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We all want that easy, comfortable, safe, secure life. In fact, we pray about it often. But is that what God wants for you? Is that His high priority for your life?

    No one ever said that they learned their deepest lessons of life, or had their sweetest encounters with God, on the sunny days. People go deep with God when the drought comes. That is the way God designed it.
    Christ aims to be magnified in life most clearly by the way we experience him in our losses. Paul is our example: “We were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead” (2 Corinthians 1:8-9).
    The design of Paul’s suffering was to make radically clear for his own soul, and for ours, that God and God alone is the only treasure who lasts. When everything in life is stripped away except God, and we trust him more because of it, this is gain, and he is glorified.
     …If we can learn to enjoy Christ and magnify Him even in the midst of pain and suffering, we show the world where our true love lies.
     …Jesus’ beauty shines most brightly when He is treasured above wealth, above health, and above life itself.
–John Piper

Though this may not be what we want to hear, I think it is right on target. The valleys of life show us who we can trust, and when we come out of the valley after holding God’s hand through it, we find that He is the One most worthy of all our trust. He is the One who is ever faithful to His promises to always be with us. I don’t know what you are struggling with today, but I know that if you will hold on to Jesus, you will not be disappointed. You will discover that even if you have no safety, security, or comfort other than Him… He is enough!

In his own social interactions, Jesus was putting into practice “the great reversal” heralded in the Beatitudes. Normally in this world we look up to the rich, the beautiful, the successful.
   Grace, however, introduces a world of new logic. Because God loves the poor, the suffering, the persecuted, so should we. Because God sees no undesirables, neither should we. By his own example, Jesus challenged us to look at the world through what Irenaeus would call “grace-healed eyes.”
–Philip Yancey

I need that “great reversal” in my own life. When I look at people without doing so through the lens of grace, I judge them, I get irritated with them, I compare my life to them, instead of simply loving them, feeling compassion or sorrow for those in need, and feeling joy for those who are experiencing blessings.

Therefore, my prayer this morning is… Jesus, give me “grace-healed eyes” and grace-filled eyes, so that I look at people with compassion and love – the way that you look at them. Help me to see with your eyes.

The Beatitudes: (from the New Living Translation)
“God blesses those who are poor and realize their need for him,
for the Kingdom of Heaven is theirs.
God blesses those who mourn,
for they will be comforted.
God blesses those who are humble,
for they will inherit the whole earth.
God blesses those who hunger and thirst for justice,
for they will be satisfied.
God blesses those who are merciful,
for they will be shown mercy.
God blesses those whose hearts are pure,
for they will see God.
God blesses those who work for peace,
for they will be called the children of God.
God blesses those who are persecuted for doing right,
for the Kingdom of Heaven is theirs.

Well, I got through half the year without missing a post each day, but coming off of vacation, I got two days behind! So I’m going to catch up by giving you three different quotes about hope today:

    There are two ways to look at human history, I have concluded. One way is to focus on the wars and violence, the squalor, the pain and tragedy and death. From such a point of view, Easter seems a fairy-tale exception, a stunning contradiction in the name of God. That gives some solace, although I confess that when several of my friends died, grief was so overpowering that any hope in an afterlife seemed somehow thin and insubstantial.
    But There is another way to look at the world. If I take Easter as the starting point, the one incontrovertible fact about how God treats those whom he loves, then human history becomes the contradiction and Easter a preview of ultimate reality.
    Hope then flows like lava beneath the crust of daily life.
–Philip Yancey

    I take hope in Jesus’ scars. From the perspective of heaven, they represent the most horrible event that has ever happened in the history of the universe. Even that event, though —the crucifixion— Easter turned into a memory. Because of Easter, I can hope that the tears we shed, the blows we receive, the emotional pain, the heartache over lost friends and loved ones, all these will become memories, like Jesus’ scars.
    Scars never completely go away, but neither do they hurt any longer. We will have re-created bodies, a re-created heaven and earth. We will have a new start, an Easter start.
–Philip Yancey

    Christians can hope because faith always reaches beyond earthly circumstances. Its confidence is in a person. And no other person in recorded history has influenced more people in as many conditions over so long a time as Jesus Christ. The shades and tones of his image seem to shift with the needs of men:

Truly, he is a man for all time. In a day when many regard him as irrelevant, a relic of a quickly discarded past, church history provides a quiet testimony that Jesus Christ will not disappear from the scene. His title may change but his truth endures for all generations.
–Bruce Shelley

I hope that you have hope because of who Jesus is and because of:
– what He has done in your life in the past;
– what He is doing in your life in the present; and
– what He will do in your life in the future stretching into all eternity!

Private prayer should be practiced by every Christian;Long periods of Bible meditation will purify our gaze and direct it; Church attendance will enlarge our outlook and increase our love for others; Service and work and activity — all are good and should be engaged in by every Christian.
But at the bottom of all these things, giving meaning to them, will be the inward habit of beholding God. A new set of eyes (so to speak) will develop within us, enabling us to be looking at God while our outward eyes are seeing the scenes of this passing world.
–A. W. Tozer

As Christians we do not have absolute proof for our belief in Jesus. There is in fact no absolute proof for any ultimate proposition, whether Christian or Buddhist or atheist or whatever. But the God of the Bible does not call us to leap in the dark; he does not require faith without evidence, for that is mere superstition…. I found God offered both: He gives us the subjective experience of knowing him and objective evidence to act upon. It is not evidence that overwhelms us or answers every question, but it is evidence that is sufficient.
–Rebecca Pippert

Amen.