“Give her the reward of her labor, and let her works praise her at the city gates.” — Proverbs 31:31 (CSB – Read the chapter)
The world saw the end of an entire era of human history yesterday. Leaders come and go like the changing of the seasons. We change Presidents the way most people change vehicles—every four to eight years. CEOs of major corporations rarely last longer than a decade or so. The average pastor tenure is only a few years. But for most of the people alive on the planet today, the only Queen of England they have ever known until yesterday was Elizabeth II of the House of Windsor. Let’s pause for just a moment this morning and marvel at a great woman.
“So don’t throw away your confidence, which has a great reward. For you need endurance, so that after you have done God’s will, you may receive what was promised. For yet in a ‘very little while, the Coming One will come and not delay.’ ‘But my righteous one will live by faith; and if he draws back, I have no pleasure in him.’ But we are not those who draw back and are destroyed, but those who have faith and are saved.” (CSB – Read the chapter)
Have you ever missed your chance? If you have, think about that moment for a bit. What was the opportunity, and why did you miss it? Were you late for it? Did someone else snatch it from you? Or was the loss a matter of patience? There are not a few opportunities lost to a lack of patience. We want things on our timetable, but that’s not always or even often the timetable on which they operate. If we demand ours anyway, we’re setting ourselves up to miss out on a lot. As chapter 10 comes to a close, the author calls us to stick with following Jesus, even when it gets long and hard, so we don’t miss out on the best part. Let’s talk about it.
“For if we deliberately go on sinning after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a terrifying expectation of judgment and the fury of a fire about to consume the adversaries. Anyone who disregarded the law of Moses died without mercy, based on the testimony of two or three witnesses. How much worse punishment do you think one will deserve who has trampled on the Son of God, who has regarded as profane the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and who has insulted the Spirit of grace? For we know the one who has said, ‘Vengeance belongs to me; I will repay,’ and again, ‘The Lord will judge his people.’ It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” (CSB – Read the chapter)
Have you ever had one of those moments when you knew you had lost, and you were just waiting for the defeat to be completed? I’ve had lots of those moments while playing video games over the years. Honestly, most of the time I responded by simply turning the game off. If I’m watching one of my sports teams lose – especially in a big game – I’ll turn off the TV. Why bother sticking around when you know the results aren’t going to be what you had hoped? In life, though, that’s not an option. And with Jesus, grace and redemption are always possible. What the author of Hebrews is talking about here, however, is a situation when a terrible loss becomes unavoidable. Let’s wrestle today with what may be the most disturbing warning of the letter. Hang on tight for this one, and don’t look away until we reach the end. You’ll not want to miss this.
With one more week to go in our series (and with this being the final part that I’m preaching), this week we are talking about another critically important way we can stand in our faithfulness to Christ even when we are standing alone. As we look at the story of Daniel in the lions’ den, we are going to talk about the kinds of things we do without having to think about them and what that means for our lives. Thanks for reading and sharing.
Habits of Faithfulness
I want you to think for just a minute about the sheer number of things you do on a daily basis that you feel like you could do with your eyes either metaphorically or literally closed. Given how automated many of the things you do are, that may actually be a tough list to compile. How many things in your life do you do because they are simply what you do? Surely your list includes some pretty basic things. If you use any kind of corrective lens, I suspect putting those on in the morning is automatic. Hopefully most of your personal hygiene routine runs on autopilot. The people sitting next to you are grateful for that. If you are a coffee drinker, your morning date with your coffee machine probably doesn’t require a lot of thought…which is probably good because if you are a coffee-drinker, you may not give a whole lot of thought to much of anything before that first cup starts energizing your system.
This week as we continued our series, How to Be Faithful When No One Else Is, we are turning with Daniel’s story in a direction that may be unexpected. When we imagine ourselves standing in faithfulness as the world around us turns away from such a path, we are often tempted to think in very much cultural terms. We imagine ourselves as warriors battling back the forces of evil. Yet being faithful after the way of Jesus looks very different from this. Let’s talk about how and why as we look at another story about a king and a dream.
Loving the Hurting
Let’s do a quick vocabulary poll this morning. This one is definitely a fifty-cent word. How many of you have heard the word “schadenfreude”? Anyone want to throw out a definition or use it in a sentence. It’s actually a really good word to have in your back pocket. It’s probably worth quite a few points in a game of Scrabble. I don’t think I’ve ever actually played a game of Scrabble in my life, so I could be wrong, but it at least has a lot of letters. Schadenfreude, as you might have guessed, is a German word. While a more robust definition is probably available in German, in English it basically translates to taking pleasure at the misfortune of others. We live today in a world where schadenfreude is a common feeling for a lot of people.
The Nexus 