daily scriptures first thoughts september 14 2007

Morning: Psalm 51:1-12
1 Kings 18:20-40
Philippians 3:1-16
Matthew 3:1-12
Evening: Psalm 142:1-7

I am grateful that God gives us a new day, and a perspective of time. To look back and remember. To live in the present. To hope for the future. If I were stuck in only one dimension of time, I would despair, or at the very least be like a hamster on a wheel. As it is, God has created us with a past, a present and future - God has created us for eternity, and has always been with us. The peace I have about all this is that this eternity is with Jesus, who redeemed me and made things in all time, right with God. My past is cleansed, my present is purposeful, and my future is assured to be with God forever. Life doesn't get much better than that. The psalmist prays in Psalm 51:

⁸Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones that you have crushed rejoice. ⁹Hide your face from my sins, and blot out all my iniquities. ¹⁰Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me.

And so God has.

Still, we live "in the flesh" in the "not yet." Memories of the old me living within the new me, bring sadness and regret, and humility. Paul revisited his past in his letter to the Philippians, and also in I Timothy:

If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: ⁵circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; ⁶as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless. ⁷Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ.

He is more remorseful in his rehearsal of his past in I Timothy, calling himself, formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence. But he tells us in everything, we stand pardoned in our new humanity, sins forgotten, ready to meet the day as a servant of Christ, awaiting our future reunion with our redeemer.

O Happy Days! Yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Thanks be to God.

daily scripture first thoughts september 11 2007

Morning: Psalm 42:1-11
1 Kings 16:23-34
Philippians 1:12-30
Mark 16:1-8 (9-20)
Evening: Psalm 102:1-28

On this anniversary of 9/11, my husband has just landed at London's Heathrow airport for a business trip. I am anxious a bit, as I remember that we were separated 6 years ago on this day, on 9/11/01. I was at Princeton seminary and he was back in Overland Park, Kansas at work, when we watched the towers go down miles apart from each other. How I missed him and my children on that day, and the days that followed. Psalm 42 was on my heart back then - and it rises up from within me whenever I think of being separated from those I love and feel distant from God. When I heard and watched the terrorist world attack my country and my faith. When I listened to the explanations from some ambitious politicians and more than a few Christians explain the evil as God's wrath on America that made it even worse, while the world watched how we responded. And today, the evil is still with us, even though some of those voices are not. The grief is remembered.

As I kissed my husband goodbye yesterday, I was prompted by the Spirit to tell him to remember we are one in the Spirit, even though we are absent in the flesh, in the back of my mind thinking, "what if I never see him again?" But today, the Lord blessed me with Paul's letter to the Philippians, a letter of encouragement to those he was separated from, while in prison for the gospel.

The psalmist also reminds us that our hope is in the Lord alone, that he is the true source of our longing and our peace. No matter what happens to us - or those we love - peace and comfort, hope comes from God. God is the only One we can count on now and for eternity because of Jesus. Many I know this day are suffering for the gospel, with decisions of conscience; others face family struggles, poverty, depression, separation from loved ones, aging. I miss my husband this morning, and my 2 children who live in other cities. And I feel like Paul sometimes, risking to preach the grainy truth of the gospel, shedding light on the evil that is within us and that pursues us, knowing that I will sometimes be struck down, ridiculed. And sometimes, I will behave badly in it all while others are watching.

But Paul also assures me when he writes of the sovereignty of God and the power of God's word in all things: ¹⁸What does it matter? Just this, that Christ is proclaimed in every way, whether out of false motives or true; and in that I rejoice...²⁷...live your life in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ, so that, whether I come and see you or am absent and hear about you, I will know that you are standing firm in one spirit, striving side by side with one mind for the faith of the gospel...

May the love of God and the peace of Christ and the fellowship of the Spirit be yours today as we remember 9/11 and proclaim the gospel in season and out.