God Communicates

Today's Daily Soap {Scripture | Observation | Application | Prayer}

• S: Here's how we can be sure that we know God in the right way: Keep his commandments. If someone claims, "I know him well!" but doesn't keep his commandments, he's obviously a liar. His life doesn't match his words. But the one who keeps God's word is the person in whom we see God's mature love. This is the only way to be sure we're in God. Anyone who claims to be intimate with God ought to live the same kind of life Jesus lived. ... Anyone who claims to live in God's light and hates a brother or sister is still in the dark. It's the person who loves brother and sister who dwells in God's light and doesn't block the light from others. But whoever hates is still in the dark, stumbles around in the dark, doesn't know which end is up, blinded by the darkness. 1 John 2:2-6,9-11 [MSG]
  
• O: "Anyone who claims to be intimate with God ought to live the same kind of life Jesus lived. ... Anyone who claims to live in God's light and hates a brother or sister is still in the dark.
  
• A: Think God isn't in control? That He doesn't speak to us? Try this. Every day I pull the readings for my Life Journaling (Daily Soap) from an established reading plan. I don't make these up or try myself to find something that meets a particular purpose. Today, my own religious beliefs were challenged and I was called a racist because of some content that appeared beneath a recent article I wrote on Redstate.com. The content was not of my design, but rather appended to my article by Redstate without my knowledge or approval. Today, I sat down to Life Journal and read the above passage from 1 John 2. It's the person who loves brother and sister who dwells in God's light and doesn't block the light from others. As I stood accused of being a racist, posting content that I did not post, my faith being called into question, it is comforting -- like reassurance from God -- to read such words of wisdom. By no design of my own, simply following my established reading plan, I was led to such a timely passage. Say it's fate. Say it's coincidence. Say it's my imagination. Say whatever you want, but I say it's the way that God communicates in our world today.
  
• P: Father, as I try to live a life that is an example of Your love, it is inevitable that I will face accusation and insult from time to time. Your Word says so, and I've certainly experienced it before. Thank You for using Your Word and my daily journaling to provide reassurance and affirmation in the face of such accusations.
  

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Epiphany

Today's Daily Soap {Scripture | Observation | Application | Prayer}

• S: "These people make a big show of saying the right thing, but their hearts aren't in it. Because they act like they're worshiping me but don't mean it, I'm going to step in and shock them awake, astonish them, stand them on their ears. The wise ones who had it all figured out will be exposed as fools. The smart people who thought they knew everything will turn out to know nothing." [Isaiah 29:13-14 MSG]
  
• O: Today was a very stressful day. The past week, in fact, has led up to it with some unusual happenings at work. First, last week there was a meeting of several District Managers and above at our corporate headquarters. This week, I have a visit scheduled with some people from our corporate headquarters and from a liquidation company that is coming in to pick up several clearance items as part of a test that will likely be rolled out to the entire company if it is successful in my store. I also received word that My District Manager and Loss Prevention Manager will be in my store on Wednesday to look into some high merchandise shrink numbers. And, there is a Store Manager meeting tomorrow for the entire District. It's been a hectic week. My company closed nearly three dozen stores several months ago, and has been struggling financially for quite some time. With a new CEO and Executive Council, the company is trying to reinvent itself. Any time a company is in this situation, it can be difficult not to worry about what might happen next -- restructuring, job eliminations, store closures, etc. All of the unusual coincidences happening at the same time have had me wondering a bit. I say all of that to say this: WOW! Did I have an epiphany today. After stressing over much of this and calling my wife to let out the stress, I sat in my car during a very short lunch and spent some time reading through the Bible. I read several chapters, and shortly after starting what I had planned to be the last chapter, I read the passage quoted above. It felt amazingly like God was trying to speak to me.
  
• A: "These people make a big show of saying the right thing, but their hearts aren't in it." I want my heart to be "in it," but clearly there are distractions and preoccupations in life that tend to steal attention away from God and family. "Because they act like they're worshiping me but don't mean it,..." Of course I worship God. But, when I'm in church, and we're singing, do I feel it? Am I worshipping and praising -- or just singing? And what of the rest of the week? Where is the praise and worship then? "I'm going to step in and shock them awake, astonish them, stand them on their ears." The message is coming through loud and clear now. How easy it could be for my whole world to be turned on it's end by things such as lost jobs or store closures. "The wise ones who had it all figured out will be exposed as fools. The smart people who thought they knew everything will turn out to know nothing." Now I know. See, I felt as if God was trying to get through to me, to tell me that I'm not quite living the life that He would want me to live. Like He had stood me on my ears with all of the uncertainty at work. When my wife and I were looking for our new house, we made several commitments to each other -- and to God -- that we haven't been doing a very good job of living up to. In some cases, we have actually used the new house as one of the excuses for not living up to these commitments. Through this passage in Isaiah, I feel that God has opened up my eyes and made me realize that there are some things that I need to be doing for Him. Funny thing of it is, when I spoke with my wife about it afterward and told her of my epiphany, she said she had been thinking the very same thing last night.
• P: God, I hear You. I hear You and I understand. Thank You for bringing me to the realization that we haven't been honoring our commitments to You. Whatever Your Will might be regarding the situation at work, I put my faith in You to see us through it.
  

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Communication

Today's Daily Soap {Scripture | Observation | Application | Prayer}

Today's SOAP
inspired by the
Men's Devotional Bible

• S: Song of Solomon 2:3-13; Psalm 85:10-13; Proverbs 3:1-6
  
• O: Love, faithfulness, and communication are interdependent characteristics of a lasting relationship.
  
• A: My wife and I sometimes run into a communication barrier. When she's busy, I want to talk. When she wants to talk, I'm busy. This morning as I sat down to read through this daily devotional, she started talking to me. I got frustrated. I was trying to spend some time with God, and my wife was interrupting us. When I complained, she was frustrated that I was sitting in the breakfast nook, where everyone could see me and be tempted to interrupt me. I explained that the kids weren't interrupting me, it was just her. I tried to remind her of my commitment to conduct my own personal devotional time every morning, and how easy it is to fall back on a commitment when you don't force yourself to build a habit of it (I have, after all, missed the past two days here and felt that getting through the process today was critical). In frustration, I closed up my laptop and stormed out of the room, pretty much resigned to giving up on it for the day. Then, without the barrier of the computer between us, we talked a little bit. When I told her the only other table convenient was in the dining room -- where I thought she wouldn't want me to set up at -- she suggested I do just that. So here I am, in the dining room, reading through a devotional that is all too fitting for the situation this morning. Relationships take work. Marriages, being the toughest and (hopefully) most enduring of all relationships, take an even greater effort. More work. They do not last without love. They do not last without faithfulness. They do not last without communication. Just as I mentioned on Average Joe American recently, communication is the cornerstone of any civilized society -- which includes any loving marriage. It can become too easy to spend all of our communication time talking about money, and bills, and the kids, and what needs done around the house, and all too easy to not spend it telling each other how we feel and what we need from each other. We must communicate. Both ways. All the time. About more than the mundane.
  
• P: Lord, help me to keep this realization of how important communication is to the success of my marriage. Help me to open my ears when my wife speaks and to remember that she is more important than whatever else is vying for my attention at the time. Help us both to open up the lines of communication and to share with each other what we think, how we feel, and what we need from each other. And help us to just put the mundane issues out of the way for a while.
  

READ TODAY'S DEVOTIONAL:

FIDELITY means a stubborn dedication to growth in personal relationship. A marriage partnership must have room for individual growth; but at the beating heart of any marriage is the delicate, fragile -- often painful -- but potentially joyful relationship of two persons face to face in personal encounter. The vital core of marriage is the special kind of sexual communion that vibrates on every level -- physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual. All the institutional dimensions are only the framework for the dynamic center. And if partners are faithful in the complex ways mentioned above, their fidelity will mean a steady dedication to the growth of an honest and open relationship in every dimension. Fidelity is best practiced with an implicit understanding that the relationship happens within a permanent, lifelong structure. But within the structure of permanence, relationships are constantly shifting: they are never stagnagt, but grow deeper or become shallower. To be faithful means that we can never lazily accept the present as our fated destiny. For relationships never have to be what they are; they can change. The future has possibilities wherever two willing human beings affirm its possibilities for them. No one can make a claim to faithfulness in marriage if he does not keep the door open to the possibilities that his relationship can be better tomorrow than it is today. Personal relationships are nourished only through communication, and communication between two people enmeshed in daily preoccupations with jobs, budgets, diapers and new math can be very difficult to maintain. For one thing, it takes time . . . And, above all, it takes desire. Personal communication is difficult because it is painful for us to talk about what we are feeling; it is much easier to discuss the unbalanced checking account than to discuss how we feel toward wach other. But more, it is difficult because when we talk we are not sure what becomes of our message after it is filtered through the receptive apparatus of the person who receives it . . . Fidelity will give us the job of finding out what the other person is actually hearing from us and of patiently probing what the other person is acutally trying to say. --From the Men's Devotional Bible by Zondervan (link above)

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