear our cries than we are to make them. It is to our benefit to remind God of the promises He has made, because in the challenges of daily living, we can easily forget them. And in so doing, we forget the glorious goodness of our Great God, for He will always do as He has promised!

This is the Gospel. This is grace for your race. NEVER FORGET THAT . . . AMEN!        

Mary . . . sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to his teaching. But Martha was distracted with much serving.  (Luke 10:39-40 ESV)

Mary and Martha both loved their Lord. Both were sold-out in their commitment to His service. But there was a huge difference in the two serving sisters: Mary knew when to exchange her service for devotion to the One she was serving . . . Martha did not. Within every child of God is some Mary and some Martha. Which one do you identify with more closely?

It is not uncommon for those who are sold out in service to their Savior to find themselves, at times, serving the service rather than the One they are serving. I must confess that I know this truth from personal experience. The old, sinful self is in a constant struggle against the new, Spirit-led self, even when we are engaged in service of our Lord. When the old self wins, the service becomes the end, rather than the means to the end, which is serving Jesus.

Mary and Martha had both been busily engaged in preparing a wonderful feast for Jesus and His companions. We know Mary was just as involved in the preparations as her sister was because of Martha’s urgent request to Jesus: “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Tell her then to help me” (Luke 10:40). This is the classic example of what it looks like when we slip from serving our Savior to serving our service.

Jesus beautifully and tenderly pointed this out to Martha:

The Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things, but one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her.” (Luke 10:41-42)

How easy it is for us to get caught up in Martha-like service! We can be so absorbed in our service that we completely forget to adore the One we are serving. Mary, on the other hand, knew when it was time to exchange serving her Lord for sitting at His feet. The message is clear: We must never let our devotion to our Savior be exchanged for our duty to serve Him. We must remember that the most important thing we can ever give to our Lord is what flows out of our hearts . . . not what passes through our hands. To be sure, we must never stop serving our Savior, but we must know when it is time to exchange service for sitting at His feet.

So . . . who are you most like? Mary or Martha? If your answer is “Neither,” it is time for some self-examination and time to actively engage in service to your Savior. I can assure you that if you approach the leadership team at your church and ask if you can volunteer some of your time, you will be met with open arms! “Many hands make light work.”

On the other hand, if you are a bit like Martha, remember, the greatest service you can offer to your Lord is to do what Mary did: she sat at His feet and worshiped.

This is the Gospel. This is grace for your race. NEVER FORGET THAT . . . AMEN!

All who heard it wondered at what the shepherds told them. (Luke 2:18 ESV)

I encounter far too many believers who have, for a variety of reasons, lost a sense of wonder in their walk with Christ. The shepherds preached the simple message of the Gospel, and “all who heard it wondered.” We should keep that sense of wonder every step of the way into the Celestial City. It is my prayer that these few words will encourage you today to do just that.

The prophet Isaiah reminds us of the many names of our God; one of them is Wonderful Counselor. Our God is Wonderful, and the witness of wonder must be our daily experience, because holy wonder leads to heartfelt worship. Should we not be in a state of perpetual wonder? God came after rebels on the run—our first parents, who willfully disobeyed His one prohibition in the Garden—to bless them and not to destroy them. Instead of casting them into outer darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth, and starting all over with a new “first couple,” God cared for them. And if that isn’t enough to keep us in a state of wonder, God the Father sent His beloved Son to pay the penalty for our sins, so that you and I would be brought back into right relationship with Him. Surely this is the wonder of wonders!

I am convinced that wonder wanes when we shift our focus away from Christ and put it on our circumstances. Our thoughts become trapped in the temporal and the earthly, and we miss out on the wonder of the eternal and the heavenly. When this happens, we must journey back to Golgotha, where our Lord hung on a cross and died in our place. The Lord Jesus Christ chose to be forsaken by His Father so that you and I would never experience utter and eternal damnation. And now God says, “Never will I leave you, never will I forsake you” (Hebrews 13:5). What unimaginable wonder is this, that our God has pledged His fidelity to us for all eternity?

A holy wonder that leads to heartfelt worship will ultimately lend itself to hopeful watching. This will keep us looking up, rather than out and in. When we are looking up at Jesus, we will sense His presence so thickly wherever we go that we may well wonder why we have not taken off our shoes, since we are standing on holy ground. We will cry out with the psalmist, “Many, O Lord my God, are the wonders you have done, the things you planned for us” (Psalm 40:5). The witness of our wonder should never wane when we look back at all God has done for us and look ahead to all God has promised yet to do.

So . . . how would you rate the witness of your holy wonder? If you find it to be a bit less than what it should be, you need only shift your focus away from your circumstances and center it on Christ. If you pause long enough right now, you may even feel the scars on those hands that hold you tightly and will never let you go.

Oh, the wonder of it all!

This is the Gospel. This is grace for your race. NEVER FORGET THAT . . . AMEN!        

Whoever refreshes others will be refreshed.  (Proverbs 11:25)

God has given His people many guarantees in Scripture. Let this one today both bless and strengthen you for the journey ahead. The principle is crystal clear: In God’s economy, you cannot give without getting.

Whoever refreshes (this is how the NIV translates the Hebrew ravah; many other versions render it “waters”) another has the promise of being refreshed (or watered) by God Himself. In other words, the more we look after and serve others, the more God will look after and serve us. The key is to keep our focus on God and not ourselves. When we lift others, God will lift us. When we comfort others, God will comfort us. When we bless others, God will bless us. This is what I call “divine recompense.” But we must do our part! We must fulfill the condition of proactively refreshing others, knowing that God will fulfill His guarantee to refresh us.

No one ever lived a more “other-oriented” life than our Lord Jesus Christ. He continually put others first. He said plainly that “The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45). It was Jesus who, on the night He was betrayed, took a towel and a basin and washed the feet of His disciples, setting the eternal example of how His followers are to live their lives all the way into glory.

By nature, this is impossible for you and me. Sin has turned us inward. Our first thought in the morning and our last thought at night is usually rooted in self. Even as Christian believers, who have been baptized by the Holy Spirit and given a new nature, we must fight with all our might against sinful self-absorption and self-centeredness. It’s not easy to put others first! It isn’t easy to think of others more highly than we think of ourselves. But this is the call for every child of God, and that call comes with a wonderful guarantee from God Himself: when we take time to water others, our God will water the streams of our souls to new levels of refreshment.

So . . . have you been refreshing others lately? Remember, the simple act of refreshing (serving, blessing, etc.) others is often the refreshment promised in and of itself. Are you not blessed every time you bless someone else and see the light of joy and gratitude in their eyes? You cannot give without getting; the more you give, the more you get. Your supply of giving will never run out because God is filling it to overflowing. So refresh others and prepare for refreshment from your Redeemer. God has guaranteed it!

This is the Gospel. This is grace for your race. NEVER FORGET THAT . . . AMEN!

The woman said to Elisha, “Your servant has nothing at all, except a small jar of olive oil.” (2 Kings 4:2)

The woman had suffered the loss of her husband, and now a creditor was coming to take away her two boys as slaves. In desperation, she cried out to the prophet Elisha, who asked how he could help. When she told him she had only a little oil, he instructed her to go and ask her neighbors for empty jars (“Don’t ask for just a few,” Elisha cautioned) and to pour what oil she had into the jars. The woman kept pouring and pouring and pouring . . . until there were no empty jars left. Immediately, the oil stopped flowing. Elisha then told the woman to sell the jars of oil, pay her debts, and assured her that she and her sons could live on what was left.

The biblical principle is clear, and it should be a source of great encouragement to you, regardless of where this message finds you: a little in the hands of our Lord is a lot! Here we see that a little oil in the hands of Omnipotence become more than enough for this widow and her two sons . . . and the same is true for me and you today.

As I read through the Scriptures, it never ceases to amaze me just how incredible our God truly is in meeting us in our deepest places of need. From manna from heaven to water from a rock, Omnipotence sustained the children of Israel in the wilderness for 40 years. Two loaves and five fish in the hands of Omnipotence fed more than 5,000 people, with twelve baskets of leftovers!

The poor widow could not see her abundance, yet it was all around her, and the same can be said of us today. Our God is not impotent; He is not incapable of meeting our needs. In fact, He has promised to meet every single one of our needs (Matthew 6:33), and there is no power in this universe that can hold back His hand.

But we must remember that He will meet our needs in His time and in His way. We need only to trust Him, even when we cannot trace Him. When we find ourselves in lack, we must remember that the lack is never with our God, for He owns the cattle on a thousand hills (Psalm 50:10). God owns everything (Psalm 50:12), and has promised to give to us everything we need when we need it.

The key to living in “times of need and times of abundance,” as Paul said in Philippians 4:12, is to take our eyes off our circumstances and fix them on our Savior. Oh, to have the spiritual eyes to see God’s storehouse of infinite supply! Then we would not shrink back from any storm wind that blows our way. In fact, we would do everything within our power to “nest in the gale,” knowing that our God is in the gale with us, growing us into the person He is calling us to be.

There is no such thing as scarcity with our Savior. There is no such thing as lack with our Lord. We simply need to fix our eyes on things above, and Omnipotence will take care of all things below, right up until that day He calls us home.

This is the Gospel. This is grace for your race. NEVER FORGET THAT . . . AMEN!