Mission Faithwalk

                     And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him. (Colossians 3:17)           “If you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say anything.” We’ve all heard some variation of this saying. I like the version that uses double negatives: “If you don’t have nothing good to say, don’t say nothing,” but that doesn’t mean what we want it to mean. Another somewhat similar instruction is “Be nice.” The problem with all these sorts of instructions, including, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”, is definition. What constitutes something “good to say”? Or “Nice”? And what if what you would have others do to you is to leave you alone, but the person next door wants people to stop by and chat?             The greatest com...

                 So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness. (Colossians 2:6-7) I wish I were really up on all the terminology for verb tenses and forms because this verse seems to bounce among them. I doubt the terminology would really help. What we need to understand from the verbs is that something happened in the past that should be continuing in the present with both present and future results. Some of it happened to us, and some of it is what we are to do. If we are going to continue to do something, we must do it as we were doing it before or as we were doing something before. How did we receive Christ Jesus as Lord? By faith. By the hearing of the Word. How are we to live our lives in him and be built up in him? By faith and by its strengthening. By hearing the Word. After a...

            Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise; give thanks to him and praise his name. For the Lord is good and his love endures forever; his faithfulness continues through all generations. (Psalm 100:4-5)           Have you ever really thought about the Psalms? I mean, we’re talking about 150 chapters, one of which is 176 verses long (Psalm 119). Psalm 14 and Psalm 52 are similar enough that one might think one or the other is plagiarized, and I doubt this is the only case of repetition. Sometimes, they call on us to praise God. Other times, they call on God to shatter the teeth of our enemies. They can be an emotional rollercoaster, at the highest of highs one moment, and inconsolable the next. One will proclaim the blamelessness of the psalmist, and the next will confess his sins. To say that they’re all over the place is not an exaggeration. But perh...

                 Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace. And be thankful. (Colossians 3:15) Let: 1) To cause or to make, 2) give opportunity to or fail to prevent, 3) to free from, or as if from confinement, 4) to permit to enter, pass, or leave There are more definitions for the word let but the point in providing the definitions is that in this verse, it probably doesn’t mean passively failing to prevent. You may need to grant peace permission to enter, but I suspect it’s more active than that. We’re to cause or make the peace of Christ to rule in our hearts. I’ve written before about causing anger to rule in my heart back in my teens and twenties. I encouraged it. There were times I probably picked anger up by the scruff of its neck, carried it into my heart, locked the door, dropped the mangy creature in the middle of the room. There was a time, much later, when I conc...

                I always thank my God for you because of his grace given you in Christ Jesus. For in him you have been enriched in every way—with all kinds of speech and with all knowledge— (I Corinthians 1:4-5)           I read this verse in the middle of the night, and thought, “Oh, those proud Corinthians, I don’t have anything to say about this passage.” This morning as I looked at it again, I thought, “Ugh. I haven’t been enriched that way.” The green-eyed dragon peeks out from behind my eyes. It doesn’t help that most of the non-cashiers I work with are far more knowledgeable and/or skilled than I am. While I made wreaths, they were decorating them and/or talking about floral breeding programs and sideline businesses they’ve done. Don’t get me wrong, I’m honored to work with them and I’m thrilled to be learning how to make wreaths, but yesterday, I walked away feeling like the charity case...

                   Come, let us sing for joy to the Lord; let us shout aloud to the Rock of our salvation. Let us come before him with thanksgiving and extol him with music and song. (Psalm 95:1-2)           I don’t know if I keep coming back to it in this blog, or if I just keep coming back to it. If I’m being too repetitious, feel free to tell me so. But today’s passage, chosen by my Bible platform, brings me back. First, it invites us to sing for joy to the Lord, which refers to His authority, sovereignty, and divine rule. Then it invites us to show to the Rock of our salvation. A rock is that on which we can stand and build. I don’t think there’s really any doubt that these verses refer to God, but they also give us at least a partial definition of what a god is. A god is our Lord, the authority over our lives, that which rules in and over our live, and ultimately, over the un...

                 Desire without knowledge is not good — how much more will hasty feet miss the way! (Proverbs 19:2) What did you want to be when you grew up? I went through lots of phases: cop, doctor, superhero, lawyer, Enterprise crew member, singer, wildlife manager/ranger, and astronomer, among others. Most of those ideas sort of faded away quietly. The one that I remember thinking through before I changed my mind was the wildlife manager idea. What I wanted was to be Grizzly Adams – to go make friends with the critters. However, knowledge got in the way. I have allergies. I am not fond of extreme temperatures.  At the time, I wasn’t all that keen on getting dirty or encountering bugs (especially spiders!) And I didn’t want to shoot a critter and take it out to the boonies to release it. For that matter, if I shot at a critter, the trees or a fellow ranger would be more likely to get tranquillized than the critter. My kn...

              " Now fear the Lord and serve him with all faithfulness. Throw away the gods your ancestors worshiped beyond the Euphrates River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord.    But if serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.” Then the people answered, “Far be it from us to forsake the Lord to serve other gods!   It was the Lord our God himself who brought us and our parents up out of Egypt, from that land of slavery, and performed those great signs before our eyes. He protected us on our entire journey and among all the nations through which we traveled. And the Lord drove out before us al...

                 The Gibeonites then sent word to Joshua in the camp at Gilgal: “Do not abandon your servants. Come up to us quickly and save us! Help us, because all the Amorite kings from the hill country have joined forces against us.” So Joshua marched up from Gilgal with his entire army, including all the best fighting men. The Lord said to Joshua, “Do not be afraid of them; I have given them into your hand. Not one of them will be able to withstand you.” After an all-night march from Gilgal, Joshua took them by surprise. The Lord threw them into confusion before Israel, so Joshua and the Israelites defeated them completely at Gibeon. Israel pursued them along the road going up to Beth Horon and cut them down all the way to Azekah and Makkedah.   As they fled before Israel on the road down from Beth Horon to Azekah, the Lord hurled large ha...

    Now when all the kings west of the Jordan heard about these things—the kings in the hill country, in the western foothills, and along the entire coast of the Mediterranean Sea as far as Lebanon (the kings of the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites)— they came together to wage war against Joshua and Israel. However, when the people of Gibeon heard what Joshua had done to Jericho and Ai, they resorted to a ruse: They went as a delegation whose donkeys were loaded [ a ]  with worn-out sacks and old wineskins, cracked and mended.   They put worn and patched sandals on their feet and wore old clothes. All the bread of their food supply was dry and moldy. Then they went to Joshua in the camp at Gilgal and said to him and the Israelites, “We have come from a distant country; make a treaty with us.”   The Israelites said to the Hivites, “But perhaps you live near us, s...

              Then the Lord said to Joshua, “Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged. Take the whole army with you, and go up and attack Ai. For I have delivered into your hands the king of Ai, his people, his city and his land. You shall do to Ai and its king as you did to Jericho and its king, except that you may carry off their plunder and livestock for yourselves. Set an ambush behind the city.” So Joshua and the whole army moved out to attack Ai. He chose thirty thousand of his best fighting men and sent them out at nigh 4  with these orders: “Listen carefully. You are to set an ambush behind the city. Don’t go very far from it. All of you be on the alert. I and all those with me will advance on the city, and when the men come out against us, as they did before, we will flee from them. They will pursue us until we have lured them away from the city, for they will say, ‘Th...

  But the Israelites were unfaithful in regard to the devoted things; Achan son of Karmi, the son of Zimri, the son of Zerah, of the tribe of Judah, took some of them. So the  Lord ’s anger burned against Israel. Now Joshua sent men from Jericho to Ai, which is near Beth Aven to the east of Bethel, and told them, “Go up and spy out the region.” So the men went up and spied out Ai. When they returned to Joshua, they said, “Not all the army will have to go up against Ai. Send two or three thousand men to take it and do not weary the whole army, for only a few people live there.”   So about three thousand went up; but they were routed by the men of Ai,   who killed about thirty-six of them. They chased the Israelites from the city gate as far as the stone quarries and struck them down on the slopes. At this the hearts of the people melted in fear and became like water.   Then Joshua tore his clothes...

            Now when Joshua was near Jericho, he looked up and saw a man standing in front of him with a drawn sword in his hand. Joshua went up to him and asked, “Are you for us or for our enemies?” “Neither,” he replied, “but as commander of the army of the Lord I have now come.” Then Joshua fell facedown to the ground in reverence, and asked him, “What message does my Lord have for his servant?” The commander of the Lord’s army replied, “Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy.” And Joshua did so. Now the gates of Jericho were securely barred because of the Israelites. No one went out and no one came in. Then the Lord said to Joshua, “See, I have delivered Jericho into your hands, along with its king and its fighting men.    March around the city once with all the armed men. Do this for six days.    Have seven pri...

            Now when all the Amorite kings west of the Jordan and all the Canaanite kings along the coast heard how the Lord had dried up the Jordan before the Israelites until they had crossed over, their hearts melted in fear and they no longer had the courage to face the Israelites.   At that time the Lord said to Joshua, “Make flint knives and circumcise the Israelites again.” So Joshua made flint knives and circumcised the Israelites at Gibeath Haaraloth. Now this is why he did so: All those who came out of Egypt—all the men of military age—died in the wilderness on the way after leaving Egypt. All the people that came out had been circumcised, but all the people born in the wilderness during the journey from Egypt had not.    The Israelites had moved about in the wilderness forty years until all the men who were of military age when they left Egypt ...

                 When the whole nation had finished crossing the Jordan, the  Lord  said to Joshua,   “Choose twelve men from among the people, one from each tribe,   and tell them to take up twelve stones from the middle of the Jordan, from right where the priests are standing, and carry them over with you and put them down at the place where you stay tonight.”   So Joshua called together the twelve men he had appointed from the Israelites, one from each tribe,   and said to them, “Go over before the ark of the  Lord  your God into the middle of the Jordan. Each of you is to take up a stone on his shoulder, according to the number of the tribes of the Israelites,   to serve as a sign among you. In the future, when your children ask you, ‘What do these stones mean?’ tell them that the flow of the Jordan was cut off before the ark of the covenant ...

                 And the  Lord  said to Joshua, “Today I will begin to exalt you in the eyes of all Israel, so they may know that I am with you as I was with Moses.   Tell the priests who carry the ark of the covenant: ‘When you reach the edge of the Jordan’s waters, go and stand in the river.’”   Now the Jordan is at flood stage all during harvest. Yet as soon as the priests who carried the ark reached the Jordan and their feet touched the water’s edge,   the water from upstream stopped flowing. It piled up in a heap a great distance away, at a town called Adam in the vicinity of Zarethan, while the water flowing down to the Sea of the Arabah (that is, the Dead Sea) was completely cut off. So the people crossed over opposite Jericho.   The priests who carried the ark of the covenant of the  Lord  stopped in the middle of the Jordan and ...

                 Then Joshua son of Nun secretly sent two spies from Shittim. “Go, look over the land,” he said, “especially Jericho.” So they went and entered the house of a prostitute named Rahab and stayed there. (Joshua 2:1) Really? Forty years earlier, God told Moses to send twelve spies into the Promised Land. Joshua was among them, and they came back with a report that led the people into rebellion. The result was forty years of wandering (seemingly) aimlessly while waiting for people to die. Now Joshua was repeating the exercise?  He only sent two, but I wonder whether he spent the whole time they were gone wondering what he would do if they came back with a bad report. Perhaps before they left, he told them that if they came back with that bad report – without sufficient evidence – that he’d have them executed. Did he consider not sending out scouts? The problem with that is that sending scouts was pr...

              “Moses my servant is dead. Now then, you and all these people, get ready to cross the Jordan River into the land I am about to give to them—to the Israelites. I will give you every place where you set your foot, as I promised Moses.    Your territory will extend from the desert to Lebanon, and from the great river, the Euphrates—all the Hittite country—to the Mediterranean Sea in the west. No one will be able to stand against you all the days of your life. As I was with Moses, so I will be with you; I will never leave you nor forsake you. Be strong and courageous, because you will lead these people to inherit the land I swore to their ancestors to give them. “Be strong and very courageous. Be careful to obey all the law my servant Moses gave you; do not turn from it to the right or to the left, that you may be successful wherever you...

                 And Saul approved of their killing him. On that day a great persecution broke out against the church in Jerusalem, and all except the apostles were scattered throughout Judea and Samaria .  (Acts 8:1) This past Wednesday, our prayer meeting was dedicated to praying for the persecuted Church. I want to make this clear: I am completely in favor of praying for the persecuted Church. They need our prayers and it is our responsibility and privilege to pray for them. We should be praying for the persecuted Church. At the same time, however, I think we must be careful with this idea. We have a tendency to try to divide the needy into the “truly” needy and the whiners, and there are valid reasons for not responding to them in quite the same way. The problem is, we tend to compare the two, and if someone doesn’t measure up to the level of suffering we deem sufficient to be considered persecuted, we dismiss them. They don...

                 he made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times reach their fulfillment—to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ. (Ephesians 1:9-10)   Imagine that you have created the ultimate theme park. As one fictional theme park declared, you “spared no expense.” Like that theme park owner, you didn’t want the park to be just fun; you wanted it to benefit all humanity. You spent billions on the infrastructure and billions just on dressing things up for the opening day. Everything was perfect, then the first visitors walked through the gates, and all hell broke loose. No, it wasn’t dinosaurs having escaped from their pens; it was the guests themselves. For some, it was too warm, for others, too cool. Some didn’t like the music, food, colors, restroom locations, some of the other guests, or you. The food is...

                 But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, (Matthew 5:44)   And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. (Romans 8:28) You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives . (Genesis 50:20) I’ve written about this verse many times, but probably not quite this way. The day before yesterday was our elections, and I’m not happy with how things turned out. I hope things don’t turn out as hard as I expect. God is still in control, and He will cause all things to work together for good. Yeah, yeah, we say the words and I suspect we think we mean them. But, as we approach the holidays, an ad comes to mind: Christmas Strength . If you’ve skipped watching it, it’s a good one that you’ve p...