Month: June 2013

Categories
Prayer

A Powerful Prayer for Today

a relief sculpture of a person prayingR.A.Torrey: We are too busy to pray, and so we are too busy to have power. We have a great deal of activity, but we accomplish little …many services but few conversions….

I ran across this prayer during my reading and thought it was excellent. I hope you won’t just read it, but that you will pray it for yourself and for your church this morning…

“God, give us tears for our sins. Forgive us for being so shallow in prayer, …so content amid perishing neighbors, so empty of passion and earnestness in all our conversation. Restore to us the childlike joy of our salvation. …Cause us to hold to the cross with fear and trembling as our hope-filled…tree of life. Grant us nothing, absolutely nothing, the way the world views it. May Christ be all in all.
…Oh God, place [within us] passionate prayer, poverty of spirit, hunger for God, rigorous study of holy things, white-hot devotion to Jesus Christ, utter indifference to all material gain, and unremitting labor to rescue the perishing, perfect the saints, and glorify our sovereign Lord.
Humble us, O God, under Your mighty hand, and let us rise…as witnesses and partakers of the sufferings of Christ. In His awesome name. Amen.”
(from John Piper in Brothers, We are not Professionals)

What else would you add to a prayer that we should all be praying today?

— brian rushing

Categories
Worship

The Silence of Death.

No sound comes out of graves.
But on a Saturday some 2000 years ago,
that silence was deafeningly loud at the tomb of Jesus.
a carved rock tomb which signifies the silence of the tomb of Jesus
Have you ever had one of your dreams dashed…to the point that it left you speechless? I can’t imagine seeing Jesus crucified on Friday and to have all my hopes as a disciple dashed and destroyed. How could He die? What will I do now? The silence screaming back at me from my dark questions would have been deafening.

It was a dark day in history. There have been other dark days. But I love what Ravi Zacharias has to say about the dark days of history – including the dark spots that stand as blemishes on the history of Christianity:

“As discomforting as it is to admit, much of what the church has had to face by way of criticism has been deserved. Much wrong has been perpetrated in history by people supposedly acting in the name of Christ. In many parts of the world today the church has a poor name, and a look back at her track record in those settings often reveals valid reasons for that contempt. But… the deviants often get more attention than do the normal.”

“But I point you not to them or to any man; rather, I point you to the person of Jesus Christ. Look at who He is and who He claims to be.”

“Do yourself a favor and get your eyes off of the shortcomings of institutions and people and history’s dark spots. Level your scrutiny at the person of Christ, and you will see the One who wears His Father’s coat very well.”

“Pilate said of Him, “I find no fault in this man. The thief on the cross said, “We receive the due reward of our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.” Jesus looked at His fiercest opponents and said, “Which of you convinces me of any sin?” That last challenge could not have been made by any other religious leader, founder, or prophet. The sinfulness of each one of them is readily visible and undeniable.”

“Jesus alone stands without moral blemish.”
“Fairy tales are merely fantastic; Jesus Christ is fantastically true.”

The silence of Saturday was deafening, but the resurrection of Sunday was on its way!
Jesus is fantastically true, and so was His resurrection!

— brian rushing

Categories
Worship

The Good God of Good Friday

scrabble tiles spelling friday, as a visual representation for Good FridayA very few of you that have been following me for the short time I’ve been posting on facebook may have noticed that I have been adding my prior facebook posts into my blog. Going back through some of my posts that I wrote for facebook before I started the email subscription and blog, I felt they would be useful to share with everyone. So when you read today’s post and wonder why I am posting about Good Friday several months after it has occurred, it is because it is a “recycled post” but one with ideas that are applicable for today. So…   What’s So Good About Good Friday?

The reason we celebrate Good Friday as a holi-day (Holy-Day) is because of Jesus – His Goodness. His goodness to leave Heaven and put on humanity; His goodness to come to earth as its Eternal King yet not to be served but to serve; His goodness to take the punishment of my sin though He was sinless.

And it isn’t just that His greatness is to be remembered only on Good Friday or on the days when I feel blessed, but God is good all the time!

Corrie ten Boom reminds us of this when she says:
“Often I have heard people say, “How good God is! We prayed that it would not rain for our church picnic, and look at the lovely weather!” Yes, God is good when He sends good weather. But God was also good when He allowed my sister, Betsie, to starve to death before my eyes in a German concentration camp.”
the inside of a concentration camp barracks
What an amazing outlook on this sin-filled, evil world where God’s goodness is evident even in the midst of our circumstances. We invited sin into His perfect world. We chose to listen to and trust Satan instead of God. And instead of blasting us into oblivion, He becomes our righteousness in the midst of this perverse earth. We still have to endure the consequences of living in a sin-soaked world. We still have to endure the consequences of our own poor choice of choosing sin. But thankfully, we can do so knowing that our God of goodness will walk with us through every difficulty.

Corrie ten Boom knew that God was good even though she and Betsie had to endure the evil of the concentration camp. What an amazing statement she made showing that she was allowing God to transform her mind, and therefore change her entire outlook on life.

God, change our outlook on life so that we better understand your greatness no matter the circumstances we find ourselves in. And Thank You for Good Friday!

(Thanks to my friend Mariah Fields for sharing this wonderful quote with me from Corrie ten Boom!)

— brian rushing

Categories
Relationships

True Love Ain’t Free

free parking 2
There ain’t much in life that is free.
Certainly not love.
True love demands commitment.
True love is an active choice of binding oneself to another.

“They have invented a new phrase that is a black-and-white contradiction in two words—”free love.” As if a lover had been, or ever could be, free. It is the nature of love to bind itself….”

The quote is from G.K. Chesterton. And I love how he finishes this thought about the binding nature of love. He says that “the institution of marriage merely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at his word.”

When we say “for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness, & in health,” we are making an active, binding statement. We are giving our word that we will be bound up with the other person for a lifetime.

Ravi Zacharias reflects (somewhat deeply) on this idea of binding love:
“Unfortunately in the English language we have cheated ourselves by using the same [word] to cover a wide variety of relationships. In the Greek language there were four different words, each describing a different kind of love:
      ‘Agape’ refers to a pure love with particular reference to God.
      ‘Phileo’ is the love of friendship.
      ‘Storge’ describes the love of a parent.
      ‘Eros’ is romantic love.

“Note carefully that although only one of the loves [eros] is physically consummated, all of them involve commitment. However, in our culture when we say “love” it is most often physical love that is implied, and that devoid of commitment. How strange that we call the sexual act “making love” when in actuality if that act is without commitment…it is a literal and figurative denuding of love in which the individual is degraded to an object.”

“When love is shallow the heart is empty, but if the sacrifice of love is understood, one can drink deeply from its cup and be completely fulfilled.”

I hope that my love for others will always be a love that has commitment backing it up.
How has someone shown you that love is a commitment?

Tozer: The true follower of Christ will not ask, “If I embrace this truth, what will it cost me?”

— brian rushing

Categories
Relationships

Letting the Overflow Spill Out

Do you remember Rainman . . . “I’m an excellent driver… Dad lets me drive slow on the driveway every Saturday. …But not on Monday, definitely not on Monday… Uh oh, fifteen minutes to Judge Wapner.”

Ha! As for myself, I might change the phrase to something like – “I’m an excellent reader.” What I mean is that I love to read, and I hate to keep the great stuff I come across to myself. Some of it makes its way into sermons, but there just is not enough time to share it all. Therefore, the overflow spills out into my posts.
the overflow in the bucket is pouring out
That might answer your question as to why I sometimes quote from one person for several days in a row. As I am reading a book, I might come across some powerful ideas that I want to share with you, and so that is when the overflow spills over.

I hope you will do the same – pouring into the lives of those around you the overflow of what God is showing you or teaching you. How well are you doing that with your children? with coworkers? with social media? If you look back over your own facebook posts or tweets from the past month, how could you have changed a caption to one of your posted pictures to let your friends know that God is the One who has blessed you with that beautiful child or family? Are you using your overflow to exalt Him? Are you being intentional?

As I have said before, we need to keep praying: “God, Help Us To Change Our Conversations!”

Today, I hope that you will strategically use your conversations to show that Jesus is your greatest Treasure.

— brian rushing