daily java

Daily Java:

Rejoice in our confident hope (Romans 12:12)

Today is the first Sunday of Advent, the four Sundays that come before Christmas. Advent was designed by some on the early church as a watching time, waiting for the advent – or coming – of the Messiah.

The world then, like the one we live in now, was a world of no hope. And hope is a strange thing, something hard to define. You either have it or you don’t.

Those who have hope are happy, even when things are going badly. They have some point to life, some reason to get up in the morning. They live.

Those who do not have it are miserable, they are despairing. There is no point, no purpose to their lives. They just exist.

You see people like that around. They are just waiting for something to happen, dreading the day it does, not knowing how to get the strength to make it through another day. Their dreams are gone, their joy is gone, their lives are futile.

They may even be people in good jobs or with good families. It may seem that they have everything to live for. But in their eyes, you see it. There is no hope. They are null and void in life, just waiting to die.

The apostle Paul calls it our confident hope. It is a hope that shows. We may even be going through a rough time in our lives, but the hope is there, maybe even partially buried. But it is there. And it will come back. It is a certain confidence in the fact that we know we are loved and that there is some purpose or reason beyond what we have been able to cobble together ourselves.

It is like the confidence of a man who knows his physical limitations and is walking through a rough neighborhood. It is like the confidence of a pretty girl who can break her nose and know it will be fine and she will still be pretty. It is like the salesman who is good at sales but hasn’t had any customers come in. He knows sooner or later they will and he will sell.

It is like sister Ella in her new sparkly cap. It looks good and people stop to tell her. She is confident in it.

It is knowing that things will turnout fine even if they look bad.

That is the hope we celebrate today, the hope of the resurrection, the hope of eternal life, the hope of purpose and meaning beyond this world. We celebrate hope. Jesus brought us hope. God gives us hope through him. As a Christ-follower, we have hope.

And that is what today is all about: hope. Confident hope. Eternal hope. Extreme hope. A hope that is everlasting and will never die.

That is our gift from God. And when we hope in him, we give it back to him.

daily java

Daily Java:

Don’t be intimidated in any way by your enemies. This will be a sign to them that they are going to be destroyed, but that you are going to be saved, even by God himself. (Philippians 1:28)

There is a big deal now about bullying. There are all kinds of ads telling you to not bully and to not encourage bullying. For the most part, they are stupid.

Bullying is not something you deal with rationally. It is something you deal with on other levels. And above all, a person is bullied if they want to be bullied. A bully cannot intimidate you unless you allow him to do so.

My son had problems with bullies in junior high. He was a suburban Houston boy thrust into a rural farm community. The kids were different than he was. For one thing, they were a lot more physical. My son was not. He was basically a sensitive, shy kid.

They were beating him up and the like. Finally I got tired of it and enrolled him to karate classes. I told him that it was not so that he could stand up to the bullies and threaten to hurt them. It was so that he could gain confidence. If there is one person bullies do not bother, it is confident people.

I have not had problems with bullies since mid high school. It was at that point that I got both size and confidence. For some reason, even though I didn’t necessarily set out to do so, I got confidence. Although I was not necessarily a physical person, I looked like one. So bullies left me alone.

I wanted the same for my son. As he worked on his karate, little by little he gained confidence. And it showed in the way he presented himself. After one of the kids from his school saw him going into his karate school dojo, they decided he wasn’t worth the possible embarrassment of being beaten up. So they left him alone.

Bullies look for people who are ill at ease, or not strong. They prey on those people. The Christian should be the kind of person that people will not bother with. After all, as one friend said to me, what are they going to do? Threaten him with heaven?

There is a confidence that should be in a Christian that says to people that you cannot hurt him. Jesus himself said it in Matthew 10 when he said to not fear them who can destroy your body, but rather fear him who can destroy both body and soul in hell.

In other words, if you are going to be afraid, be afraid of real scary people. God is scary if you get to thinking about it. People are not. Sure, they may hurt you and even kill you. But there is a strength in the Christian that says that they will continue no matter what the problems.

A Christian doesn’t wait for the government to pass laws telling those outside the body of Christ that they cannot hurt those inside the body of Christ. The Christian relies on the power of God.

That power doesn’t mean that everybody is going to fall before him. But it does mean that no matter what else may happen, God is still in control.

People will try to bully Christians because they mistakenly view them as weak, but they are not. They have the power of God within them. and, if they truly rely on God, they have a strength within them that is beyond the power of the world to understand.

Bullies are stupid. They think they can get what they want by brute force or by intimidation. But the apostle Paul says don’t worry about them. They will ultimately be destroyed. And no matter what they do to you, you will be rewarded.

One of the inmates at the jail where I go on Thursday nights told me the other day that I radiate calm. I suppose that what he saw was Christianity coming through me. he saw the power of God in my life and he saw that I was not going to be afraid of a bunch of people wearing striped clothing.

Greater is he that is in me than he that is in the world, Jesus said. And he meant it.

Bullies are going to be with us no matter what the government may pretend to do. But the Christian doesn’t have to worry about it. He has the God of the Universe on his side.

daily java

Daily Java:

At the foot of the mountain, a large crowd was waiting for them. A man came and knelt before Jesus and said, “Lord, have mercy on my son. He has seizures and suffers terribly. He often falls into the fire or into the water. So I brought him to your disciples, but they couldn’t heal him.” Jesus said, “You faithless and corrupt people! How long must I be with you? How long must I put up with you? Bring the boy here to me.” Then Jesus rebuked the demon in the boy, and it left him. From that moment the boy was well. Afterward the disciples asked Jesus privately, “Why couldn’t we cast out that demon?” “You don’t have enough faith,” Jesus told them. “I tell you the truth, if you had faith even as small as a mustard seed, you could say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it would move. Nothing would be impossible. (Matthew 17:14-20)

The apostles had some new found power given them by God. And they got to where they were kind of proud of it and of their positions as right hand men to the Messiah. When a man came to them with a boy possessed by a demon, the disciples tried to cast it out themselves. “No need to worry the Rabbi. We’ll take care of it for you. After all, we are his assistants.”

And they were. But in this case, as in a couple of others throughout the gospels, they came up rather short. All of the praying and calling on God, all of the jumping around did nothing. The boy remained stubbornly in the grip of the demon.

Jesus came by and cast the demon out, releasing the boy from his torment. Jesus’ response to the man when he told him that his disciples couldn’t anything about it was rather odd. It was a rebuke for their faithlessness and wondering out loud how long he was going to have to put up with this foolishness.

From what we have read about the apostles, they were probably chagrined. Here was their chance to shine, to show people that God was on their side. People would see their own power and that God really loved them.

But it was ashes. They came up short in front of everyone. And then they also came up short in front of Jesus. Jesus threw the demon out easily.

Why could we not do it, they asked. Jesus’ answer: your faith was in the wrong place. Your faith was in yourselves and not in God, in your own power, not in God’s power. You couldn’t do it because you relied on your own relationship with God rather than God himself.

We forget that it is God that is great, not us. We are only great inasmuch as God allows us to be great. And power we have is from him. As 2 Corinthians 3:4-6 says: We are confident of all this because of our great trust in God through Christ. It is not that we think we are qualified to do anything on our own. Our qualification comes from God.

Anything we can do is from God, not from ourselves. And as long as we remember that, we do well. It is our faith in God that keeps us going, our faith in his ability, not our own, that matters.

It really doesn’t matter how much you believe in yourself. What matters is how much you believe in God and in his power.

daily java

Daily Java:

I will bless the Lord who guides me;
      even at night my heart instructs me.
I know the Lord is always with me.
     I will not be shaken, for he is right beside me. (Psalm 16:7-8)

My wife and I have been married for over forty years. In that time, we have built a good relationship.

That relationship has been built on our being together. She has been beside me for all those years, supporting what I do, encouraging me, loving me, teaching me, learning from me, just being with me.

We are together much of the day, due to the nature of my work, and we are together every night. We eat together and sleep together, we play together and laugh together, we celebrate together and mourn together.

She is my companion and I love her.

But as much as I love her, I have been with the Lord longer.

I accepted Jesus as my Savior on December 13, 1959, at the age of ten. I have not always done a good job, but I have tried to serve him ever since.

He guides me and instructs me and is always with me.

There are times when Ella cannot be with me for one reason or another, but God is always there. And one day, she will die, but he will still be there.

This knowledge gives me a confidence that is not found even in my relationship with Ella. One day she will be gone, but he will never be gone.

He will always be with me.