Easter Devotion (Day 32) - Unity of the Spirit

 

May the God who gives endurance and encouragement give you the same attitude of mind toward each other that Christ Jesus had, so that with one mind and one voice you may glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Romans 15:5-6 

This passage comes toward the conclusion of the Letter to the Romans. One of Paul's great concerns in this letter was disagreements between the Jews and the Gentiles of the fledgling churches of Rome. This prayer is part of a longer passage appealing for understanding and unity, regardless of backgrounds. 

Often these verses are read as a call to ecumenicalism, or churches with different backgrounds worshiping together. While Paul would undoubtedly have encouraged this, it is only the surface of what he was requesting in this prayer. He is actually asking that believers learn to think about one another the way that Jesus thinks about them, a way entirely based in love. Every person on earth is loved by Jesus. He came to earth, died, and rose again for each individual person. If we look at everyone we meet as someone whom Jesus felt was worth dying for, then how can we treat them as anything but a brother or sister? Think how Jesus reached out to those on the edge of society, eating and drinking with sinners, healing lepers, and blessing the poor. There is no room for anything but a self-sacrificing, encouraging, and uplifting attitude among anyone claiming to have the thoughts of Jesus. 

Prayer: Lord Jesus, may I see others through Your eyes and learn to love them as You do. Help me to remember Your way of love, a way that brought You to the cross for the sins of every human being. Help me to reach out to every brother and sister in Christ, no matter what their background. In Your Name I pray, Amen.

*This devotion taken from The Sanctuary for Lent 2016 by Sue Mink

Streams in the Desert - Dew From Heaven

I will be as the dew unto Israel (Hosea 14:5).

The dew is a source of freshness. It is nature's provision for renewing the face of the earth. It falls at night, and without it the vegetation would die. It is this great value of the dew which is so often recognized in the Scriptures. It is used as the symbol of spiritual refreshing. Just as nature is bathed in dew, so the Lord renews His people. In Titus 3:5 the same thought of spiritual refreshing is connected with the ministry of the Holy Ghost--"renewing of the Holy Ghost."

Many Christian workers do not recognize the importance of the heavenly dew in their lives, and as a result they lack freshness and vigor. Their spirits are drooping for lack of dew.

Beloved fellow-worker, you recognize the folly of a laboring man attempting to do his day's work without eating. Do you recognize the folly of a servant of God attempting to minister without eating of the heavenly manna? Nor will it suffice to have spiritual nourishment occasionally. Every day you must receive the renewing of the Holy Ghost. You know when your whole being is pulsating with the vigor and freshness of Divine life and when you feel jaded and worn. Quietness and absorption bring the dew. At night when the leaf and blade are still, the vegetable pores are open to receive the refreshing and invigorating bath; so spiritual dew comes from quiet lingering in the Master's presence. Get still before Him. Haste will prevent your receiving the dew. Wait before God until you feel saturated with His presence; then go forth to your next duty with the conscious freshness and vigor of Christ.

--Dr. Pardington

Dew will never gather while there is either heat or wind. The temperature must fall, and the wind cease, and the air come to a point of coolness and rest--absolute rest, so to speak--before it can yield up its invisible particles of moisture to bedew either herb or flower. So the grace of God does not come forth to rest the soul of man until the still point is fairly and fully reached.

Drop Thy still dews of quietness,

Till all our strivings cease:

Take from our souls the strain and stress;

And let our ordered lives confess

The beauty of Thy peace.

Breathe through the pulses of desire

Thy coolness and Thy balm;

Let sense be dumb, its beats expire:

Speak through the earthquake, wind and fire,

O still small voice of calm!

The Holy Spirit

Luke 11:13 – “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him!”

In the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord had already spoken of His wonderful “HOW MUCH MORE?” Here in Luke, where He repeats the question, there is a difference. Instead of speaking, as then of giving good gifts, He says, “How much more shall your heavenly Father give THE HOLY SPIRIT?” He teaches us that the chief and the best of these gifts is the Holy Spirit, or rather, that in this gift all others are comprised. The Holy Spirit is the first of the Father’s gifts, and the one He delights most to bestow. The Holy Spirit is therefore the gift we ought first and chiefly to seek.

The unspeakable worth of this gift we can easily understand. Jesus spoke of the Spirit as “THE promise of the Father,” the one promise in which God’s Fatherhood revealed itself. The best gift a good and wise father can bestow on a child on earth is his own spirit. This is the great object of a father in education—to reproduce in his child his own disposition and character. If the child is to know and understand his father; if, as he grows up, he is to enter into all his will and plans; if he is to have his highest joy in the father, and the father in him, he must be of one mind and spirit with him. So it is impossible to conceive of God bestowing any higher gift on His child than this, His own Spirit. God is what He is through His Spirit; the Spirit is the very life of God. Just think what it means: God giving His own Spirit to His child on earth.

Or was not this the glory of Jesus as a Son upon earth, that the Spirit of the Father was in Him? At His baptism in Jordan the two things were united—the voice, proclaiming Him the Beloved Son, and the Spirit, descending upon Him. The apostle says of us, “Because you are sons, God sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father.” A king seeks in the whole education of his son to call forth in him a kingly spirit. Our Father in heaven desires to educate us as His children for the holy, heavenly life in which He dwells, and for this gives us, from the depths of His heart, His own Spirit. It was this which was the whole aim of Jesus when, after having made atonement with His own blood, He entered for us into God’s presence, that He might obtain for us, and send down to dwell in us, the Holy Spirit. As the Spirit of the Father, and of the Son, the whole life and love of the Father and the Son are in Him and, coming down into us, He lifts us up into their fellowship. As Spirit of the Father, He sheds abroad the Father’s love, with which He loved the Son, in our hearts, and teaches us to live in it. As Spirit of the Son, He breathes in us the childlike liberty, and devotion, and obedience in which the Son lived upon earth. The Father can bestow no higher or more wonderful gift than this: His own Holy Spirit, the Spirit of sonship.

Prayer: Father in heaven, You sent Your Son to reveal Yourself to us, Your Father-love, and all that that love has for us. And He has taught us that the gift above all gifts which You would bestow in answer to prayer is the Holy Spirit.

Acts 4 - Astonished

Intentionally Posturing Our Hearts & Lives in Surrender to the Holy Spirit


Acts 4:1-16
Astonished
 
My father used to have a saying. Well, he had many sayings, but this is one of my favorites:

“There is a man impressed with the sound of his own voice”.

A man so enveloped in his own pride, he loved his thoughts and his intellect and thought them superior to anyone else. I have a feeling many members of the Sanhedrin in Jesus’ day loved the sound of their voices too.

And then there’s Peter. An unschooled ordinary man. These prideful leaders could not wrap their minds around how an uneducated common fisherman could preach so eloquently and assert himself so boldly. They were astonished.


I love how Luke tells us they had “been with Jesus”. There is no amount of education that can replace that. We can know all about Jesus. We can study every word He’s ever said and every miracle He’s ever performed. We can listen to a thousand sermons, but until you sit at His feet and ask Him to teach you through His Holy Spirit, you’re just an unschooled ordinary person.

Nothing in Peter’s circumstances had changed during the last fifty days. What changed was his understanding and perspective. His priorities shifted. His focus sharpened. His purpose paved a mission that he relentlessly pursued. His whole sense of reality expanded and Jesus’ resurrection became his abiding reality.

Circumstances became inconsequential, resulting in Peter’s becoming filled with courage and faith and the urgency to tell others about Jesus. Maybe the most unexplainable thing in our lives wouldn’t be changed circumstances, but a change in us. As we allow the Holy Spirit to change us, the way we handle circumstances is bound to change as well, because our perspective toward them and our reaction to them will be different. By the power of the Holy Spirit we are able to walk through those circumstances with a confidence, peace, or joy that becomes unexplainable apart from God to those who are watching us.

What are some of the circumstances you need God’s perspective and power to react differently?

A fractured marriage?
A failed relationship?
Victory over a recurring temptation?
Development of a healthy habit?
Peace with a difficult circumstance?
Boldness to share your faith with a loved one?
Something else?

As we allow the Holy Spirit to fill us with His peace, joy, and confidence in God’s goodness, our enemy’s hands become tied. (I love how these religious leaders knew there was nothing they could do to stop Peter- and you and I become unstoppable when we are driven and empowered by the Holy Spirit!). When we submit to Jesus, the enemy loses control. Just as in Acts 4 and Luke 20, those opposing the work of God stood by astonished, wringing their hands.

Will you and I come and sit at Jesus’ feet and allow Him to teach us? To make us people who live unexplainable lives? Will we “be with Jesus”?

Today’s reading is an excerpt from An Unexplainable Life: Recovering the Wonder and Devotion of the Early Church 

Easter Devotion - Spirit Prayer

In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God.
Romans 8:26-27 

The world can be an agonizing place. Sometimes we deal with pain so crushing we can't even articulate it. How to explain the grief of a broken heart, a dying friend, a stunning loss? And how can anyone put into words the horrors of war, the fear of a global pandemic, the injustice of starving children or those forced into slavery or trafficking, or the revulsion of cruelty in the world? One feels helpless in the midst of such heartrending pain, both pain we know personally and the pain of a sin-sick world. 

Yet the Spirit is there with us. We don't have to find the words. Our hearts are open. God hears what we really need through the Spirit ambassador. Our prayers don't have to be crafted with specific requests and solutions. We don't need to explain anything to God. All we need to do is to place our sorrow before God and rest in His care. Therefore, we have no excuse not to turn to God. Every thought of ours, even those we are too embarrassed or hurt to speak aloud, can be recrafted by the Spirit into a plea for help and healing. Our struggles, when they are in the presence of God, are true prayers. 

Prayer: Holy Spirit, hear the longings of my heart that are too deep even for words. Bring them before the Father, so that I may rest in His healing. In Jesus name I pray, Amen.

* This devotion taken from The Sanctuary for Lent 2016 by Sue Mink