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Every day we have to make a decision about whether or not we’re going to trust God enough to follow Him. For most of us that decision won’t have a lasting historical impact, but for some people, trusting in God’s sovereignty has played a key part in the story of Christianity.

Our devotional this morning comes from Today in the Word. In it, the author discusses Zerubbabel’s role in rebuilding the temple—an action that had repercussions for centuries to come:

The book of Haggai is the story of a turning point in the spiritual life of God’s people. They had gone from neglecting the new temple and the spiritual state of their own hearts to obediently rebuilding the temple and joyfully participating in genuine worship. They had moved from self-centered to God-centered, and as a result were poised to experience His blessing on their harvests and community.

Today’s final message is addressed to Zerubbabel, and it parallels the messianic passage earlier in the chapter (vv. 6-9). The first part reaffirms that God is sovereign and has a plan for the nations (vv. 21-22). The second part portrays Zerubbabel as a “signet ring” on God’s hand (v. 23). One meaning of this image was that God would bless Zerubbabel as a leader, as opposed to King Jehoiachin, who as a “signet ring” had been discarded (Jer. 22:24-25).

A second meaning of this picture was that Zerubbabel was a type or foreshadowing of Christ (cf. Zech. 3:8). Generally, a king’s signet ring carries the authority of the king, just as Christ the Son is equivalent in authority to God the Father (John 17:2). From our vantage point in history, we know that Zerubbabel was in the line of David and an ancestor of Jesus (Matt. 1:12). Zerubbabel, then, was chosen by God to lead in a special task, rebuilding the temple, at a key time in history, and both who he was and what he did had spiritual significance beyond that time, just as God had planned.

Read the rest of the devotional at todayintheword.com.

Your decision to follow Christ might not change the course of history, but that doesn’t make it any less significant. How have you seen your relationship with Christ change the world around you?

Yesterday the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life released their findings from a study on religious knowledge in the United States. The test is a smattering of questions about the various major worldwide religions. Surprisingly, to me at least, self-described “Atheists and Agnostics” ended up scoring highest on the test while Christians were at the bottom. No group aced the test. Even the Atheists and Agnostics crowd only skated through with a solid D average.

Additionally, it seems that the Christians in the US have some educational gaps when it comes to their own religion. Only 55% of Americans knew that the Golden Rule isn’t part of the Ten Commandments; however, that number only went up to 67% when it came to White Protestants, and it was around 45% for Hispanic Catholics.

ABC News did a short video on the report in which they asked people on the streets some of the questions from the survey. It’s a lighthearted report, but some of the responses are a bit shocking to me:

Pew has a version of the Religious Knowledge test that you can take. They also let you compare yourself against the different segments of the population.

So, what do the results mean? I think it shows that the United States isn’t nearly as concerned with questions of faith and religion as it used to be. I’d also add that if there was any group that should have gotten 100% on this test it’s Christians. After all, we’re directly called to care for and love our neighbors. What better way to love our neighbor than to know the basic facts about what they believe?

What about you, how do you feel about the results of the survey? If you took the sample test on the Pew site, how did you do?

[HT: ThinkChristian.net]

I’m terrible with directions. Even with a turn-by-turn list to a location I’ve been to more than once I’ll still manage to get lost on occasion. This directional deficiency can be wildly frustrating at times, but it also gives me plenty of opportunities to practice humility.

Because of my issues with directions, this devotional from Strength for the Journey really resonated with me. The author uses the metaphor of a traveling on a road to describe our relationship with Christ. He calls the road that Jesus walked the Glory Road. We know we’re walking the Glory Road when we see our life begin to match His:

Following Jesus means that we stay on the road with Him. And, if you ask me what road Jesus travels, I would answer that His road is the “Glory Road.” Throughout His entire life and ministry, one dynamic was always in play. He lived to demonstrate the glory of His father. When John summarized the life of Jesus (as though someone had asked him to describe Jesus in 25 words or less), he pointed out that Jesus “made His dwelling among us” and noted that the disciples had “seen His glory, the glory of the One and Only . . . full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). Simply put, Jesus came to glorify God by showing us what God was really like. He traveled that glory road all the way to the cross where the love, mercy, grace, justice, and holiness of God were demonstrated in a dramatic moment of servanthood and sacrifice.

[...]

So, to be a follower of Jesus means that we must be on the road with Him—the glory road. That’s where He travels. And, you’ll know you are on the right road when your life looks more and more like Jesus in attitude and action, because He is “the radiance of God’s glory” (Hebrews 1:3). You’ll know that you’re getting up to speed with Him when you see all your relationships and encounters as opportunities to make the qualities and characteristics of our glorious God clearly seen and experienced.

Read the rest of the devotional at rbc.org.

In Romans 8, Paul writes that when we’re in a state of spiritual confusion the Holy Spirit will step in and translate our anguish for God. This devotional from Day by Day reminds us that God doesn’t need us to say anything when we come to Him. He understands exactly what we are feeling and what we need:

It is out of that love and knowledge that the Holy Spirit takes our concerns before the Lord. For in such a time we may find ourselves coming to God when we cannot find the words to say what needs to be said, or the words to confess our wrong, or the words to simply speak to Him because our hearts are heavy and have made it difficult to speak. We find that there are times when our circumstances are so hard, or our feelings so intense that though we wish to communicate with God, we are unable. Yet the Holy Spirit intercedes with expressions of what is within us, and effectively communicates what must be said. He will not let our needs go unmet, but ensures that our needs are sufficiently brought before the Father.

Our Father loves us so very much, and has provided for us every imaginable way to give us what is needed to keep our relationship with Him where it needs to be. In those times that our hearts are so heavy that we cannot utter a word, we can know that we can simply come into the presence of God and silently sit. And as our emotions well up within, there is One who sits with us. And without a word from us, the heaviness of our hearts and the urgency of our needs are carried to the Father by He who was sent to us to be our comforter.

When you come into the presence of God but cannot find the words, just relax and rest in Him, knowing that what you cannot say is not going unheard.

Read the entire devotional at daybyday.org.

Have you ever faced a situation in which you had to rely on the Holy Spirit to intercede for you?

This devotional from Lifetime Guarantee uses the metaphor of a house to describe our spiritual lives. When we build our house, we use Jesus as a foundation, but the rest of construction is up to us. Will we use weak material like straw and sticks, or strong materials like brick and stone? If we use the former, when spiritual storms come we might be in trouble. If we use the latter, we’ll be prepared when the winds start blowing:

“It’s like the story about the three little pigs.” John paused and we paused. “If you build with straw or sticks, your work is going to be destroyed. If you build with bricks—stable materials—your work will stand.”

It always surprises me how the Lord reveals insight into His written Word with such simple stories. John just added his “two cents” worth to the discussion and then we all were quiet because we were all pondering the metaphor he presented.

We were talking about “how” to build on the foundation of Christ (I Corinthians 3:10-16). You’ll remember the choice we have according to that scripture: Wood, hay and straw, or gold, silver and precious stones. Jesus tells us about the wise man and the foolish man in the scripture above. In the children’s story it was the “wicked wolf” that came and in Jesus’ story it’s the wind, the rain and the floods. For us, it’s the world and how the insidious ruler of this world stomps and rants and raves and uses all his sadistic tactics and wisdom in his effort to destroy us.

I wonder—has the wicked wolf been blowing on your house lately? Or have the rains and the floods come and your “house” has fallen? You thought you were so secure, but you didn’t know what was in your future. Believers all have the same “Foundation” through our salvation experience and that unshakable Foundation is Jesus Christ, but of what have we built our “house?”

Read the rest of the devotional at Lifetime.org.

How has the strength of your spiritual house been tested recently?

“The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak”—this famous observation is something we can all relate to. It is one of the deep frustrations of the Christian life that although our sins are forgiven and our minds are renewed by Christ, we nevertheless must struggle daily against the sinful impulses of our “old selves.”

In the “Evening” section of today’s Morning and Evening devotional, Charles Spurgeon fixes on this apparent contradiction between sin and sanctification. But he sees it as a reason not to despair, but to give thanks to God:

Paradoxes abound in Christian experience, and here is one–the spouse [in Song of Solomon 5:2] was asleep, and yet she was awake. He only can read the believer’s riddle who has ploughed with the heifer of his experience. The two points in this evening’s text are–a mournful sleepiness and a hopeful wakefulness…. When our renewed heart struggles against our natural heaviness, we should be grateful to sovereign grace for keeping a little vitality within the body of this death. Jesus will hear our hearts, will help our hearts, will visit our hearts; for the voice of the wakeful heart is really the voice of our Beloved, saying, “Open to me.” Holy zeal will surely unbar the door.

If you’re a Christian, you have certainly experienced the ongoing war between the “mournful sleepiness” of your sinful nature and the “hopeful wakefulnesss” of your new life in Christ. How do you understand the struggle between these two realities of your spiritual life?

Our words are powerful. The old saying “sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me,” couldn’t be further from the truth in my mind. Despite our ability to forgive and forget, a well-timed hateful string of words can emotionally damage a person for years to come.

Our Daily Bread gives us welcome reminder of the pain that our tongues can cause:

The writer of Proverbs describes an unwise person as “one who speaks like the piercings of a sword” (12:18). Our tongues can be like a multi-bladed Swiss Army knife when it comes to the variety of ways that we cut and destroy each other.

Unhealthy attitudes of anger, irritation, frustration, and impatience—even disappointment, stress, guilt, and insecurity—all contribute to our damaging speech. And as we cut with our words, we wound and divide friendships and relationships. It’s no wonder that the infamous list of seven things that are an abomination to the Lord includes anyone who “sows discord among brethren” (Prov. 6:16-19).

How do we stay off that list? For starters, we need to watch what we say. Gossip and slander are out, and words that hurt instead of heal are not welcome. Boasting, lying, and all the rest of the ways we use words to hurt and divide need to be gone as well. In their place, words that extend love and the healing power of forgiveness, mercy, and truth should rule our words and relationships. After all, where would we be if Jesus hadn’t spoken words of forgiving love and grace to us?

Read the entire devotional at odb.org

Is there anything you’ve said recently that you feel convicted about? How do you avoid damaging speech?

Does your church hold a Sunday evening worship service? Evening services have long been a staple of Sunday worship in many Christian traditions. But a recent article in my local paper shed some light on a discouraging trend in my own denomination: Sunday evening church service attendance is significantly down… in some cases, enough so that evening services are being dropped from the weekly church calendar altogether.

The survey [within the Christian Reformed denomination] found evening worship attendance is “plummeting,” down from 56 percent of members in 1992 to 24 percent in 2007.

Researchers wrote that the data “seems to suggest that evening service attendance has become optional.”

It’s a conclusion that may seem harmless, but to some it’s cause for concern about the integrity of the Dutch Reformed family’s faith convictions. For others, the tradition’s decline is a natural outcome of the church’s aspirations to evangelize a broader demographic.

“Many churches are substituting evening worship and putting their energies into other things,” said Jeff Meyer, pastor of Crosswinds Community Church, a 4-year-old CRC congregation in Holland [Michigan] that, like many new churches, does not conduct evening worship.

There’s a lot to unpack in the article. For some, the decline of the evening church service is a tragic breakdown of a long-running church tradition. For others, it’s a clear sign of apostasy and spiritual decline. But for many of the churches jettisoning their traditional evening services, it’s a matter of using church resources (and staff time) efficiently and realistically.

One of my close friends (who is quoted in the article) is the pastor of a church that recently changed its Sunday evening worship service in response to very low attendance. Instead of a full-blown worship service, the church instead hosts a less formal time of community study and discussion. For that church, it was partly a simple question of church resources: was it a good use of the pastor’s time to spend hours preparing a sermon that would be heard by only a fraction of the congregation? (The same could be asked about the time spent by worship planners, musicians, and other staff involved in preparing worship services.) Were there more effective ways that time could be used to serve the church than preparing for a poorly-attended evening service?

Speaking as somebody whose evening church attendance is spotty but improving, I’m not sure what to think. I do worry that the tendency to make evening church “optional,” while not sinful in itself, is one sign that churchgoers today are giving less priority to Christian worship and fellowship than they used to. On the other hand, I completely sympathize with churches looking for alternate ways of fostering fellowship and study. And I resent the idea (voiced by one pastor in the article) that the failure to observe a 16th-century human tradition makes one an apostate.

What about you—does your church hold evening worship services? How is attendance—and how is your attendance? Is evening worship an integral part of Sunday worship, or is it an optional (and possibly outdated) practice that churches should jettison if it doesn’t get adequate participation?

You’re probably familiar with the story of the Emperor’s new clothes, in which a proud ruler’s ego prevents him from accepting the obvious truth that he has been fooled by a pair of clever tailors. He demands that his court admire his new set of clothes… despite the obvious fact that the clothes do not exist.

How would you behave in a similar situation, upon discovering that a painful truth you tried to keep secret was actually plain for all to see? Does your reaction change when it’s God and not other people who can see through your mask? That’s the question A Slice of Infinity asks in this devotional:

Imagine finding out that the one thing you have desperately attempted to keep veiled in secrecy was not actually veiled at all. The thought bears the unsettling sense of finding yourself unclothed before a crowded room. Would you feel foolish? Would you run and hide? Or would you insist the veil was still there? [Hans Christian] Andersen ends with a glimpse into the mind of the king: “[The words of the child] made a deep impression upon the emperor, for it seemed to him that they were right. But he thought to himself regardless, ‘Now I must bear up to the end.’” Idols are not easy to own up to; how much more so, when what we idolize is not really there in the first place….

Perhaps Paul’s instruction to “put off falsehood” is sometimes a call to “put off” what is not even there. The call of Christ is no different. He calls us unto himself and requires that we give him everything, but we must come without costume or pretense. We must come as much ready to be honest with ourselves as with him. In the journey of the Christian pilgrim, we walk with Christ through crowds of lost and deceived sheep toward the Cross, and like the disciples on the road to Emmaus our eyes are opened to our own lost and deceived ways. It is as if Jesus himself is a mirror and we are inspecting our new clothes. But he will take from our shoulders our robes of self-importance and false security. He will tear from our grasp our garments of self-pity and shame. Then he will clothe us with garments of salvation and array us in robes of righteousness, and he will remind us that we are his bride.

Have you struggled to relinquish a long-held way of thinking about yourself in the face of Jesus’ call? Is it comforting or terrifying to know that Jesus sees us exactly as we are, no matter what masks we put on to fool ourselves or others?

Do you ever find it difficult to think that God delights in you?

When we focus on our rebellious sinful nature it can be easy to convince ourselves that we’re unlovable. But as Spurgeon reminds us in this devotional, the Bible clearly shows us that God takes a particular delight in humanity:

But we love to dwell upon this transcendent truth, this glorious mystery: that as the bridegroom rejoiceth over the bride, so does the Lord rejoice over us. We do not read anywhere that God delighteth in the cloud-capped mountains, or the sparkling stars, but we do read that he delighteth in the habitable parts of the earth, and that his delights are with the sons of men. We do not find it written that even angels give his soul delight; nor doth he say, concerning cherubim and seraphim, “Thou shalt be called Hephzibah, for the Lord delighteth in thee”; but he does say all that to poor fallen creatures like ourselves, debased and depraved by sin, but saved, exalted, and glorified by his grace.

Read the entire devotional at ccel.org.

How have you been reminded of God’s delight in you recently?