Better at Setting Something Aside
“And now let Pharaoh look for a discerning and wise man and put him in charge of the land of Egypt. Let Pharaoh appoint commissioners over the land to take a fifth of the harvest of Egypt during the seven years of abundance. They should collect all the food of these good years that are coming and store up the grain under the authority of Pharaoh, to be kept in the cities for food.”
Genesis 41:33-35 (NIV)
Can you accept that you possess the discipline to save some of your money? God has given us this discipline as a way of living obediently to Him, of honoring His omniscience, and of showing gratitude that in many instances He will not let us be caught off guard. He will provide both revelation and vision: revelation to tell you what’s coming and vision to tell you how to respond to it.
God gives Pharaoh a dream that when Joseph interprets it, it reveals that God blesses the saving and the storing just as much as His blessings are revealed in surviving the famine.
We become better at saving money first when we develop the conviction that saving and storing is just as much a spiritual offering to God as it is scattering, planting, harvesting, and storing. Saving money is as much a blessing as being able to spend it. Worship can be attached to the saving of money just as intimately as the worship we offer over what our money brings to our lives.
If you can thank God when God lets it flow in the years of plenty, you can thank God when you have to live in the years of scarcity off of what you have stored.
Look at your paycheck and assess: if you have to put $10 to the side, do you see the opportunity to celebrate? Money saved equal to the clothes and jewelry and cars and possessions that money purchases turns into opportunities to be grateful for God’s provision.
For far too many people, saving is a burden. That’s why most people avoid it or do it reluctantly. Whatever one’s attitude toward a thing often determines their commitment toward that thing, which means we could all do better at saving money if we first changed our perception of the discipline of saving and storing. Saving money is an act of spiritual offering to God. You honor God not just by how you spend your money; you honor God by how you save your money.
Say to yourself: “If I learn how to save money, I can thank God in the years of plenty for how good God has been, and thank God in the years of scarcity for how He keeps me from falling and presents me faultless.” Become better at saving your money because it builds and strengthens other disciplines. Start wherever you are, with whatever you have, whenever you can, as much as you can.
Better at Creating a New Normal
On the evening of that first day of the week, when the disciples were together, with the doors locked for fear of the Jewish leaders, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” After he said this, he showed them his hands and side. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord. Again Jesus said, “Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” And with that he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone’s sins, their sins are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.”
John 20:19-23 (NIV)
When life drags you through some of these sinking moments and deeply painful experiences, when fatigue seems to have squeezed out the little optimism and hope you had left, when your reserve tank has now run out of fuel and the stall has given way to a complete stop, you may feel you can’t move forward anymore, you can’t find any more reason to stay positive.
You may say to yourself, “I don’t know how to process this, and if I could, I wouldn’t know where to house these thoughts and emotions because they’re too tough, too painful, too confusing, too fatiguing, too draining, and too disappointing.”
The first thing we must notice in this text is that Jesus appeared in His resurrected body. The writer thinks it is instructive to remind us that Jesus appears in a locked space in His resurrected body to the timid and fearful disciples, saying “Peace be with you.”
The lesson is to grab the important blessing of His appearance in that resurrected body and to define your own peace by it. Jesus is teaching and inviting us to consider that resurrection is not to be seen or embraced as a one-time event. Resurrection was the release of a spiritual norm.
You live with resurrection capacity.
All of us have areas of our lives that have experienced death. And here’s what He’s saying: Everything in your life that has ceased to be as God designed can be resurrected to fresh participation in the ongoing movement of creation in your particular context.
His appearance was not just a demonstration or confirmation. It was an invitation. What’s the invitation? Here it is:
Child of God, you are invited to move in your life from evidence of belief in Jesus to belief as an expansive norm. How expansive? So deep, so wide, so applicable, so necessary, so relevant, so needed, that there is no part of your life that you will just accept as okay, outside of the design of God’s will for it. Meaning, you don’t care what has experienced death in your life; you don’t settle for it. Whatever it is, relationship, ambition, dream, or vision. You don’t accept that which seems insurmountable at any cost because God has given you resurrection capacity.
Better at Being Challenged
Another time Jesus went into the synagogue, and a man with a shriveled hand was there. Some of them were looking for a reason to accuse Jesus, so they watched him closely to see if he would heal him on the Sabbath. Jesus said to the man with the shriveled hand, “Stand up in front of everyone.” Then Jesus asked them, “Which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save life or to kill?” But they remained silent. He looked around at them in anger and, deeply distressed at their stubborn hearts, said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and his hand was completely restored. Then the Pharisees went out and began to plot with the Herodians how they might kill Jesus.
Mark 3:1-6 (NIV)
How do we become better at dealing with our challenges so that our reactions are not always based on the stoking of our hurts and our pain and our agitation, but so that we can offer God in response something that expands the kingdom and glorifies His name? How do we better respond to our challenges no matter where they may be—personal and professional and family and health challenges, emotional challenges, spiritual challenges, cultural challenges?
This text is teaching us that we can steward our challenges better if we do what Jesus did. His interaction was with some Pharisees who were watching a man with a shriveled hand waiting for Jesus to minister to him. Jesus becomes angry not at what they say, but because of the condition of their hearts. He’s angry to the point of almost having an outburst.
But Jesus shifted the focus. He knew where the challenge was coming from. He knew it was coming from those who were accusing Him. He knew who was stirring His anger and causing His distress. But He didn’t let the challenge angle His vision. He didn’t let the hurt angle His motivation. He took His vision, His virtue, His motivation, His might, and He angled it toward the man with the withered hand because He knew if He angled His motivation there, it would emote from Him something good.
Here’s the principle: You can’t deflect all of your challenges, but you can determine your angle and your focus toward something that glorifies God. This angling can reveal how powerful God is to have blessed us in spite of all the things that are circling around us.
There is no challenge in your life that ought to be able to unsettle you until you can’t angle your motivations to make sure you’re being led and guided by Christ.
Better at Experiencing God
“This is the covenant I will make with them after that time, says the Lord.
I will put my laws in their hearts, and I will write them on their minds.”
Hebrews 10:16 (NIV)
In Christ, you are invited to experience God living in the human heart. That’s the key. That’s the aim. It’s the spiritual path to ensure faith and maturation. It’s how you and I can live our best lives. This is God’s ultimate will for us.
A better relationship with God is to experience God, which is when God writes His law on your heart and in your mind to face challenges and address deeply layered cultural and personal issues. This will only be possible when people who have experienced God can offer a faith that is based not just on what they know but on what they have themselves experienced.
The Bible was written to a community, Israel, for how Israel needed to understand their God and how they needed to relate to each other. This is why the Scripture does not say, “All men and women will know that you are my disciples if you have a certain amount of money,” or “a certain political persuasion,” or “if you are a certain gender,” or “if you are of a certain ethnicity.” No, it says, “All men will know that you’re my disciples if you have love one for another” because your spirituality is not based on your singular solitary sanctification, consecration, isolation, or theological reflection. No, we are not impressed with how deep you are if you are deep but do not obey God’s commandments to love your neighbor and love your enemy.
If the Lord is living inside of you, you ought to be one of the most mercy-giving, grace-filled, compassion-extending people, and when people are around you, they ought to hear the truth of Jesus and not your opinion.
The future is going to be shaped by people who have matured beyond an adversarial conversation about the Bible and spirituality. There are people who are debating with you for the sake of debating, and you can tell them God’s honest truth and it won’t matter. And then there are other people who are debating because they have a strong opinion, but they are open to being taught something different.
A person who has experienced God never needs to debate with a person who nurtures their religion only as an intellectual construct, and that’s why the writer of Hebrews says God wants to relate to you not just cognitively, He wants to relate to you experientially—this is the Lord writing His law on your heart. The Lord wants a deep personal, internal connection with you where your heart is aligned with His will.
Better at Sharing My Faith
I pray that your partnership with us in the faith may be effective in deepening your understanding of every good thing we share for the sake of Christ.
Philemon 1:6 (NIV)
Part of the toxicity and vitriol of our culture is because Christians are too anonymous. A strong discipline the Lord wants you to steward is the sharing of your faith. He wants your worship, your service, your devotion, and your surrender of will to Him—but He also wants you to share your faith in Christ with others effectively and powerfully.
There are people around you that you need to interact with, whom your spirituality can influence so that they can become anchored in faith. As you’re conversing with people around issues of finance and social graces and what it means to be interconnected, do you interact with them with salvation on your mind?
Our faith is something we are destined and called to share. Paul is saying to Philemon: Don’t see Onesimus as a slave, see him as a brother because Onesimus and you, Philemon, are now part of the same family. Both of you are now tied together by blood. Both of you are living graced with redemption. Both of you are blessed by the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ. There’s a common connection that changes how you see yourself and how you see others—not only the sin connection, but the faith connection.
We don’t start our conversations of faith with what we believe about various doctrines or ideologies. We start with Jesus because when we start with Jesus, His sacrifice, His grace, His surrender for our redemption, His power to change human conditions, we realize we are closer in relationship because of Jesus than we are different without Him.
Paul desires that Philemon’s sharing of his faith have a powerful impact not just on others but also on himself. Paul believes that when Christians share their faith, they not only help others establish an understanding of God but also deepen their own understanding of Him.
So when you communicate with people around you, what’s more important to you?
Is it more important to you for people to see your point or to see your Christ and your engagement? What’s more important: your victory or the kingdom’s expansion?
