PASTOR’S PERSPECTIVE: “Making the Daily Christian life Really Daily!”

     Someone, hoping to catch the witty cowboy entertainer Will Rogers off guard, asked him, “If you knew you only had 48 hours to live how would you spend them?” He responded, “One at a time!”  Days, like hours, (and minutes and seconds for that matter), must be lived one day at a time.  A cleaning lady was once heard telling her customer-“the problem with life is that it’s so daily!”.  Howard Hendricks used to say, “The problem with the Christian life is that it is so daily!”  There is truth to that.  The children of Israel grew “weary” of the daily manna from heaven.  We become weary with our daily gifts of 24 hours from God.  We take them for granted and miss out on their intended fulness.  Ralph Waldo Emerson used to say “If the stars only came out one night a year, we would stay up all night to look at them!”  But because they are daily we take them for granted.  That being said, there is a special opportunity to embrace the Christian life being “so daily” and making it “Really Daily!”…by making sure that it is lived to the fullest intention of God!  Otherwise we might be wasting our days instead of living them.  Again, Emerson was convicting at this point.  He said, “you cannot kill time without injuring eternity!”  The challenge before us as Christians is to live one day at a time with the measure and meaning God intended,  In his book For The Living Of These Days, William Elliott Jr. observes, “The reason why so many of us are overwrought, tense, distracted and anxious is that we have never mastered the art of living one day at a time.  Physically we do live one day at a time.  We can’t quite help ourselves.  But mentally we live in all three tenses at once-Past, Present, and Future…And that will not work!  The load of tomorrow, added to that of yesterday, carried today makes the strongest falter!”  He might be onto something…we see alot of “faltering Christians”.  Maybe it is because they have not yet mastered “the art of living one day at a time”.  The Bible has much to say about the living out of our days.  It reminds us “Our days upon earth are but a shadow” (Job 8:9).  “Are thy days as the days of man?” (Job 10:5).  Man that is born of woman is “few of days” (Job 14:1).  It is no wonder Moses prayed, “Teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts to wisdom” (Ps. 90:12).  The Bible gives us some wisdom as it  discusses daily activities that will ensure that are daily lives are “Really Daily” from God’s perspective.

First of all our days are to have a Daily Code.  The dictionary defines a “code” as a “systematic code of law”.  For the Christian his Daily Code is of course the Word of God.  Days not spent in the Word of God are days robbed of Divine Perspective and Purpose!  One of God’s great servants used to call the Bible “The Kings Highway Code”.  Others have called it “The Christians Road Map”.  We all should keep a daily appointment to spend quality time in God’s Word.  It should be read; it should be studied; it should be memorized; it should be obeyed; it should be shared DAILY!  We read that the Berean Christians were First Century examples for us.  “They received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the Scriptures DAILY whether those things were so or not!” (Acts 17:11.  Peter told the believers he was nurturing to“as newborn babies desire earnestly the sincere milk of the word that you may grow thereby” ( I Pet. 2:2).  A baby’s  number one desire, above all else, is for “milk”.  They desire it daily…several times daily!  That is the kind of appetite that God delights to see in His growing children.  The nineteenth century British statesman William Gladstone echoed that sentiment when he spoke of Christians needing to spend time in God’s word.  He said, “This great spiritual library shows me how to meet and overcome life’s temptations, sorrows, and oppressions.  It furnishes me techniques for the mastery of fear, anxiety, and despair.  The Word of God corrects my perspective, and saves me from being undone by the immediate.  It gives me somehting which all of us need so much in these desperate days-the long view.  It tells me-in Emerson’s words ‘what the years and centuries are saying as against the hours’ “ We need that daily-OUR DAILY CODE!

The Psalmist points out to us another imperative “daily activity” to help us make our daily lives REALLY DAILY.  He reminds us of our Daily Call.  He writes, “LORD I have called out daily unto thee, I have stretched out my hands unto thee” (Ps. 89:9).  Asaph writes, “Offer  unto God thanksgiving: and pay thy vows unto the MOST HIGH and call upon me in the Day of Trouble: and I will deliver thee and thou shalt glorify me!” (Ps. 50:14-15).  I believe that every day should involve the daily call.  Some call to the LORD as they start their day; others all througout the day; others as they close out their day.  Actually we are told to “pray without ceasing” meaning that our days should be filled with daily calls to the LORD,  That is one thing the disciples learned about Jesus.  He could not go long at all even during His busy days without “CALLING HOME TO THE FATHER”.  One of the touching scenes in E.T. is the expression of his heart’s  desire to “phone home”.  That should be our daily heart’s desire.  We are people of the Daily Call!  One of the things I regret the most is that while living away from my parents that I did not call and talk to them more.  Oh to be able to do that today!  Don’t let your prayerlessness cause you to regret.  Practice faithfully your Daily Call.

A third gem from the Book of Psalms reminds us of another Daily Discipline.  The Psalmist writes, “So will I sing praise kunto thy name forefer, that I may perform my daily vows!” (Ps. 61:8).  There it is-we have a Daily Chore.  The dictionary defines a chore as “a small or odd job”. In his Devotional Book Daily Readings, W.E. Sangster tells of a shy Christian who sought the face of God for a way to minister by his life.  God led him to have a ministry of encouragement by sending cards.  Cards to those who were sick.  Cards to the discouraged.  Cards to the bereaved.  Cards to family; cards to strangers; to people he read about in the paper; he heard about in conversations.  His whole life took on a new twist.  What a small insignificant thing to do.  But only eternity will reveal the impact of that secret single daily chore of a dedicated servant of Jesus.  Can you and I find some daily chore to vow to do for God.  Seek His face.  Make that commitment.  Daily keep your vow!  We have given our days some structure.  A Daily Code; A Daily Call; A Daily Chore; now lets go a little deeper.  Jesus insisted that our Days must include our Daily Cross!  Listen to Him as He says, “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross DAILY, and keep on following me!” (Luke 9;23).  We all have our own little interpretations of the the “crosses we bear for Jesus”.  But A.W. Tozer makes Jesus’ intention very clear...”we must recognize that the cross was the symbol of death; it stood for the abrupt, violent ending of if the life of a human being.  The man who took up his cross and started down the road in Roman times had already said goodbye to family and friends.  He was not coming back.  He was not going out to have his life re-directed; he was going out to have his life ended!  The cross made no compromises, modified nothing, spared nothing; it slew all of the man, completely, and for good.  It did not try to keep on good terms with its victim.  It struck swift and hard, and when it was finished, the man was no more!”  So it is when you give your life to Jesus.  Your life. lived only for yourself, and for your interests, benefits, and desires, has be lost in His cause.  To lose it, is to gain it.  To try to keep it is to lose it all.  Daily pick up your cross.  Paul said, “But God forbid that I should glory, save in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified to me, and I to the world” (Gal. 6:14).  That is the essence of the Daily Cross.  I love Elizabeth Cephane’s hymn/poem demanding nothing less.  She wrote:

     ” I take, O cross, thy Shadow For My abiding place;

       I  ask no other sunshine than The Sunshine of His face;

       Content to let the world go by, To know no gain or loss,

        My sinful self my only shame; My glory all His Cross”

Lastly there is our Daily Care.  Jesus had a daily burden.  He said, “the Son of Man came to seek and to save them that are perishing” (Luke 19:10).  Jesus invested His days as the Good Shepherd seeking the lost sheep.  That was His Daily Care.  It took Him into locations;  into individual lives; into conversations with sinners, publicans, harlots, and demoniacs, not to mention lepers, and even crimminals.  On the cross hear him engage with crimminals about heaven and the forgiveness of sin.  We talk about the weather; about the Cubs winning the world series; about our jobs; our families; our hobbies.  How about our Savior?  Daily?  Stephan Olford tells about a converted cleaning lady named Aunt Sophie.  After she found Jesus she used to say that she was “called to scrub and preach Jesus”.  Daily, she engaged everyone she met about her Savior Jesus.  Someone made fun of her saying that they saw her talking about Christ to a wooden Indian in front of the town’s Cigar store.  Sophie heard about it and said, “Perhaps I did.  My eyesight is not too good anymore,  but talking to a wooden Indian is not so bad as being a wooden Christian and never talking to anybody about the Lord Jesus.”  Something we are told to do daily, some of us never do at all ever!  To make our Daily Christian lives Really Daily we need that Daily Code-Daily Call-Daily Chore-Daily Cross-and Daily Care.  Don’t let today pass without them!  If you do you are “killing your days–and injuring eternity!” 

PASTOR’S PERSPECTIVE:  “Uncovering the buried original shimmering you!”

By:  Ron Woodrum

     In the play Death of A Salesman, written by Arthur Miller in 1949, which won a Purlitzer Prize for drama, and a Tony Award for Best Play, there is one scene that speaks volumes.  Willie Loman has committed suicide.  The family is standing at the graveside.  Happy, Willie’s 32 year old son says “he had no right to commit suicide”.  Linda, Willie’s faithful wife, wonders where are all the friends and acquaintances that knew Willie?  His eldest son, Biff, hits the nail on the head in explaining his tragic end when he declares “Willy had all the wrong dreams…he never knew who he was!”  That epitaph could be written over the lives of most Christians, who for all practical purposes have committed spiritual suicide with the lives that God intended for them to live.  We often miss out on the fulfillment of fully following Jesus because we spend all of our waking hours “chasing all the wrong dreams and failing to realize who we were really intended to be in Christ!”  The great intellectual Christian thinker G.K. Chesterton saw this dilemma when he wrote in his magnificent book Orthodoxy these words-“We all feel the riddle of the earth without anyone to point it out.  The mystery of life is the plainest part of it. . .Every stone or flower is a hieroglyphic of which we have lost the key; with every step of our lives we enter into the middle of some story which we are certain to misunderstand.”  Any attempt on our part to sort this confusing story out will end in futility and frustration.  Robert Jenson points out the inherent reason why this is true.  He says, “Human consciousness is too obscure a mystery to itself for us to script our own lives”.  Any attempt to script our own lives leaves us trapped in an eternal present, we come to a sickness of heart like that of Shakespeare’s MacBeth, the Scottish nobleman who sells his soul to play the role of the king who sells his soul to play the role of king in his own small story.  At the end of his life he laments,  “I am sick at heart…tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time; Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard from no more!  It is a tale told by and idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” (Act V, Scene V).  Frederick Buechner, in his book Telling Secrets, also points out this dilemna facing Christians.  He says, “the world sets out to make us what the world would like us to be, and because we have to survive after all, we try to make ourselves into something the world will like better than it apparently liked the selves we originally were.  That is the story of all our lives, needless to say, and in the process of living out that story, the original, shimmering self gets buried so deep that most of us hardly end up living out of it at all.  Instead, we live out all the other selves which we are constantly putting on and taking off like coats and hats against the world’s weather”.  Chesterton, in Orthodoxy, calls this dilemma a “mental calamity” that robs us of our “spiritual identity”.  He clearly points this out by saying, “We have all read in scientific books, and indeed, even in romance novels about the story of the man who has forgotten his own name.  This man walks about the streets and can see and appreciate everything; only he cannot remember who he is.  Well, every man is that man in the story.  Every man has forgotten who he is….We are all under the same mental calamity; we have forgotten our names.  We have forgotten what we really are.”   Most, including most Christians, never escape this “calamity”.  Though we know God, through His son Jesus, we settle for far too little.  We chase all the wrong dreams.  C.S. Lewis said it so well-“We are half-hearted creatures fooling about with drink, and sex, and ambition, and religious efforts, when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant b the offer of a holiday at the sea.  We are far too easily pleased.”

     How do we get out of this dilemma?  How do we escape this mental calamity?  How do we uncover our original shimmering selves?  It is beyond our reach to “script our own lives!”  Simon Tugwell clears this up for us.  He says, “So long as we imagine it is we who have to look for God, we must often lose heart.  But it is the other way around-He is looking for us!”  A.W. Tozer becomes more explicit in explaining how this works for us.  He writes-“Thirsty hearts are those whose longings have been wakened by the touch of God within themselves”.  George Herbert, marveling at the message of Isaiah 62:4, 12 which reads, “No longer will they call you Deserted.  They will be called…the Redeemed of the LORD; you will be called the Sought After”, caused him to write, “My God, what is a heart; that thou shouldst it so eye and woo; powering upon it with all thou art; As if thou hadst nothing else to do?” (Mattens).  Chesterton explains how he came to the conclusion of God’s work bringing this to reality in our lives; “I always had believed that the world involved magic; now I thought it perhaps involved a magician…I always felt life first was a story; and if there was story there must be a story-teller!”    Anne Dillard, calls this divine wake up call a mystery.  She says, “We wake, if ever we wake at all, we wake to mystery!”  Frederick Buechner gives us this advice-“listen to our lives”  and God will speak in a clear way which way to follow Him.  He writes in Now and Then, “If God speaks to us at all, other than through such official channels as the Bible and the Church, then I think He speaks to us largely through what happens to us…if we keep our hearts and minds open as well as our ears, if we listen with patience and hope, if we remember at all deeply and honestly, then I think we come to recognize, beyond all doubt, that however faintly we may hear Him, He is indeed speaking to us, and that however little we may understand of it, His word to each of us is both recoverable and precious beyond telling!”  C.S. Lewis referred to this divine communication to our hearts, this eternal tug from God, as the “secret signature of each soul”.  He says, God speaks to our hearts “of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are watching for, looking for, listening for?  You have never had it…tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear.  But if it should ever manifest itself…and did not die away…you would know it.  Beyond all possibility of doubt you would know it and say ‘here is the thing I was made for’.  We cannot tell each other about it.  It is the secret signature of each sould, the incommunicable and unapeasable want…If we lose this we lose it all!”  Responding to this call of God to our inner heart, choosing to follow the way of salvation, provided by God in His son Jesus, and giving ourselves fully to His call and direction.  That must not just be a once in a lifetime decision, though it begins with that, it must be a pursuit of our whole heart, to know Him, and follow Him, and let Him transform us with His love, presence, and power.  George MacDonald put it this way, ” But we who would be born again indeed, must wake our souls unnumbered times a day”.  Once we have awakened to God’s call, and responded to Him by trusting in the finished work of His Son on the Cross, our lives must consist of putting Him first, following in His steps, to do that consistently means turning all else away to listen for His direction.  C.S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity, put it this way, “It comes at you the very moment you wake up each morning.  All your wishes and hopes of the day rush at you like wild animals.  And the first job each morning consists simply of shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that larger quieter life come flowing in.  Standing back from all your natural fussing and frettings; coming in out of the wind!”  (Mere Christianity).    Responding to this inward call of God.  Embracing His Son as our Savior, and choosing to lose our lives following Him-is to finally know who we are…understanding our story…no longer chasing the wrong dream…finding fulfillment and joy we have been longing for all of our lives.  But in order to make that born again reality a continued experience we must pursue Him with a whole heart…listening to the other voice…the larger perspective, let His eternal life come flowing in.  Today’s message talks about how Unprofitable Servants of His are Made Profitable.