Praise the
Lord for this new day. My wife celebrated her 60 something birthday
yesterday. She was praying for snow for her birthday, and the Lord
granted her the desire of her heart. He sent some very fresh snow on
her way. She was ecstatic and jubilant. She received many
phone calls and birthday cards. One of the cards she received from a very
dear servant of the Lord that we were blessed with in our first
Church we served in 1978. She is a widow now but lives loving and serving the
Lord. She got married when she was 16 years old. She still lives in
the house where she and husband lived and raised their children. My wife received
another special call from one of our granddaughters. She talked to
her grandma over for 30 minutes. Then she talked to me. She said to
me, "Grandpa - Can I ask you a question" Yes, of course",
I said. "What is your question?" Can you play
with me when you come to our house?" "Of course I will", I
said. She shares her birthday week with her grandma, She told me
that she will celebrate her birthday 5 days after her grandma's birthday.
She will turn 5 years old. Praise The Lord for birthdays and the
special days in our lives.
We live in an
exciting time in world History. Praise the Lord for this New Year. It
is great to be alive and great to know Jesus as our Lord and Savior and serve
Him as the King of kings and Lord of lords.
I read
recently that over 100 billion emails are sent each day. That’s more than ten
times the population of the whole world. Each day 5000 new books are
published. This year the number of text messages will exceed 6 trillion.
If we take the year Christ was born as
our starting point, it took 1500 years for all the knowledge in the world to
double. The next doubling took only 250 years. It doubled again in
150 years. By the end of World War II, knowledge doubled every 25 years. Today
knowledge is doubling every 12 months. No wonder we can’t keep up. According to Stephen Davey, “If you
happen to read the New York Times newspaper for one week, you will be exposed
to more information than the average person living in the 1800‘s, came across
in their entire lifetime.” (From the message “Tutored by Truth.”)
We are being swamped by a tidal wave of
information that pours in 24/7/365. The whole world is now “live” and in
“real-time.” Stories change every few minutes, and the screen you
watch may have a news anchor reading a story with an image to the right, a
sidebar to the left, with a screen crawl at the top and another at the bottom
so that you’re following five different information sources at the same time on
the same screen. No wonder we are easily distracted. We look without
seeing, we listen without hearing, and we speak without understanding. We
are a wired up, tuned in, hyper-caffeinated generation.
Some years ago Bob Moorehouse wrote an
essay called The Paradox of Our Time. Here’s a brief excerpt:
We've learned how to make a living, but not a life. We've
added years to life not life to years. We've
been all the way to the moon and back, but have trouble crossing the street to
meet a new neighbor. We conquered outer space but not inner space. We've
done larger things, but not better things.
Every part of this summary seems
very true, but I was especially drawn to this sentence: “We’ve conquered outer
space but not inner space.” Everything we build is bigger, stronger,
faster, and larger. We’ve come a long way in a short time. The engine of
human progress hums right along. We send men to the moon, satellites into
orbit, and radio waves to the stars. Inner space is another matter. We’re not even close to conquering
that. The human heart seems as unruly as ever. If we are
honest with ourselves, we all know that the real battles of life are inside,
not outside. "My greatest challenge is the man in the mirror." When I say that the
human heart is unruly, I speak about not yours, but mine.
What we are on the inside matters more than
what happens on the outside. That’s where the brief book of James becomes incredibly
relevant. This epistle, written 2000 years ago to beleaguered, scattered,
oppressed Jewish believers who were just barely hanging on to their faith,
speaks with amazing clarity to life in the 21st-century. The book of
James would have us discover the freedom that comes when we respond the
right way to the pressures of life.
"We
look without seeing, we listen without hearing, and we speak without understanding."
James 1:19-20 specifically answers the question, "How do you
respond properly when the heat is on, the pressure is building, and you are
about to lose it?" Pay close attention to his answer:
“Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick
to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; for the anger of man does not produce
the righteousness of God.” “Be quick to hear” (James 1:19a).
Wisdom begins when we listen more and talk
less. In context, this sort of listening starts by paying attention
to what God has said in his Word. In the first century, believers didn’t
have all the "advantages" we have. They didn’t have printed copies of
the New Testament. They didn’t have the Bible on a smartphone app so they could
read it wherever they went. For the most part, hearing the Word meant
meeting with other believers and listening to the Word being taught. It
meant hearing, memorizing and then meditating on what they had heard.
Wisdom
begins when we listen more and talk less. I wonder who is better off,
the first-century believers who had almost no copies of the Word or
21st-century believers who have the Bible at our fingertips. No one would
trade our technology for life 2000 years ago, but I will say this. Technology
is useless (and even dangerous) if we are so busy and so distracted that we are
not “quick to hear” what God is saying to us.
Jesus
didn’t come to make us nicer people. He came to make us new people.
We are to extend grace to others as God has extended grace to us. We
who have been showered with God’s grace in Christ are to give to other
undeserving sinners the same outpouring of grace. From God to us to others. Grace to
us, grace to others. This is God’s plan. We do
for others what God has done for us. We have been forgiven; we know what
it is like. Now do the same for others. We are not left to wonder
what it means to forgive those who have hurt us.
We need the Lord Jesus living in us. In one of
his books, British Bible teacher F. B. Meyer talked about how Christ living in
us makes all the difference in the moment of temptation. Meyer said that
when he felt himself getting angry or irritable, he asked the Lord for the
quality most needed at that moment:
Your patience, Lord Jesus.
Your kindness, Lord Jesus.
Your love, Lord Jesus.
Your courage, Lord Jesus.
Your wisdom, Lord Jesus.
Your joy, Lord Jesus.
Your compassion, Lord Jesus.
If we believe that in Jesus Christ
dwells all the fullness of God (and we do), and if we believe Christ dwells in
our hearts by faith (and we do), then we may believe that in our lives this
week the fullness of Christ, the beauty of Christ, the grace of Christ, the mercy
of Christ, the holiness of Christ, and the kindness of Christ may fill us and
drive out the evil—the lust, greed, impatience, unbelief, critical spirit, and
the angry intolerance that holds us back. When we are living in Christ and Christ is living in us,
then by God’s grace we will be . . .
Swift to hear,
Slow to speak, and
Slow to anger.
Come, Lord Jesus, transform us by the
power of your Word so that your beauty may be seen in us.
In Christ,
Brown
