God in a Food Trough

God—omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent. God Almighty. El Shaddai. Just trying to think about him can blow your mind. But to think that God, who is by definition limitless, would choose to take on the greatest limits that we know, can certainly trip all your circuits.

And yet, that is the message of the New Testament. Who would have ever thought this up? Certainly it wouldn’t be the logical conclusion of Judaism—the religion of God, the exalted and high and holy one.

Wanting Life My Way

My wife’s favorite movie, Lost in Yonkers, is one most people didn’t get that excited about. (She just has better taste than most!) The main character, played by Mercedes Rule, is Bella, a woman in her mid-thirties living in New York in the 1940s. Bella has a very childlike personality and is a bit on the slow side. After meeting a guy who wants to marry her, she decides to get her family (mother, aunt, brother and nephews) together to announce the big news.

Enjoy Others

 Last week I spoke to you about remembering to enjoy God, taking seriously David’s call for us to delight ourselves in the Lord.

In writing to Timothy, Paul said something else we need to hear. In the midst of a challenge to those who have wealth, he spoke of putting our hope in God “who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment.”

If we think sometimes that God’s real intention is that we live with a kind of grit-your-teeth, gut-it-out kind of endurance, we need to let Paul’s words change our minds. We live in relationship with a God who “provides us with everything for our enjoyment.”

Enjoy God

This passage from Psalm 37:4 is a good one for me this week and maybe it will be for you as well:

Delight yourself in the Lord

        and he will give you the desires of your heart.

David's statement here in Psalm 37 literally means it is God's will for us to take great pleasure in him. It is not his plan that we just obey him and trudge along the road of faith, grimly trying to hold on until the end. Yes, we need to fear, honor, obey, serve and glorify God and at the same time, enjoy him.

Father of the Bride

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Today, November 20, was a special one. Many in my family will write it on their calendars or store it in their computers. Today our second daughter was married to a man of character, heart and faith.

Give Anyway

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I once spoke with someone going through something very difficult. I asked him how he wanted to handle a certain change that challenging circumstances had dictated. “As painlessly as possible,” he said. “I’ve been through enough.”

This person has lived a life of giving to others, but in that comment he revealed the weakness we all have in the face of strong natural feelings. His pain was causing him to feel a bit like a victim—a victim who had suffered enough.

The Key to Overcoming

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Everything begins in the mind. “As a man thinks—so is he” is still true. Many have pointed out that in every situation there are two significant elements: (1) the circumstance itself and (2) the way you think about it. Of the two, however, the second is far more important than the first.

As I write this, I am reading a book by a man who was paralyzed in his youth by polio and has had only the use of some toes on one foot throughout most of his forty plus years, and yet he has earned and has become an author who types his own manuscripts. His circumstances seem overwhelming, but because of the way he came to think about them, he has been able to overcome.