TURNAROUND NEEDED
2008-07-08

Psalm for today: Psalm 43

Send out your light and your truth;
let them lead me;
let them bring me to your holy hill and to your dwelling!
Then I will go to the altar of God,
to God my exceeding joy,
and I will praise you with the lyre,
O God, my God.

I'll be using a guitar, as I don't own a lyre.



In Matthew 16:24, Jesus tells us that we must take up our cross and deny ourselves if we want to follow him.

I think I dropped my cross somewhere.

It really hurts to say that.


Day 193

Haggai 1:3-6,8-11

God is admonishing the returned exiles of Israel for living in nice homes while his temple is in ruins. What he's asking for is for them to get to work, cutting timber, rebuilding the temple. In his honor. At one point, God tells them that it is because of their stinginess that his temple is in ruins.

Have you ever been so stingy that it made you miserable? I have experienced remorse in the past for not sharing or giving when asked. But at the same time, my wife and I are pretty generous, giving money and goods to a lot of charities. We can't help everyone. But we help where we can.

However, there have been times when we could have volunteered to do things at church and we didn't. Not because we didn't have time. We were just lazy. We didn't feel like doing it. That makes us stingy with our time.

God admonishes us for that in this passage today.

There could be a lot of ways to bring this passage home to today. The most obvious is that God wants us to take care of his "house." But where is his "house?" It's not just the building where we go to worship. According to the Bible, my own body is the temple of the holy spirit! And if you put all of our bodies together (as the entire church), you have a really big "house." So, maybe, just maybe, since we don't have a "temple" to worry about in the physical sense, we need to be concerned with taking care of the "body of Christ." Our "temple" is the "church" which is made up of every Christian in the world.

I think I'm having an epiphany, here.

I'm serious.

I'm getting a very strong inspiration from God about how seriously he loves the church, and how much we need to be involved with caring for the body.

I'm going to really have to meditate about this and determine what I'm supposed to do about it.



Father, thank you for this revelation today. Of course, part of me is slapping my forehead and saying "doh!" because it really should be a no-brainer. But you love the church, and you have given us all the responsibility of taking care of each other with the resources that you have provided for us.

Help me figure out what this means for me. I already have some ideas about attitudes that I need to change about some people immediately. Forgive me, Father, for the attitudes that I have had about these people. Help me change them.



I'm not going to be running up a mountain to cut timber anytime soon. It's also not likely that I'm going to be physically building a church building anytime soon. Of course, you never know... But this I know; that I will be involved in caring for the body. My attitudes about some people are going to change.

And I'm going to find where I dropped that cross and pick it back up.

Grace and peace, friends.



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