Be Stubborn – in the Best Way

What we learn from Moses' walk with the Lord

by Kevin Carson

If you search “formulas for success in life” on Google, you get about 41,100,000 results. That’s crazy. Are there that many different formulas for success? Is it just up to the individual to survey the options and choose what may work the best? Talk about pressure to get it right! How am I supposed to know which one to pick?

For the follower of Christ, the best way to determine how to be successful is to start in the Bible. You may want to consider prescriptively how to be successful and descriptively look at those who were successful. Who are the individuals that God blessed and why?

One of those Bible characters God richly blessed was Moses. The Bible describes his relationship with God at Moses’ death this way: “But since then there has not arisen in Israel a prophet like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face” (Deut 34:10). I’m not sure your definition of a successful person, but it must include Moses. Then what can we observe about Moses that helps us for daily living today?

Let me suggest three key observations related to Moses that will help us be the best version of the kind of person God intends for us to be.

Moses insisted on the Lord’s Presence.

Before the children of Israel left Mount Sinai for the Promised Land, God told Moses that He would send an angel to go with them on the journey. God said, “And I will send My Angel before you, and I will drive out the Canaanite and the Amorite and the Hittite and the Perizzite and the Hivite and the Jebusite. Go up to a land flowing with mild and honey; for I will not go up in your midst…” (Ex 33:2-3).

Bottom line – Moses is promised success. God promised to send an angel to go before them and give them the Promised Land. They win. They get the land. The other people are defeated. God promises victory. Most of us would be satisfied with this.

However, check out Moses’ response to God. “If Your Presence does not go with us, do not bring us up from here. For how then will it be known that Your people and I have found grace in Your sight, except You go with us? So we shall be separate, Your people and I, from all the people who are upon the face of the earth” (Ex 33:15-16).

Moses basically explains to God that he is not willing to go anywhere – even with the promise of victory – without God going with them. Moses insisted on the Lord’s presence. In the best way, Moses was stubborn. He knew any victory would be shallow if in the process of gaining the victory that they missed out on the presence of God.

Now get that. Victory – having all your goals met – fails to satisfy if, in the process, you miss out on the presence of God. As they say, victory is shallow. What good is there in gaining everything if you miss God’s presence in the process? Ultimately, that is not success at all.

Victory - having all your goals met - fails to satisfy if, in the process, you miss out on the presence of God.

Moses enjoyed God’s presence.

God and Moses were friends. Moses talked daily with God. The Bible says, “So the Lord spoke to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend” (Ex 33:11). Imagine that…God spoke to Moses as a friend. God and Moses enjoyed each other’s presence. Think how sweet it is to be with your best friend – to talk, laugh, enjoy each other’s presence. When the time is gone, you are refreshed, renewed, and restored. A great conversation with your close friend can take the worst of circumstances and make them better, can take a mediocre day and turn it into a good day, and can provide the uplift you need to face a particular challenge because you have received encouragement, advice, and support. These benefits are from our human friends.

Now imagine enjoying God’s presence in a similar way. Moses and God were friends. Moses spent regular time with Him (Ex 33:7-11). How incredible is that?

Guess what? If you are a Christ-follower, then you also are considered a friend of God (John 15:9-17). Jesus called His followers His friends. He invites us to abide with Him. He loves us. Just as we read of God having specific friends like Moses and Abraham (James 2:23), we also read that Jesus chooses to be our Friend and invites us to enjoy His presence. He never leaves us or forsakes us. He is with us always (Matt 28:20). The issue is not whether or not Jesus is with us, the issue is whether or not you enjoy His presence and reap the benefits of that friendship.

The issue is not whether or not Jesus is with us, the issue is whether or not you enjoy His presence and reap the benefits of that friendship.

Moses recognized God’s friendship as grace.

Moses asked God, “For how then will it be known that Your people and I have found grace in Your sight, except You go with us?” (Ex 33:16). Moses made a one-to-one connection between God’s grace and His presence. Again, that’s what is so cool about our relationship with God too. We have His presence always. God the Father is omnipresent, God the Son never leaves us, God the Holy Spirit indwells us, and God’s Word – His words to us – is forever. We can read His Word, memorize His Word, meditate on His Word, and share His Word with each other. All of this is grace.

The friendship of God is grace upon grace upon grace. We do not deserve it, just as Moses did not deserve it. God said to Moses, “I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion” (Ex 33:19). Moses and the children of Israel – just like every one of us – did not deserve God’s grace. Yet, God in His grace was their friend. As Paul considered God’s relationship with Israel, he concluded, “So then it is not of him who wills, nor of him who runs, but of God who shows mercy” (Rom 9:15-16). Your friendship with God magnifies God’s mercy and grace. It is no small thing to be a friend of God.

Your friendship with God magnifies God's mercy and grace. It is no small thing to be a friend of God.

Are you stubborn in the best way?

Are you stubborn in the best way? Do you insist on not going anywhere without the awareness of God’s presence? Do you recognize than any victory or success in life is empty or vain without enjoying God’s presence along the way? Do you worship God daily in gratitude of His marvelous grace and mercy that He bestows upon you in friendship?

Be stubborn in the best way. Do not budge one inch from your current position without making yourself aware of God’s presence, enjoying His presence, and rejoicing in the grace of God’s presence with you in this moment and throughout your day and night.

For more information on the presence of God, consider this post: When Your Trial Seems Impossible.

Pastor Kevin’s Blog | Walking together through life as friends in Christ sharing wisdom along the journey

© 2018 KEVINCARSON.COM

Evaluate Your Day Before It Begins

Article by Matthew Westerholm

“Was today a good day?” I crawled into bed and prepared to sleep, my mind anxiously evaluating the previous 24 hours. Using a haphazard set of metrics, I interrogated myself, “Was today a success? Did I accomplish my goals and get what I wanted?”

I never fall asleep quickly when my thoughts spiral like this. And any sleep that I get is not particularly restful. My problem is that I tend to overanalyze my day once it has ended.

Instead of this end-of-the-day anxious spiral, the psalmist provides believers with a confident prayer that flips worry on its head. Psalm 90:14 says, “Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.” It is easy to read these nineteen words quickly, but this verse contains glorious truths that enable us to evaluate our day before it even begins.

Our Ultimate Request: Satisfy Us

That first word, satisfy, might be the most important word in this verse. At the start, the psalmist asks God to satisfy him, giving us both an example and permission to ask God to make us happy.

While our long lists of dissatisfactions often cause sleepless nights, our neediness and dependence unmistakably reveal the truth that we are not meant to achieve satisfaction on our own. In every circumstance, this psalm calls us to turn to the Lord and ask him to satisfy us.

What might a prayer for satisfaction in God look like in different circumstances? If we are disinterested or lethargic, we should ask God to fascinate and animate us. If we are bored or distracted, we should ask God to delight and captivate us. When we are lonely or miserable, we can ask God to accompany and comfort us.

Morning by Morning

While the others spend the entire day searching for satisfaction, God satisfies his children at the start of their day. Having received satisfaction from God in the morning, believers are liberated each day to glorify God.

This satisfaction of God sets us free to navigate our lives in faith. The world uses work to chase satisfaction through personal accomplishments. We are freed by God’s satisfaction, liberated to glorify God with our work and provide for our families.

The world uses recreation to chase satisfaction through the pursuit of pleasure. We are freed by God’s satisfaction, liberated to find joy whatever the circumstances. The world uses people to chase satisfaction through approval. We are freed by God’s satisfaction, liberated to glorify God by loving people — genuinely interacting and caring for them.

God’s love helps us receive and interpret our circumstances instead of having our hearts controlled by them. Rather than looking at our schedules and hoping for a good day, or creating a plan to make a good day, we look to the satisfying love of God that he generously offers each morning.

Steadfast and New

And we don’t need to wonder whether God’s love for us is going to fade or fail; God’s love is just as steadfast as he is. As Jeremiah wrote, “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end.” God’s love and mercy, the prophet tells us, are “new every morning.”

We describe God’s love as both “steadfast” and “new” — a confusing pair of adjectives. But because God’s eternal nature never changes, his love toward his children is steadfast. And because God upholds the universe through new, creative energies that he inexhaustibly sustains (his gloriously plural, “mercies”), his love for his children is new every morning.

“The Lord is my portion,” the prophet concludes, so we can “hope in him.” (Lamentations 3:22–24). God gives us his merciful love each day; this is our daily baseline for hope.

Daily Satisfaction, Eternal Happiness

Normally, Hebrew poetry uses parallelism. That means that the Psalms make their point by using two (or more) closely corresponding lines. A strictly parallel reading leads us to expect the verse to say something like, “Satisfy us in the morning, that we may be glad till the evening.” If God satisfies us at the start of the day, we expect to remain happy until the day’s end.

Here, however, the psalmist surprises us. In a twist of gospel math, a daily(“in the morning”) prayer for satisfaction is answered by a lifetime (“all our days”) of joy and gladness.

How can one morning’s worth of satisfaction provide a lifetime of joy? Certainly some of the answer rests directly in the verse — God’s steadfast lovewill last our entire lives.

On Easter Morning

But the rest of the Bible explains this equation even more fully. One morning, the Lord Jesus Christ walked out of his grave, conquering sin and defeating death. And the resurrection power of the Son of God has been given to all God’s sons and daughters (Romans 8:11). So, now, because of that greatest morning of all, we can rejoice and be glad all of our days.

We don’t need to wait until an evening of anxious evaluation to determine whether today was a good day. God loves us with a steadfast love. The Lord Jesus conquered sin and death on Easter morning. And because we belong to him, today is a very good day.

Matthew Westerholm (@mwesterholm) is the pastor for worship and music at Bethlehem Baptist Church and assistant professor of music and worship at Bethlehem College & Seminary. He lives in Minneapolis with his wife and three sons.

Posted at:  https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/evaluate-your-day-before-it-begins

The Greatest Thing You Can Do with Your Life

Article by Jon Bloom Staff writer, desiringGod.org

One of the most wonderful and hopeful things you can know about yourself and your life is captured in a rather unassuming, simple sentence:

Only let each person lead the life that the Lord has assigned to him, and to which God has called him. (1 Corinthians 7:17)

The verse might hit us as a bit constrictive, perhaps even oppressive, especially if our circumstances are difficult or painful. But that would miss the heart of God’s intention for us.

Your life is a gift and an assignment from God. This should infuse our life — its good and evil, its sweet and bitter, its health and affliction, its prosperity and poverty, its comfort and suffering — with an unfathomable dignity, purpose, and glory. You are not an accident. Neither are you a ruined potential, run off the rails because you were dealt a poor genetic hand of cards, suffered others’ abuse, or made foolish and sinful choices, putting you beyond the hope of a useful calling in Jesus’s kingdom.

No, you exist because God wanted you to exist. And you are who you are, whatyou are, how you are, where you are, and when you are because God made you (John 1:3), wove you in your mother’s womb (Psalm 139:13), called you to be his own (John 10:27; Romans 8:30), and assigned you a place to live (Acts 17:26).

The greatest thing you can do with your life is to live to the hilt the adventurous assignment God has given you.

God Has Called You

“Jesus doesn’t want us to spend the life he’s given us today absorbed in the unreality of an imagined tomorrow.”

Think about this for a moment: “Let each person lead the life . . . to which God has called him.” God has made your entire life your calling!

We tend to think of our callings as our vocations, some significant job God gives us to do with an identifiable and preferably esteemed title. Perhaps it’s a career vocation or perhaps it’s a noncareer vocation in a church or ministry. But that’s too narrow. Of course, vocations should be vehicles for our calling — ways we fulfill our assignment from the Lord. But our calling encompasses more than our vocations.

Our primary core calling is to love God with all we are and to love our neighbors as ourselves (Luke 10:27). And this calling incorporates everyone we interact with, or perhaps comes to mind, in everything we do from morning till night. Which is why John Calvin said, “God commands each one of us to consider his calling in every act of life” (Institutes, 821).

This means that our calling isn’t behind that door we’re waiting for God to open someday (though that may be part of tomorrow’s calling). Our calling is to love God today, to love the neighbors God places in our “road” today, and to do well what God gives our hands to do today.

That’s one reason Jesus tells us, “Do not be anxious about tomorrow” (Matthew 6:34). Being overly preoccupied with tomorrow’s calling, as tempting as that can be, is often a way we are deceived into being disengaged from today’s calling. Jesus doesn’t want us to spend the priceless gift of life he’s given us today absorbed in the unreality of an imagined tomorrow.

Now, it is true that our callings change over time. We move through different phases of life, we might be deployed to different places at different times, and we experience various circumstantial and health changes. All these alter our calling. And as the Spirit gives us light, we should seek to anticipate and plan for changes as befit good stewards.

But God wants us focused primarily on the life he’s called us to, which is the life we have today.

Be Faithful to Your Assignment

“The greatest thing you can do with your life is to live to the hilt the adventurous assignment God has given you.”

The Spirit tells us through Paul, “Let each person lead the life that the Lord has assigned to him.”

Perhaps you’re thinking, You don’t know my circumstances. Without wanting to be insensitive, it doesn’t matter what your circumstances are.

The circumstances of the Corinthian Christians to whom Paul was writing were all over the board: married, betrothed, and single, widows and bondservants, circumcised and uncircumcised. That’s just a sampling.

Think of the bondservants. They were the physical property of a human master. And yet Paul says to them in 1 Corinthians 7:21, “Do not be concerned about it. (But if you can gain your freedom, avail yourself of the opportunity.)” What Paul meant was circumstances, even very difficult ones, don’t disqualify anyone from God’s assignment. If we can extricate ourselves honorably from such circumstances, we ought to do it. But if not, let us consider it God’s assignment, at least for today, and be faithful,

not by the way of eye-service, as people-pleasers, but as bondservants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart, rendering service with a good will as to the Lord and not to man, knowing that whatever good anyone does, this he will receive back from the Lord, whether he is a bondservant or is free. (Ephesians 6:6–8)

Assigned to Affliction

Think of Paul’s own various circumstances: imprisoned, violently persecuted, ill, exposed to the cold, hungry, shipwrecked, betrayed, homeless, poorly dressed, mocked, maligned, distrusted, spiritually opposed, afflicted, sometimes despairing of life, and finally killed (2 Corinthians 11:23–28). And it was glorious! All of it! Because Paul’s life was hidden with Christ in God (Colossians 3:3) and since the Life (John 14:6) had given him eternal life, death could only gain him a whole new level of life (Philippians 1:21).

As John Calvin said, “we should all regard our particular situation as a post assigned to us by God, lest in the course of our lives we flit to and fro and drift aimlessly about” (Institutes, 821). See your life today as an assignment from God. And stay faithful at your post until the Lord moves you.

Your Greatest Adventure

“See your life today as an assignment from God. And stay faithful at your post until the Lord moves you.”

Here’s the bedrock truth beneath 1 Corinthians 7:17: God — the Creator and sustainer of all that exists — is the one who has chosen us and bestowed on us the exceedingly rare honor to live here and now. He has assigned us a life to lead. And there is no more wonderful, exciting, hopeful, fulfilling, joy-producing sense of life purpose than to realize that we are who we are, what we are, how we are, where we are, and when we are by the assignment of the Lord.

You have been given the unfathomable gift of life. You have been given the infinitely more valuable gift of eternal life. And you have been given the astounding and extremely rare privilege of receiving an assignment from God. There is no higher calling than to lead the life that the Lord has assigned to you. Embrace your assignment, this great adventure chosen for you, and press it to the limit.

Jon Bloom (@Bloom_Jon) serves as author, board chair, and co-founder of Desiring God. He is author of three books, Not by Sight, Things Not Seen, and Don’t Follow Your Heart. He and his wife live in the Twin Cities with their five children.

Posted at:  https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/the-greatest-thing-you-can-do-with-your-life