Honor

Honor your father and mother, as the Lord your God commanded you. Then you will live a long, full life in the land the Lord your God is giving you (Deuteronomy 5:16, NLT).

What is honor and why in its holding others in esteem and respect will blessing be found?  Something transfers in all relationship when in the exchange of seeing others as worthy and valued and in the actions that follow, which give honor; both parties are blessed.  Honor God and His blessings come into your life by His grace and love. Honor your parents and blessings flow from your relationship with them. Honor others by giving and serving them and relationships on many levels are supported, strengthened, secured and even guaranteed.   

It is a strange thing really that something so beneficial to every one of us as honor is something that is lacking in most relationships. The true honoring of others is rare in many ways but it something that marks God as God and something that will mark us as real followers of Him. Honoring involves both the decision to honor and the resolve to give honor through our actions. God values us and He honors us with His love.  Thus we must see the value of others in all of our relationships and honor them with our love, service and action to really be His children.

Eventually honoring others as an action comes around to honor being bestowed on the one who does the honoring. Thus the verb of honoring in and through our living becomes the noun of honor found in the truth of our character and the respect given to us.

The greatest honor is given to those who from their heart and values honored others in their giving and doing. It is from their character and in their actions that specific deeds, times or even a lifetime of dedicated service is given real honor by others.  It is in out of their humility that they are honored. Those that would seek honors from doing a deed, or being in position of leadership that they may be honored, may fool some people by their actions but their inflated pride will give little joy or satisfaction. The truth is quite simple … choose to honor others as God desires us to do and you will be blessed.

Don’t just pretend to love others. Really love them. Hate what is wrong. Hold tightly to what is good.  Love each other with genuine affection, and take delight in honoring each other (Romans 12:9-10, NLT).

Life Prayer

To retain, might not be gain …

What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? (Mark 8:36, KJ21)

Much effort is put forth in the course of our living to retain things. We have deep desires as human beings to retain as much as possible during our days on this earth. Retaining things in life seems to be a natural aspect of our living, yet our intention retaining does not always bring gain.

Retaining a career or business position might not always be the best for us, if our superiors are demanding more than we want or can psychologically, morally or physically deliver. We could lose our enthusiasm for life, our health and most importantly the moral core of our being that gives us direction and strength for living. We might have retained a position, but we have gained nothing but our wages.

Investing considerable time and effort in our home or a system or plan to retain our material possessions and our monetary savings might work for gain, but it can evaporate in an instant, due to innumerable events beyond our control. What we intended to retain, can be lost.

Jesus Christ as Lord and Master of all things offered a different course of action in His kingdom than the typical way of living, where time and effort are devoted to retention of things in this life on earth. He knew how flimsy and futile all the best intentional retaining in life could be. Much of what we desire to retain is of this earth, and it can easily be lost. Even to gain the whole world would be no gain in the eternal sense if you miss the salvation and keys to the eternal kingdom Christ freely offers.

Thus, Christ asks us, as He asked His disciples to let go of our dedication, efforts and our great desire to retain things that cannot be retained for His eternal Kingdom. It will be of absolutely no gain to retain everything in this world but lose your soul. It is the letting go of the things of this earth and through the giving up of ourselves that we will gain the only things, which will be retained for eternity.

Suggested Reading Mark 8

Seeing, Realizing and Living

Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand and marked off the heavens with a span, enclosed the dust of the earth with a measure and weighed the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance? Who has directed the Spirit of the Lord or as his counselor has instructed him? Whom did he consult for his enlightenment, and who taught him the path of justice, and taught him knowledge, and showed him understanding? Behold the nations are like a drop from a bucket and are accounted as the dust on the scales . . . All the nations are as nothing before him, they are accounted by him as less than nothing! (Isaiah 40:12–17)

When we really and truly see who we are, and when we really and truly see who God is, we are helpless and hopeless in our reach for God. The Almighty and Living God rules and reigns beyond every perceived and comprehensible human sense of perfection in His holiness. He is so utterly indescribable in the countless realms of His power and essence that the sum and the totality of all human vocabulary and language fail to begin even to touch all that He is and does. 

Yet, we long with all our heart and soul to know Him even as we are barely able to grasp and know the slightest and minuscule amounts of His glory and greatness.  To have an intimate relationship with God is our created purpose, but our sin obscures this connection until we find salvation at the cross. It is from the cross forward hopeful in the Risen Christ; we find the endless grace to come again and again in the humble acknowledgement of our limited human strength and capacity and our need for all that an indescribable God can give by, through and in His incomprehensible love.

Continuing down the road of life and faith, we can and will find ourselves time and time again wandering, weary and confused in all we experience and all we face. It is in these moments that both weigh against our hearts and challenge our emotions and our intellect, that we need more than we can gather or find in our being.  It is here in the deepness of our struggle, pain, and difficulty that our needs for the Indescribable God pour forth in our cries for help and clarity in understanding and direction.   It is here again that we must truly see our God for who He is.  Nothing is impossible with Him and nothing is out of His capacity to heal, sustain, restore and redeem in the ever sufficient and overflowing grace of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

It is a humbling thing to truly see who we really are and a glorious and wonderful thing to realize our need for all that the Almighty and Living God can give. Seeing and realizing this great truth brings will always lead us to praise, thankfulness and the worship of our Heavenly Father and our Savior.  Abiding every day in the truth of our need for God and knowing He has the strength and power by His love and grace to give us everything we need is life giving on this earth and for eternity.  Take time today … to be still and thankful for who you are and who your God is!

Suggested Reading … Isaiah 40

The Reason for Owning a Bible

The Crushing of our Lord

Wenceslaus Hollar, Jesus on the Mount of Olives, Print, NGO Image, National Gallery of Art, Public Domain

When He arrived at the place, He said to them, “Pray that you may not enter into temptation.” And He withdrew from them about a stone’s throw, and He knelt down and began to pray, saying, “Father, if You are willing, remove this cup from Me; yet not My will, but Yours be done.” Now an angel from heaven appeared to Him, strengthening Him. And being in agony He was praying very fervently; and His sweat became like drops of blood, falling down upon the ground.
(Luke 22:40-44, NASB)

The Garden located on the side hill of Mount of Olives called Gethsemane derives its name from the Hebrew word for “Olive Press.” How remarkable that this garden so named was the place Jesus favored in His coming to His Father for times of prayer and fellowship.

The Son continually sought blessing, direction and relationship with His Heavenly Father in all matters assuring that He might be in constant and complete unity with His Father’s will. On all the occasions up until this point, the Son had never had any difficulty with the Father’s will but now massive amounts of untold heaviness were pressing in and on the body and spirit of the Son. It was a time of extreme and unbearable crushing in this place of “The Pressing.”

The Son staggers under the weight of the judgment about to come upon Him. Although He never wavers in His submission to His Father … yet He does plead for a possible release from the course of destiny now before Him. Some people explain the hesitation on the part of the Son as coming from the tremendous pain, torture and suffering that was about to come upon the Savior because of our sin and the sin of the world.

These are significant pressures but quite possible the massive heartache and agony that was crushing the Savior, came from knowing He would bear the weight of the sin of the world and the knowledge of the abandonment that was to happen when the Father accepted the Son's freely laying down His life on the cross as He bore the sin of the world through His death. While in the realm of His deity, Christ could not die ... He did die in the flesh. Yet, somehow in the deepest of all mysteries, as Christ both in fulfilling the prophecies of David (Psalm 22) and as He cried out to His Father for abandoning Him on the Cross (Mark 15:34) because of the sin of the world that He was bearing, He would experience in the flesh a sense of separation from His Father while somehow still abiding as divine in the unfathomable unity and love that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit had continuously lived in without beginning or end.

The abandonment of the Father of Jesus in the flesh was required for the redeeming of all people for all time. It a great and indescribable love the Father has for us that even while we are hopelessly lost in our sins, He loves us (Romans 5:8). It was an incredible love that demanded our Heavenly Father accept the death of His beloved Son and allow the crushing weight of the sin of the world to be imputed to Him to save a world of sinners. It was an incredible love our Savior had for us to lay down His life and to submit to this unfathomable crushing for our sins. We cannot imagine or comprehend the crushing that took place in the Garden of Gethsemane to our blessed Savior but we can be ever so thankful for the forgiveness and freedom it gives us. What was pressed out in the place of “The Crushing” were the first steps of our Savior in willingly walking towards the giving of His life on the cross and the amazing gift of our salvation. Thanks, be to God!

 

But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed. (Isaiah 53:5, NIV)

 

Suggested Reading … Luke 22; Isaiah 53

Revised and Republished Devotion which was Originally Published - April 2, 2015

Seeing beyond what our eyes can see.

“So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day.  For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison,  as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal” (2 Corinthians 4:16-18 ESV).

We have to trust our eyes. We use them to understand and navigate our daily world, activities and responsibilities. We use our eyes to see beauty and yet at the same time our eyes see things that are unpleasant.  Our eyes both gather data and filter information allowing us to make decisions and choices around us.  They can also be a determining factor in how we perceive our own attractiveness and value. Those that have lost their ability to see with their eyes will have to rely on their other senses to facilitate what they cannot see using those senses as their eyes unto their world. Yet our eyes can also deceive us in our own thinking, adding a sense of permanence to what might be temporary. Thus we have to be careful with what we look at and how it we use it, for our eyes guide and guard our heart at the same time.

Beyond our physical eyes … we all have spiritual eyes as well. These eyes sense, gather and filter via our conscience the colors and hues of right and wrong in our living.  If we are reborn unto God and His Spirit lives in us, we not only reborn to sense right and wrong but we are reborn to desire the life of God and His instructions and desires for us.  Thus our spiritual eyes should help us perceive and avoid things that are harmful, evil and would lead us away from God and grieve His Spirit which is alive in us.

Still, even as our physical eyes can be clouded by physical problems in our eyes; our spiritual eyes can be clouded by spiritual problems that turn us away from God’s purposes and desires and may let us formulate opinions and values that might be faulty.  We might see ourselves as stronger and more invincible then we are.  We might value the things as permanent and yet they might be the most temporary of all things.  Sufferings and difficulties might seem of no value and yet they might develop our faith and character as they someday will bring the eternal blessings of God to our lives. Only God can give us a deeper and more truthful understanding of the things around us in any given moment or season as we trust Him in faith which is far beyond what our limited spiritual eyes can now perceive.

We were created for more than what our physical eyes can see and we need to let our spiritual eyes be completely open to the faithfulness and goodness of God.  Much of what God desires to give us, cannot be seen or perceived at any given moment in time but as we obey and trust Him in faith, we will find that He is working in us to give us what is of eternal value and blessing.

“You will show me the path of life; In Your presence is fullness of joy; At Your right hand are pleasures forevermore” (Psalm 16:11 KJV).

Suggested Bible Reading ... 2 Corinthians 4 & Psalm16