And he said to Judah, “Let us build these cities and surround them with walls and towers, gates and bars. The land is still ours, because we have sought the Lord our God. We have sought him, and he has given us peace on every side.” So they built and prospered. (2 Chronicles 14:7 ESV)

There is peace in the seeking. That is to say that when we seek God, He gives us peace. Let me explain that statement.

In this passage we find Asa, king of Judah, in a golden age not seen in this area since Solomon was king. There was so much peace that he had time to make infrastructure improvements– ten years of improvement.

That much is obvious from our passage today. Asa attributes his uncanny peace to the fact that he and everybody he was entrusted to lead sought after God. In seeking out God’s will, there overflowed into their socio-economic lives a prosperity and peace.

Skeptically, you are thinking that this is nothing more than Israelite propaganda written by the author of this particular book to plainly paint out the fact that there is a correlation between seeking God and prosperity.

More than likely, this causal link was made by the author to point to the fact that the reader’s life probably was not peaceful or prosperous because he or she had not been seeking after God. However, this debate can be tabled for another day.

What I want to point out here is that peace and prosperity are not directly correlated to seeking God. In fact, we know from experience that seeking God usually disturbs our ill gotten peace and sense of mind.

Asa battled with the Ethiopians, a million of them according to this passage, in his time as king. Therefore, coming to terms with the fact that Asa says that God gives them peace on every side and still finds himself battling a nation leads us to one conclusion: his heart was at peace in seeking God and that was all the peace he needed to build and prosper.

Take this with you for the weekend: seek God for your everything (needs, wants and worries) and find peace on every side of you, even if you are warring with people around you.

Cry to God and seek Him, and find out how God defeats and allows you to build and prosper.

Lots of us understand the flash the goes between our eyes when we are about to fall. We, to the best of our abilities try to brace for the immediate impact. Some of us lay there and cry, others of us nurse the wounds. At the end of it all, we all get up from the fall; but sometimes we just can’t get up anymore. Our bodies and minds are stuck in our fallen state. We’re not alone. When I thought, “My foot slips,” your steadfast love, O Lord, held me up. When the cares of my heart are many, your consolations cheer my soul. (Psalms 94:18-19 ESV) When I read this Psalm I’m reminded of this Commercial from the late 80s: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQlpDiXPZHQ The brilliance behind this device that this company was peddling is that people would buy it so that they can yell at a speaker phone and somebody would come and help them up from their fall. The marketing for this device is also brilliant: older people who have difficulties getting up! But we’re not talking about the morality of marketing strategies. I know the average age of any of you reading this now is under 30. I also know you are in phenomenal shape so you hardly fall. However, I know being under 30, and able bodied, makes us most susceptible to falling morally and spiritually and emotionally. The reason is because we all get around. More than that, we generally don’t have a family of our own to take care of and as a result we still care about what others think of us. Long story short, we fall, a lot. Good news is that when we feel like the entire world is against us, and they very well might be, because even our ownselves are against us, we don’t have to feel like we have nobody to go to for help. This Psalm was written for people who’ve fallen and can’t get up. It’s especially mindful of people who have nobody to help them. God does not wish to destroy you when you’re down. Like the Psalm so plainly says: God’s love holds us up if we’re falling and His comforting will pick us up, if you are down. You might have fallen, but you will get up. God will pick you up from your mistakes, missteps and sin. Yell out to Him for help today.

It would be a horrible mistake to live by a code that only seeks self-gratification. Likewise, believing our faith is something we earn between ourselves and God is horribly incorrect. The reason why is because when we live by such a code, there is nothing and nobody good enough or perfect enough to warrant being involved with. Simply said, there wouldn’t be a single person in this world whom would be worth OUR time, energy and efforts. For none of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself. For if we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s. (Romans 14:7-8 ESV) In this letter to the Church in Rome, Christians were finding themselves unable to accept one another because of each other’s perceived “weaknesses” and/or “preferences.” Meaning that the OCD thing that the person at your church does that annoys you and drives you crazy, was the reason that this church in Rome was finding as the reason for division. Honestly, this is the reason we find it difficult to live for something more than just ourselves. If God lived for Himself, would he have given up His Son Jesus? What if, in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus chose not to die on the cross for our sins, would we even be alive in the state of grace by which we currently live? The answer is an emphatic, “no.” We wouldn’t be alive in this current state of grace. Most of us, if we are truly honest about our own wretchedness, would be broken down somewhere hiding in between the shadows of shame without God finding us worth His intervention. If Jesus, our Lord and Savior lived a life, not for his own sake, but for the sake of people like you and me that don’t deserve the inheritance of an awesome God, then why would we fool ourselves into believing that we can live just for our own selves? Shouldn’t we take charge and be responsible for the people who were given to us by God in our lives? You don’t live for yourself, stop acting like you do. Start taking responsibility for the people God placed around you.

Therefore you have no excuse, O man, every one of you who judges. For in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, practice the very same things. (Romans 2:1 ESV) We need to check ourselves. All of us, because we’ve become so self righteous in our society, come to believe in the falsehood that we are “better” than the person who we see stumble along. Here’s what I mean: as a pastor, I go around various pastor groups and check-in with various pastors in the community throughout the month. But in my checking in with them and conversing with them, I learn about their struggles with being human, and I subsequently judge them for it. Now, that’s not what has to be held in check. Because of my place as a pastor and judging from my perspective of what I want to strive to be, I tend to look down upon their struggles forgetting for a moment that they struggle as I struggle. You see, I say, “how pathetic! How can they commit such egregious errors when they teach this?” And for as much preaching and holiness that is on full display over the weekends, I’ve come to realize that these pastors are just men, struggling to live their lives as God ordains. Yes, they are just like you and me, except they take the pulpit on weekends. Paul writes to the Romans that all of us are liable for this tendency. We all pass judgment on each other! We forget that we are all humans that make mistakes. The only thing separating you or me from the poor sap that we passed judgment on is the fact that by some grace of God (you can call it luck) we haven’t stumbled and been publicly embarrassed by it. The Bible says that we will be held accountable for our hypercritical hypocrisy. As such, we must keep our judgments in check, especially those of us who are especially righteous. Don’t think that you will never trip up and be brought forth to public disgrace. Don’t think that staring at people with judgmental eyes is acceptable. God could have been hypercritical to our sins. He wasn’t. He was beyond gracious. He offered us a second chance. It may be time to do the same for somebody we passed hypercritical hypocritical judgment on.

There is no shame in wishful thinking. There I said it. Realism and honesty aside, we can all use a little more wishful thinking in our lives. Just think about how many people you cursed out on your commute to work this week. I don’t even have enough fingers and toes to count how many I cursed out this morning, and I’m still on my commute! Now, what if you had a little more hope for that person you just cursed out? Here’s what I mean: if we were a little more hopeful for that person who was driving that cut us off, would you have cursed him/her out? Better example, what about the job interview you have been waiting on? If you were a little more wishful in your thinking, do you think you would have settled on abandoning your career and accepted a job you innately hate? We have such little wishful thinking in our lives that our expectations are limited by our turmoil! and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. – Romans 5:5 The Apostle Paul says there is no shame in having hope (wishful thinking) and the fact that you have hope and ideals for a present and future do no harm. Wishful thinking, and I don’t mean wishful thinking as in having delusions of becoming a princess out of a Disney movie because that’s not wishful, just hopelessly delusion and fantastic, is really about going through life and seeing the goal God placed in your heart despite the odds and challenges. I know for a fact how difficult it is to be hopeful after enduring so much in life, but those enduring moments are exactly the moments we need to be the most hopeful. I don’t tell you to have hope blindly or randomly so you can feel good about your failures and shortcomings. I tell you to have hope knowing and understanding that despite all your shortcomings and failures God is pouring Himself into your hearts and minds to be the catalyst of hope through your difficulties. If we didn’t need any hope in our lives, there wouldn’t have been a need for God to sacrifice His Son in a humiliating set of events– naked and displayed along the side of a busy highway like billboard advertising. It’s time to change the way we think and have more wishful thinking, to be hopeful of a future poured out into you directly by God through His Spirit. This is the only hope we need to fight the impossible fight of life.

Facing utterly hopeless situations does more to kill a person than 50 gunshots to the chest in the “‘hood.” Sure, getting ripped apart physically by hot lead is not fun; but you can still have hope that somebody will come and save you. But just imagine the 50 gunshots to your chest in the remoteness of a mountain, with nobody to hear, and nobody to traverse the terrain for your rescue, save the wolves and coyotes that smell your bloody flesh and wait to take part in nature’s call– now, that’s utterly hopeless. I know this scenario is overly dramatic and a bit implausible, but I want to impress upon you, a hopeless situation. A more melodramatic/real life hopeless situation would look like this: the days immediately following the loss of your love, whether through death, break up, infidelity or relocation. Perhaps it is the sudden loss of a job where you spent 50-60 hours toiling every week in an endless rat race. For others, it is the inability to have children or losing children. This list can continue into infinity. Situations are hopeless when they claw the insides of our heart, ripping apart the fabric of our souls. Worst of all, they leave us petrified to move in any direction except toward the impending bright light we see at the end of the tunnel. My point is that life is tragically a bridge between hopelessness and utter hopelessness on any given day. He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was as good as dead (since he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb. No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. – Romans 4:19-21 If life is so hopeless, why didn’t Abraham despair? Abraham, a man who utterly had no hope, had all the signs pointing to the fact that his life work would terminate with unfulfilled promises. It appeared that the very same God who called him out of his homeland may not come through for him. Regardless of all these pointers: Abraham’s faith became more resolved, illustrating to us that hope has nothing to do with the situations we find ourselves in; and rather, everything to do with whom we place that hope in. Therefore when Abraham looked at his own body, or the fact that him and his wife had been trying for a better part of the century to have a child, he saw no reason to give up any hope. The only hope Abraham needed was in God. God made the promise to him and so he had to hope God would fulfill His promise. That is exactly what Abraham did. Some of us may be looking at our lives and questioning the very idea of having any more hope for this year. I mean, it’s June, and any resolution you may have had is probably an afterthought by now. Despite all your toiling this year, everything you once planned has now been stripped away. You have no money, but lots of debt; no family, but mouths to feed; academic degrees, but no job; lots of sin, but no grace. Your situation may be hopeless. But when we place our faith in Jesus’ redemptive work, it is the only reason for any and all hope despite having no reason to hope. There’s still six months left in this year, it’s time to redeem that hope in Jesus and live hopefully in the hopeless world.

Look around your life and start counting how many relationships fall apart because a lack of love and a lack of faithfulness. Now look at yourself and count how many times it was because of your lack of love and your unfaithfulness…

Never let go of love and faithfulness. Tie them round your neck; write them on your heart. If you do this, both God and people will be pleased with you. – Proverbs 3:3-4 (my own translation)

It’s a pretty straightforward proverb. The only difficulty with this proverb is actually executing it. I mean, just look at what the writer of the proverb is asking of us. The writer is asking us to shut out all hatred and selfishness AND closing down all deliberate hypocrisy and lying by being merciful and loving. In fact, the writer of this proverb says to tie them to your neck and tattoo that right into your heart. The sense here is that with these two actions, our lives would become so consequentially tied and united. That is to say that you would die without practicing loving and faithfulness. The weight of this advice is definitely life altering. You see, practicing these two things things: love and faithfulness, will bring you favor with God in that He will be pleased with you. However, what trips us up is not the idea that God will favor us, it is the statement that other people will favor us for it. In the 21st century, we have seen way too often that our love and faithfulness is often repaid by deceit and backstabbing. Just watch the show “Scandal” or “Revenge” if you don’t believe me. Rather, just look at your workplace and see how much love and faithfulness isn’t offered or even rewarded in our cubicled lives. Living in this world teaches us that loving and being faithful to anything other than our own-selves is foolishness, not a wisdom that will undoubtedly affect your life in an overwhelmingly positive manner. So the question is, how do we navigate this dilemma? The Bible says in Proverbs 3:5-6:

Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths. – Proverbs 3:5-6

If that wasn’t clear enough for you, let me paraphrase: it doesn’t matter what you see and what you experienced about how loving and being faithful may lead to disastrous consequences. What matters is that you trust God, because of who you know God to be, will look upon your godliness (loving and faithful actions) and be pleased with you. The hope we have for loving and being faithful hinges on the fact that God is loving and faithful and as a result, people will be pleased with us for pleasing God. If they aren’t and if they don’t, it doesn’t matter because we will continue to acknowledge the fact that God is the reason we live and God will work our lives out for His purposes. Love and faithfulness pays off, give it a try today.

As you come to him, a living stone rejected by men but in the sight of God chosen and precious, you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. – 1st Peter 2:4-5 The phrase, “living stone,” is an oxymoron when you think about it. After all, how can a stone live? Honestly, that’s the same as saying “cool dad”, “smart teenager”, “poor rich kid” or “family vacation.” Yes, no vacation you take with your family is any type of real vacation, just think about it. The Apostle Peter says that coming to Jesus is like coming to a “living stone”– that is to say that the ability for us to have an opportunity to come to Jesus is an impossibility that is a reality. So therefore when we come to Jesus, we have come to experience the impossible. When we decide to allow Jesus into our lives, we are welcoming the impossible to take root. Who wouldn’t want that experience? It’s a crazy thought and an out of this world situation, if we would simply come to Him. I want to be clear because many of us feel like we cannot go to an ethereal God and a risen Christ without some magical spell but that is simply not how it works. We were chosen by God to come to Him if we say we want go toward Him, we can. The better news is that we too can live lives, chosen by God, to be impossibilities. Peter says it, “you yourselves like living stones are being built up…” Our lives reflect the glory of God, not because we work hard or try hard. Quite the contrary, our lives begin to reflect the impossibility of salvation and sanctification despite our sinfulness. This is the work of the impossibility which is found as a “living stone.” If you don’t know what I’m saying, I am saying that if we are open to the idea of it, then Jesus can work miracles in our lives. It is something we discounted so badly in our hyper-rational mindset. When we are ready to experience that, then we can confidently move forward in our lives to be who we are> We can begin living the impossibility of Christian Faith through the same power of God that raised Jesus from the dead. How’s that for an oxymoron?

We can’t make ourselves more worthy for a prize or an accolade. We can only pray that God makes us worthy for the dreams He has for us. To this end we always pray for you, that our God may make you worthy of his calling and may fulfill every resolve for good and every work of faith by his power… (2 Thessalonians 1:11 ESV) The “end” Paul is talking about here is the “end game.” He wants to assure the followers of Christ in the first century that the end game of believing in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus is a fulfillment of God’s calling for their lives. Consequently, that calling cannot be received or lived into by our own power or self discipline, but only by God’s own making. Some of us are trying too hard to make ourselves “worthy” for God. In the process of trying to make ourselves this type of worthy, we are alienating ourselves, the people around us and God Himself. But that is the wrong strategy. We should really be allowing our faith in God grow by allowing God to work in all our work, insecurities and missteps and mistakes. Rather, instead of striving toward a “worthiness” or self-made perfection, we need to focus on making our intentions toward God in faith. Just ask yourself, when was the last time you even make the last good thing you did intentionally about God? When you made it about God, what had happened through the course of your activities? Were not even your mistakes, errors and bad decisions leveraged and used by God for the sake of His worthiness in your life? Make your intentions for God and He will make you worthy for that call. No perfection required, no acts of false piety needed. Come before God with your faith, no matter how large or small, with doubts and questions, and then watch as God makes you worthy.

It’s interesting to see how often our greatest life decisions are motivated by fear. The question is: why do we allow ourselves to be THAT afraid?

In God, whose word I praise, in God I trust; I shall not be afraid. What can man do to me? Psalms 56:4 David writes this Psalm while he was fleeing Saul and gets taken prisoner by the nation of Gath, where he was hiding in refuge. It is as if David used this Psalm to remind himself of the actual paradigm in his reality despite his certain circumstance. That is to say, David saw something in his situation that would provide hope, guidance and resolve for his immediate future. When we praise God, and only when we praise Him, do we have the ability to trust Him. When I’m talking about praise, I’m not just talking about singing songs. I’m referring to the act of remembering and pointing out all the reasons why God is awesome and wonderful to us. When we start raising those points, we allow ourselves to trust God. (You can use this method to trust other things and people, too). But David was reflecting positively on one aspect of God’s personality– His “word.” God had promised him that the kingship of Israel was his. Knowing the character of God, and being promised the kingship, David was able to trust God DESPITE his current circumstance. The conclusion of this trust is that nothing is going to stop that promise of God from becoming the reality God intends. So, why do WE make our decisions in a state of fear of our current situations? If we believe God is faithful to His word, shouldn’t we be preparing ourselves for what God has promised even though we currently may not be seeing or experiencing that? Of course we should. In fact, we need to stop making decisions based on our fears because that actually works against what God promises us for our lives. If you don’t know what God promises you, then you need to ask Him; however, for the rest of us, we need to start living into His promises and make decisions that reflect our trust and faith in God. Let me tell you how this Psalm concludes: “For you have delivered my soul from death, yes, my feet from falling, that I may walk before God in the light of life.” (Psalms 56:13 ESV). Yes, the conclusion is that we are still alive because there is a promise to fulfill. Therefore, you shall not be afraid because in God you trust.