What God requires He will supply. -Bro. Canter

This morning in class, we had a discussion about the first Passover. Bro. Canter told us that there were at the very least one million Israelites at that time, and possibly up to three or four million. In His mercy, God had provided a means of escaping the judgment to come through the covering of the blood by a perfect lamb. This meant that there would need to be at least two hundred and fifty thousand perfect lambs to provide a covering for each Israelite household. Two hundred and fifty thousand. That number seems impossible. Bro. Canter made the comment, however, that what God requires He will supply.

He asked if we could just imagine the few days before God told Moses what He would require. Maybe one man was speaking with his neighbor and told him, “We had the perfect little lamb born last night. I’ve never seen anything like it.” To which his neighbor responded, “Wow, you don’t say! We had one two days ago, and he’s just beautiful. Not a spot on him.” Across town, maybe one child whispered to her mother, “Momma, have you ever seen such a beautiful lamb?” To which her mother replied, “No, sweetheart. This one’s something special.”

And it was something special. For soon, all of Israel would be in need of a perfect little lamb. Can you imagine the thankfulness in their hearts as one after another realized that God had already prepared them for what they would face? He had supplied for their need before they even knew they had one.

So often, God has a plan, a requirement, of us, if you will. He asks for total surrender. He asks that we accept His plans for our lives. He asks that we trust Him, and follow His lead. And, if you’re anything like me, you may look around and say, “But Lord, I don’t have what it takes to do that.”

But gently, He responds, “What I require, I will supply.”

And I look at the future, and I argue with the Lord. I tell Him that it’s too hard, that He asks too much, that I don’t have enough.

And He whispers, “What I require, I will supply.”

And I see men and women sacrificing their time and efforts for the Savior and I think, “How do they do it?”

And He reminds me, “What I require, I will supply.”

So this is my encouragement for you today. For this day, whatever the Lord requires of you, He will supply it. For tomorrow, whatever the Lord asks of you, He is enough. He is the infinite, omnipotent, omnipresent God who does not change. He equips those that He calls. He is more than enough.

Trust Him, because He is worthy of your trust.

Trust Him with the past, because His blood is enough to cover the worst of sins.

Trust Him with today, because He gives us strength as the day.

Trust Him with tomorrow, because “Faithful is He that calleth you, who also will do it.” (1 Thess. 5:24)

And listen, He’s remind you, “What I require, I will supply.”

I am not brave
I’ll never be
The only thing my heart can offer is a vacancy
I’m just a girl
Nothing more
But I am willing, I am Yours

-Be Born in Me by Francesca Battistelli

Humans are creatures of habit. We are partial to an established routine. We wake up at the same time. We fix our hair in the same ways. We order the same thing from each restaurant we go to. We buy a wardrobe full of clothes and somehow they all manage to look the same. We have our fixed seats in church and our parking spots at the mall.

We want, no, we crave order. We plan our years, months, days. We have calendars that tell us what we’re doing when and who we’re doing it with. Everything is settled. It’s planned. It’s easy. It’s comfortable.

But two thousand years ago, a young girl found out that settled, easy, or comfortable aren’t always the words that describe the life that God has planned for you. What must it have been like to have been Mary? Can you see her, just a young girl, living out a simple life that she had planned and prepared for?

Her plans weren’t bad. No, in fact, they were good plans. She would be a wife, a mother, a homemaker. She would serve the Lord as she served her family. But God saw something more in Mary than she saw in herself. She planned to be the mother of her own children, but He planned for her to be the mother of His only begotten Son. He wanted to entrust her with the greatest gift that has ever been given. It was wonderful. It was incredible. It was terrifying.

Her seemingly perfect plans were blown out of the water by the plans her Creator had for her.

The thing about Mary is that she surrendered. She said, “I am the Lord’s. I belong to Him. I am His servant, His handmaid. Let it be as you have said.”

She willingly accepted the disruptive upheaval that God’s blueprint for her life would bring and laid aside the  comfortable plan she had made. Mary didn’t see the whole blueprint at this point in her life, though. She didn’t see the arduous journey to Bethlehem where she would lay the Son of God in a dirty stable manger. She didn’t see the abrupt escape to Egypt. She didn’t know that her baby would be violently opposed by the religious leaders of her day, and I’m sure she didn’t picture her precious Son on the cross. At the same time, she had no idea that the Child inside her would one day open blind eyes, cause the lame to leap and the dumb to speak. She didn’t know that He would calm the winds and the waves or heal the broken heart of a rejected, sinful Samarian woman with His words.

All she knew was that the angel had told her that she would be overshadowed by Highest and that which was born in her would be the Son of God.

And somehow, that was enough.

It wasn’t that she was strong or brave enough, because in all likelihood, Mary was terrified. Her question of how was well founded. The plan that God had for her did not seem to make sense, but in the angel’s answer she found exactly what she needed. It reassured her that God’s power would be with and sustain her and that she would not be alone on this journey He had called her to.

And so, the Savior of the world came, as a little baby in a manger, in the middle of a dirty stable in the small town of Bethlehem to a young, seemingly unextraordinary woman. It was Mary’s talent, wealth, or beauty that allowed her to carry the Savior to a world in need. It was simply her faithfulness, trust and obedience in her God as He directed her one step at a time.

Today, I wonder if He is still looking for some more Marys. I don’t believe He’s looking for someone who has everything that this world thinks we need to be remarkable. I think He’s looking simply for someone who has a vacancy in their heart that Bethlehem could not offer Him. Someone who is willing to set aside their carefully laid plans and take His hand as He leads them step by step to carry His Son to this world.

The crashing waves and the boisterous winds of this life can easily overwhelm the weary pilgrim. This morning in choir devotions, I began to listen as prayer request after prayer request was lifted up to the Lord. Lost loved ones, illnesses, discouragement, family situations. As the list grew, I felt myself become increasingly distressed. There were so many needs. There were so many situations. When it came time to pray, I simply stood there for a moment. I was overwhelmed. I didn’t even know where to begin or how to pray.

The thought suddenly came to my mind, “Lord, today I’m thankful that we can come into Your gates with thanksgiving and into Your courts with praise.”

This thought has been rolling through my mind throughout the day. Prayer is communication. It’s petition and worship. Intercession and thanksgiving. Listening and speaking. But it’s not just communication with anyone. It’s a direct line to the Creator of all things. Prayer is us boldly coming before the throne of grace. In a sense, it is us stepping through the gates into the courts of God. The veil has been rent. There is now access to the holy of holies, but how do we enter?

Do we enter with doubts and fears? Are our minds clouded by the thoughts of the day or the plans of tomorrow? Do we enter with our needs spilling from our lips as soon as we step into His presence? Do we step before the throne distracted and discontent? Are we in a hurry or are we willing to wait on Him?

For we are stepping into the very throne room of the Almighty. Praise should be flow as naturally as air when we enter in, but so often we forget the One whom we stand before. This King is holy. He is victorious and mighty. He is full of mercy and grace. He is righteous. He is faithful. He is the One who is powerful enough to meet our needs, but who also loves us enough to actually do something about them.

This King has blood that washes whiter than snow, scars that testify to a love that is greater than anything we’ve ever known, and stripes that attest to His healing power. He has a voice that calms the most violent of winds and waves, speaks to the outcast at the well, restores sight to the blind, delivers the demoniac at the tomb, puts the world into motion and commands His disciples to go. He has hands that touch the leper and the lame, the young and the old, the rich and the poor. He is the King.

He has a name that is above every name. A name at which demons tremble. A name that sets captives free and breaks the bondage of sin and death. A name that so often begins our prayers. Jesus.

But how do I enter His presence?

When I see Him as I ought, I cannot help but enter with thanksgiving and praise. When I see Him as He is, I become overwhelmed, not with my needs, but with His greatness.

And that is exactly what I want to be, not overwhelmed with my circumstances, but overwhelmed with my Creator.

Your hands are clenched
Your grip held tight
Your palms are sweaty
Your knuckles white

It’s getting harder
To hold on to
This thing that is
So dear to you

Your hands are hurting
Your arms are weak
As a still, small voice
You hear gently speak

“Let go of this thing
Quit wasting your time
On something that
Is rightfully Mine.

This burden you bear
Is not yours to hold
Let Me give you rest
And carry your load”

But your hands are clenched
Your grip held on tight
Your palms are sweaty
And your knuckles are white

You hold dreams of the future,
The fears of the now,
And regrets of the past
And you cry out, “How?”

How do I let go
Of this thing in my hands?
Can I really trust
In Your omniscient plan?

But gently He knocks
And softly He calls
Insistently, He asks
“Will you give Me your all?

All your hopes and your dreams?
All your fears and regrets?
Will you give it to Me
And trust I know best?”

And with trembling hands,
You loosen your grip
And the thing you’ve held on to,
Begin slowly to slip

Out of your fingers
And into His hands
Empty and waiting
In His presence you stand

A faith in His goodness
Replaces the fear
As handfuls on purpose
Begin to appear

And what you’ve held onto
You no longer grasp
Because your know
It will be worth it all when you see Him at last

We’ve turned salvation into just a prayer. -Phil Moreino

The Gospel. It’s the good news. It’s a six letter word that changes everything. It’s salvation and justification. Sanctification. Grace. Mercy. Consecration. Hope. Love. Life. It’s a concept simple enough to be understood by a child and complex enough to be planned and appreciated by the Creator of the universe. It can be received in a instant but takes more than a lifetime to fully comprehend. 

It’s for all those who ask. The rich and the poor. The powerful and weak. The fearful and the brave. 

It’s for me and it’s for you. 

It’s the story of love. Of a God who loved this world so much that He sent His only son so that we could have a way to heaven, but it’s more than that. 

It’s the story of separation. Of the same God forced to break relationship with the man and woman He created in His image. 

It’s the story of pride. Of the prize creation’s pride and rebellion against his Creator. 

It’s the story of waiting. Of a world, a nation, waiting for the promise of a Messiah. 

It’s the story of a hero. Of the Hero. Of the Son of God abandoning His heavenly home to enter into our earthly, ugly world. 

It’s the story of the supernatural. Of healing. Of blind eyes seeing, deaf ears hearing. Dead hearts beating once again. 

It’s the story of betrayal. Of a man blinded by greed and turning on a Friend, a Mentor. Someone innocent and clean. 

It’s the story of rejection. Of the world spurning their Savior and hope. 

It’s the story of death. Of a Spotless Lamb willingly laying down His life on the Cross of Calvary. 

It’s the story of pain. Of three long days grieving and weeping. Mourning as the Savior bore the pain and fought death, hell and the grave. 

It’s the story of victory. Of the triumphant resurrection day of the Savior that not only bore our sins, but justified us by His righteousness. 

It’s the story of power. Of the Holy Spirit who promises to give us the power to live victoriously everyday. 

It’s the story of LIFE. Of a Savior whose short, earthly life gave us hope for eternal life. 

This is the Gospel. It is beautiful and ugly. It is pain and joy. It is the plan of the Creator from the beginning. 

And, as my dad said, we want to reduce that to a simple prayer? 

It’s so much more than that. Yes, salvation is that moment in time when we recognize our need of Savior and come before the throne of grace and find that we can be clean because of Him. 

But it is so much more than that. The Gospel is not a one time moment of victory. It is a daily call to follow Christ. It is a restoration of the relationship with God that was lost so long ago in the Garden, not because we are holy, but because He is and He clothes us in His righteousness. 

It is a change. In lifestyle? yes. In morals? sure. In heart? Absolutely. 

It’s a shift from a world that revolves around me, to a life that revolves around Him. 

When we tell people that all they have to do is ask Jesus into their heart and life will be good, we do them a severe injustice. 

Do I want them to receive Christ? Yes. Absolutely. No doubt. 

But more than that I want them to relinquish their lives to Christ. I want to see them live in fellowship with their Creator. I want to see Christians. Not the “Christian” of today’s society that claims allegiance to God in order to improve their social standing. No, what if we became like the Christians of the first century. Men and women determined to serve Christ no matter the sacrifice. Christians less concerned with the opinions of men and more concerned with bringing glory to Christ. People whose actions of their everyday lives were a direct result of their salvation. People who had hope, despite their present circumstances. People who were joyful in the middle of trials. People who boldly proclaimed His truth. People who changed the world for the Kingdom’s sake. People surrendered to their Savior. 

Is this the Gospel?

 

 

 

I’ll build an altar with the rubble that You found me in, and every stone will sing of what You can redeem. -“Heal the Wound” by Wes Hampton

 

An altar is a place of worship. A place of commitment. A place to meet the Lord. It’s a place of sacrifice. It should be a place of great beauty, right? Something extravagant and pristine. Something clean and perfect. A place that frowns at ugliness and brokenness. 

That’s not the altar I see throughout God’s Word. The first altar written of is found in Genesis 8. Noah had just stepped off of the ark. The world as he knew it had been destroyed. He was probably not in his top condition. It’d been a long year, filled with struggles and maybe even some doubts, but that didn’t stop Noah. Overwhelmed by thankfulness for his Creator, he looked at what was left of the earth and he began to gather it together. As his stack grew, I wonder what his sons might have been thinking. 

Maybe Shem thought, “What’s he going to do with that?”

Japheth may have looked at it and wondered, “What is he going to do with that pile of rocks? It looks pretty useless to me.” 

But Noah just trudged on. Rock by rock, his heap of nothing began to take shape. What had been useless now became a place of worship as Noah offered a sacrifice to the Lord. And the Lord was pleased, but not because of the extravagance of Noah’s altar. In fact, we don’t even know for sure what the first altar really even looked like because there’s no mention of it’s appearance. No, the Lord was pleased because Noah created a place of worship and sacrifice with what he had left. 

And that’s really all the Lord wants of us. He wants us to take what we have and present it to Him as worship and sacrifice. The pieces of our lives, the brokenness, the shattered rubble, God left them there for a purpose. We can either leave them as they are, pointless and a painful reminder. Or, we can begin to use them to bring glory to His name. Our altar may not be beautiful or pristine. It may have a few rough edges, but it is proof of God’s power, of His ability to redeem and make broken things beautiful. 

In all its seeming ugliness, it is a place of beauty. Just not the beauty that we think of. It’s beautiful because it is a reminder to worship. It’s beautiful because it is a place to offer ourselves as a living sacrifice. A total sacrifice, including the good and the bad. It’s beautiful in the fact that an altar built of the rubble He found us in is exactly what He desires, nothing more, nothing less. 

 

How many of y’all remember the story of Stephen? His story is short, just taking up a handful of verses in chapters 6 & 7 of Acts. We don’t know much about him. We don’t know about his background. His parents aren’t mentioned. We aren’t told if he was an educated man or not. Was he a smart man? Was he business minded? Did he have a wife and children? Was he from a good devout family? What were his dreams? What did he do before he was chosen by the church?

We don’t know. The only thing we know about him is that he was “full of faith and of the Holy Ghost.” And that says more about the man than any list of his history or background ever could. Here was a man who had emptied himself of his own wants, his own desires, his fears and dreams. He had to, because the only way to be full of something is to empty yourself of everything else. I don’t know what  he’d been holding onto before he came to know Christ, but I do know that he wasn’t holding onto it anymore.

And this is where we find Stephen, full of the Spirit of God.

It was a hectic crowd that day. The men and women gathered around Stephen were angry, hostile even. They’d been drawn by the power of God that rested on Stephen, unable to resist the wisdom and spirit that rested on him. They flung wild accusations at him, wanting to destroy him as they had his Savior. Stephen, though, was not worried. He sat and listened, trusting in his Heavenly Father.

“Look at him. He looks like an angel,” whispered a young scribe.

“How can he be so calm?” asked a councilman.

And there amongst the crowd, sat a young man who would cause untold trouble for the church, wondering the very same thing.

As Stephen exhorted on the greatness of God and cautioned them against the hardness of their hearts, the young man shifted uncomfortably in his seat. The words sliced at his heart, opening a wound that caused him to become angry. With relief, he watched as the crowd turned against Stephen. He followed along as they carried the faithful follower of Christ out of the city. Still, when that first stone was throne at the first martyr of Christ, he couldn’t help but feel that same wound open a little wider. By the time Stephen cried out with a loud voice, “Lord, lay not this sin to their charge,” Saul felt sick.

In an attempt to heal that wound, he “made havoc of the church.”

But somehow I can’t believe he ever forgot that simple prayer that he had heard Stephen utter with his last breath. It was an outrageous prayer, if he had ever heard one. It was a prayer of mercy, a prayer of love. A prayer of forgiveness for the very men that murdered him. It was grace in its truest sense.

And that prayer of Stephen’s was answered in a greater way than he could have ever imagined. For soon, on the Damascus Road, God would answer that outrageous prayer. There on the Damascus Road, God would give mercy to the very one that Stephen had interceded for.

That is why we must intercede for those we love. Intercession is not a futile pastime. It is not a ritual we go through. Intercession allows us to touch heaven for the most hardened people that otherwise might never be carried before the throne of grace. People who this world needs in the Christian fight. People with bleeding hearts and bloody hands. People that noone else wants to pray for.

These are the people that we are to intercede for. These are the people that we are to love and extend mercy to. But first we must empty ourselves. Because it’s only by the Spirit of God that these people will be drawn to Christ, and in order to be full of His power, we have to give Him room. It’s not about our wants, desires and fears. It’s about the Savior and His kingdom.

So let Him really fill you. Let Him change you and fill you with His power. Because there are other Sauls out there waiting to become Pauls. And even though our “story” may only amount to a handful of verses in the Bible, like Stephens, our impact could bring in more Pauls, whose books fill up the New Testament.

So, be a prayer warrior. Seek God’s face for that father. That daughter. That uncle. That cousin. That friend.

Don’t stop. Don’t give up.

Keep praying because God’s grace is still healing bleeding hearts and cleansing bloody hands.

“Walk.” A simple enough concept. One foot in front of the other. One step at a time. Easy. But not for this man.
No, he’d never experienced that before. Lame from birth, walking had never been an option for him. He understood the process. He’d watched others walk all his life. In fact, sitting in front of the temple, he’d probably had plenty of time to study how others walked.
The young mother with her hurried, clipped steps.
The rich gentleman with his long languid gait.
The elder’s stilted, halting progress.
The young child’s awkward, toddling movements. The list went on forever.
Yes, he knew how everyone else walked, but what he didn’t know was how he, himself, would walk, if he ever had the chance.
Maybe that was why Peter’s command caught him off guard. It could have been any number of reasons. After all, these men were looking at him, which was an uncommon occurrence in itself. Most people avoided him like the plague. Or it could have been that these men took it one step farther by speaking to him.
But maybe it was more than that. Maybe he stared up at Peter and John, yearning with everything in him to get up and walk, but fear held him back.
Not fear of if God could.
Fear of if he could.
After all, what did a lame man know of walking? What kind of walk was he supposed to have? Fast, like the mother’s? Confident, like the gentleman’s?
But in the midst of his questions, Peter reached down and pulled him up.
And as God’s healing strength poured into his body, he found his walk.
And it was like no walk he’d ever seen.
It was a walk of excitement, as he leaped for joy. A walk of praise, as he lifted his hands and voice to God. It was a walk of victory that declared to the world that God was powerful.

But what about you? Have you sat watching others walk as you were rendered immobile by chains the devil threw around you?
Right now, God is saying walk! But you say how? I’ve never done this before? So and so does this. She does that. That guy does this. And you sit in fear thinking you can’t do it.
But it’s not your power. It’s God’s.
And trust me, when His pulls you up, and His healing strength flows into you, you’ll find your walk, just like the man at the Temple Beautiful.
And yes, it will be different than the walk of the world around you. There will be no dragging feet or slumped shoulders. No, it will be a walk of freedom. A walk of excitement and praise. A walk that testifies to God’s power. A walk that proclaims hope to a lost world. A walk of confidence. It will be a walk of victory.
So get ready, I want to see your victory walk.