Never walk away from someone who deserves help; your hand is God’s hand for that person. Don’t tell your neighbor “Maybe some other time” or “Try me tomorrow” when the money’s right there in your pocket. [Proverbs 3:27-28 (MSG)]
Yesterday, I wrote about finding the 1967 church program from the day my in-laws joined their church. The mimeographed bulletin insert for that day included a story about a little boy, barefoot and dressed in rags, who was walking home from church. A neighbor fellow asked where he’d been and, when the boy said he’d been at church, the man asked what he’d learned there. The boy joyfully replied, “Jesus loves me!” The fellow responded disdainfully, “If Jesus loves you so much, why didn’t he tell somebody to give you some decent clothes and a pair of shoes?” The boy confidently answered, “Jesus did tell someone, but I think they forgot!”
This story reminded me of one I heard recently about a well-known pastor. The gentleman was invited to speak at a Christian women’s conference at a large wealthy church. Before the program began, the event’s chairwoman read a letter from a Venezuelan missionary expressing an urgent need for $4,000. She then asked the visiting pastor to open the conference with a prayer that God would provide the resources to meet the mission’s needs. The man surprised everyone by denying her request. Explaining that he believed God had already provided the money, he added that he was going to place all the cash he had in his pocket on a table and invited the women to do the same thing.
Confused, the chairwoman finally said she saw his point; of course, they all need to give sacrificially. “No!” he said, adding that he was trying to teach them that God had already provided for the mission. Putting the $15 from his pocket on the table, he looked at the chairwoman expectantly. Reluctantly, she opened her purse and added her cash to his. One by one, the other women opened their purses and brought their money to the table. When it all was counted, more than $4,000 had been collected. The pastor explained: “Now, here’s the lesson. God always supplies for our needs and he supplied for this missionary, too. The only problem was that we were keeping it for ourselves. Now let’s pray and thank God for His provision.”
When we become members of the Church, we become the mouth, hands, and feet of Jesus and should be doing the things that Jesus would do if He were here physically on the earth. As members of His body, do we honor our commitment to be the conduit of God’s blessings to His children? Could we be holding the answer to someone’s prayers right in our hands? Could we have forgotten to give a little boy his clothes and shoes? Or weren’t we listening when Jesus spoke to us?
Once a pampered prince, forty years later, Moses was living as a Midianite shepherd. When speaking to him from the burning bush, God laid out His plan for freeing the Israelites from Egyptian slavery and the pivotal role Moses would play in it. Protesting, Moses made excuse after excuse but God countered every excuse with a solution. Provided with a shepherd’s staff and Aaron as his mouthpiece, Moses reluctantly accepted God’s charge. Before approaching Pharaoh, however, he first met with Israel’s elders to convince them that he was on a mission from God.
For the Israelites, 1526 B.C. was a terrible year to have a baby boy. Fearing the growing strength of the Jewish nation in Egypt, Thutmose I ordered that all Hebrew male babies be killed. Fifteen hundred years later, the Jewish historian Josephus would explain that Pharaoh’s counselors gave him this warning: “There would be a child born to the Israelites, who, if he were reared, would bring the Egyptian dominion low, and would raise the Israelites; that he would excel all men in virtue, and obtain a glory that would be remembered through all ages.”
It’s easy to have misconceptions about Scripture. If you were to ask someone the identity of the forbidden fruit, chances are the answer would be an apple. Scripture, however, never names the fruit. The Hebrew word used was peri which is a generic term for “produce,” “results,” or “reward.” We probably got the idea that it was an apple from later translations of Scripture into Latin since the Latin word “evil” is mălum, a word quite similar to the Latin word for “apple,” which is mālum. Renaissance painters continued to perpetuate the myth with their depiction of an apple at the temptation. Scripture, however, never identifies the fruit because its identity is not important; the evil wasn’t in the fruit but rather in Adam and Eve’s disobedience.
I prayed for Pearl for over a year. This beautiful toddler had Stage-4 cancer and her bones, brain, and internal organs were riddled with the disease’s treacherous cells. Her prognosis was bleak and there were times she nearly lost her life to the effects of the various remedies rather than the cancer. That Pearl is alive and cancer free today is nothing short of a miracle. Nevertheless, she and her family went through a very dark valley to get to this place of victory. I’m sure, if given a choice, they would have preferred God to have miraculously healed her prior to the long battle she fought for over a year.
To impress their students with the importance of commas, English teachers often tell an unsubstantiated story about Maria Fyodorovna, the wife of Tsar Alexander III of Russia. Alexander, a harsh and repressive ruler, had exiled a suspected anarchist to imprisonment and death by writing these words on his warrant: “Pardon impossible, to be sent to Siberia.” Coming across the document, the Tsarina seized the opportunity to save the life of an unknown prisoner and quickly scratched out the comma. She re-inserted it so that the warrant read: “Pardon, impossible to send to Siberia.” With the comma’s transposition, the prisoner’s death warrant became his pardon.
Devotions of the Heart 