Christians do a disservice to the Gospel when we’re known more for what we’re against than what we’re for.Check out this full message here. I have lots of new content every week, which you can check out on my YouTube channel.
The Hebronites faithfully served God and King David without any fanfare or recognition. God shined His light on these “men of outstanding capability” so that they were finally recognized publicly. Note that they didn’t try to promote themselves. They faithfully served and God promoted these humble men in His timing.
I always appreciate the straightforward leadership insights that Ken Blanchard shares. He wrote, “Leadership is not something you do to people, but something you do with people.” And in this post he discusses some strategies when one of your direct reports is struggling.
“If I find 10,000 ways something won’t work, I haven’t failed.” —Thomas Edison
“We are a Christian people, according to one another the equal right of religious freedom, and acknowledging with reverence the duty of obedience to the will of God.” —1931 Supreme Court ruling
The Holy Spirit reminds us of God’s Word. But in order for Him to remind us, we have to study it first! Check out this full message.
“Your real, new self…will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for God.” —C.S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity
“Just because they say it’s impossible doesn’t mean you can’t do it.” —Roger Bannister, who broke the “impossible” barrier of running less than a 4-minute mile on May 6, 1954
Every historical mention of Obed-Edom shows him serving God: as the guardian of the ark of the covenant of the Lord, as a gatekeeper, and as a worship leader. Here in this genealogy we learn that he faithfully served his family in a God-honoring way as well.
“God had indeed blessed him” so that his future generations were also known as valiant men of service before the Lord.
Obed-Edom demonstrates something I unpack in my book Shepherd Leadership. I wrote—
Humility is often misunderstood as allowing others to advance, and in so doing, I am completely overlooked. Others get the accolades and I get nothing. As a result, humility has gotten a bad reputation. People begin to think of a humble person as someone who never speaks up for himself, someone who can be taken advantage of, someone who becomes a doormat for everyone else. But the picture of a humble person in the Bible couldn’t be more different!
We all have to bow to someone or something. The humble shepherd leader has chosen to bow to God and to follow God’s righteous standards. One name for God is Jehovah Tsidkenu, which means God is righteous (see Psalm 119:137). The Hebrew letter tsadhe is a part of God’s righteous title, and it’s how we are called to live. Tsadhe means the humble, faithful servant. …
When you zoom in on the Hebrew letter tsadhe, you will see that the faithful, humble, kneeling servant is depicted with a crown. Far from being pushed down, left behind, or left unrewarded, the humble person is the one God delights to exalt!
Axis reported this in their weekly Cultural Translator newsletter. “Gallup polling data has found a huge spike in the percentage of Americans who say they get less sleep than they need. Survey results also indicate an increase in Americans’ daily stress. Why it’s news you can use: This data indicates that when you interact with anyone—in a store, on the road, at work, or in church—there’s a decent chance that particular human is feeling both exhausted and stressed out. The odds of this stress/exhaustion matrix are even higher if you are conversing with a young woman aged 18 to 29. In 2001, 42% of young women in that bracket said they get enough sleep, but that number has dropped to 27%. Younger women are also the most likely to say they experience daily stress. Stress and sleep have a symbiotic relationship, and parents should understand how both factors play a role in teens’ mental health.” I have written quite a few posts about getting enough sleep, and about taking some time for self-care.
“The world and its culture will not improve unless we play an active role in trying to improve it. Beginning with ourselves, we must make sure the culture we choose honors God and spreads His grace to the people around us. From there we must become informed about the state of culture, especially that which is most potent in conveying ideas and establishing practices—law, education, entertainment, social media, and pop culture in all its forms. That’s not to say we have to participate in all these; but at the least, we need to understand the times and how they shape and are shaped by various forms of culture so that we can know what we ought to do in pursuing a culture of love (1 Chronicles 12:32).” —T.M. Moore
“A man gives little if he gives much with a frown; he gives much if he gives little with a smile.” —Talmud, Ketubot
This is a very helpful interactive map of Paul’s missionary journeys. While you are on the viz.bible website, be sure to check out all of the other amazing infographics they have. I use these quite often to help me grasp the message of Scripture visually.
Absalom said to Ahithophel, “Give us your advice. What should we do?” … Ahithophel said to Absalom, “I would choose twelve thousand men and set out tonight in pursuit of David. I would attack him while he is weary and weak. I would strike him with terror, and then all the people with him will flee. I would strike down only the king and bring all the people back to you….” This plan seemed good to Absalom and to all the elders of Israel.
But Absalom said, “Summon also Hushai the Arkite, so we can hear what he has to say as well.” When Hushai came to him, Absalom said, “Ahithophel has given this advice. Should we do what he says? If not, give us your opinion.”
Hushai replied to Absalom, “The advice Ahithophel has given is not good this time….”
Absalom and all the men of Israel said, “The advice of Hushai the Arkite is better than that of Ahithophel.” For the Lord had determined to frustrate the good advice of Ahithophel in order to bring disaster on Absalom. (2 Samuel 16:20; 17:1-7, 14).
Absalom (unlike his father) didn’t consult God, but consulted men.
Ahithophel had a personal agenda. All he wanted to do is get revenge on David for what he had done to Uriah and Bathsheba. Notice Ahtihophel’s wording: “I will kill only the king” (v. 2).
What was Ahithophel’s beef with David? Uriah—the man whose wife David stole, the man whom David had killed to cover up his affair—was Ahithophel’s son (2 Samuel 23:34, 11:3)!
Hushai, the the other man who gave Absalom counsel, also had an agenda. Hushai is repeatedly given one description: Friend of David (2 Samuel 15:37, 16:16-17; 1 Chronicles 27:33). So Hushai’s sole focus is saving his friend’s life.
Humans always give their advice with their own bias or agenda.
Listen to the podcast of this post by clicking on the player below, and you can also subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or Audible.
As missionaries, we are people sent on a mission. We are sent to everyone everywhere. We are to take Him to every street where God sends us.
“Main Street” (or Jerusalem) is a great place to start, and probably a place where we will always have work to do. These will typically be the people that are most like us—people with whom we will have the most in common.
There are others that need to hear the Good news of forgiveness that Jesus has made available. As our circle of witness widens, we may have less in common with those with whom we are interacting. This may take us out of our comfort zone, but since the Holy Spirit is in us we will never be out of our empowerment zone!
But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be My witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea… (Acts 1:8).
We need to ask two questions:
What did it mean then? Judea was still compromised of Jewish people, but it was the area slightly outside the neighborhood of Jerusalem.
What does it mean now? These are people very similar to people on Main Street, but we are starting to see more differences. These differences often become the source of controversies.
I’m going to describe some people in our Judea as cultural Christians but not biblical Christians. In the time of Jesus we could think of the Pharisees: People who would call themselves godly because they have set their own standards.
Lombard Street in San Francisco is a short, curvy street. This is a one-way street and motorists are only supposed to drive 5 mph, and still there are frequent controversies on the right-of-way between homeowners, motorists, work crews, bicyclists, and pedestrians. Everyone thinks their way is the right way.
How do we take the message of Jesus to those on our “Lombard Street”?
(1) Distinguish the biblical from the non-biblical.
Both the Pharisees that interacted with Jesus and today’s cultural Christians seem to quote more from their own traditions than they do from the Scripture, so we need to distinguish that the source of our beliefs is from God’s inspired Word. (I share more about the concept of biblical, unbiblical, and non-biblical in this post.)
A great example for us is how Jesus answered two questions from an expert in the Mosaic law: How do I earn eternal life? Who is my neighbor? See Luke 10:25-37.
(2) Stick to Scripture and your personal story.
Remember that the person with an experience is never at the mercy of the person with an argument. When the Sanhedrin questioned the legitimacy of the healing of a lame man, Luke wrote, “But since they could see the man who had been healed standing there with them [Peter and John], there was nothing they could say” (Acts 4:14)!
Love the personal story of the healed blind man in John 9!
Judea can be translated “he shall be praised.” We glorify Jesus not by arguing with those on Lombard Street, but by simply proclaiming biblical truth and our personal testimony.
Sing to the Lord, all the earth; proclaim good news of His salvation from day to day. Tell of His glory among the nations, His wonderful deeds among all the peoples. (1 Chronicles 16:23-24)
As we stick with the Scripture and our personal testimony, the Holy Spirit will use our witness to open minds to the Good News of Jesus (2 Corinthians 3:18-4:5).
Follow along with all of the streets we are looking at in our series Takin’ Him to the streets by clicking here.
Then David came to Baal-perazim and defeated them there; and he said, “The Lord has broken through my enemies before me like the breakthrough of waters.” Therefore he named that place Baal-perazim. And the Philistines abandoned their idols there, so David and his men carried them away. Now the Philistines came up once again and overran the Valley of Rephaim. So David inquired of the Lord… (2 Samuel 5:20-23).
David was facing the same enemy on the same battlefield. Yet David did presume that God wanted him to attack the Philistines in the same way as before, or even that he was supposed to attack them at all.
“So David inquired again of God.”
The Philistines carried out yet another raid in the valley. David inquired again of God, and God said to him, “You shall not go up after them; circle around behind them and come at them in front of the baka-shrubs.” … David did just as God had commanded him, and they defeated the army of the Philistines from Gibeon even as far as Gezer (1 Chronicles 14:13-14, 16).
It was the same situation and same enemy, but David asked God how to proceed. God gave David a new strategy for this second situation, “David did just as God had commanded him” and won another victory.
Listen to the podcast of this post by clicking on the player below, and you can also subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or Audible.
Can we trust our Bibles? There are some things that skeptics point to that we need to be able to defend—even in this model prayer that we have been studying. We come to the last verse of this prayer, which many of you probably learned or heard as, “For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.” Yet some Bibles have a footnote here that notes that this doxology is not seen in all biblical manuscripts.
We don’t have the autographs (original writings) but we have manuscripts (copied by a trained scribe from the autograph, and then copied from by yet another reliable scribe, and so forth). The oldest calfskin manuscript we have goes back to 1500 BC, and the oldest papyrus manuscript goes back to 2400 BC.
The scribes were incredibly talented and disciplined men. They became a recognized group called the Sopherim (scribes) in about 500 BC. By AD 100, the Talmudic scribes eclipsed them, and then the Masoretic scribes—the most stringent scribes of all—dominated from AD 500-900.
Let’s turn our attention first to the manuscripts that compromise what we call the Old Testament. What did Jesus—and others that lived in His time—call those 39 books of the Old Testament? They were called Scripture. Those books were not in doubt even before Jesus was on earth.
Dr. Peter Flint notes, “The biblical Dead Sea Scrolls are up to 1,250 years older than the traditional Hebrew Bible, the Masoretic text. We have been using a one-thousand-year-old manuscript to make our Bibles. We’ve now got scrolls going back to 250 BC. … Our conclusion is simply this—the scrolls confirm the accuracy of the biblical text by 99 percent.”
In the New Testament era, the disciples of Jesus went out in pairs. Their oral transmission of the news of Jesus and the quoting of Scripture was verified by their traveling partners. Even for those who happened to be by themselves (e.g. Philip in Samaria), there was always follow up by other church leaders.
So the New Testament epistles were written to verify the spoken words—James was the earliest (probably AD 45). The number of manuscripts we have of these New Testament words are simply astounding!
After the canon of the New Testament was completed, the church fathers quoted so much of the New Testament in their letters and books that we could completely reconstruct those 27 books just from their writings.
With this many manuscripts in existence, is it likely that there would variations in manuscripts? Yes. But none of the variations ever discovered have been fundamental enough to change anything in the meaning. Josh McDowell states, “Compared with other ancient writings, the Bible has more manuscript evidence to support it than the top ten pieces of classical literature combined.”
So how do we handle these places where scholarly footnotes tell us of a discrepancy in the existing manuscripts?
Get the context—does this fit with what is happening around it?
Is there corroboration—can we cross-reference it from elsewhere in the Bible?
In the conclusion of the powerful model prayer Jesus has given us, the closing words appear to be a doxology. But I think we can trust this because for three main reasons:
This doxology seems to come full circle with how the prayer begins in: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be Your name, Your kingdom come, Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven (vv. 9-10).
These words are found almost verbatim in the words of David: Yours, Lord, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the majesty and the splendor, for everything in heaven and earth is Yours. Yours, Lord, is the kingdom; You are exalted as head over all (1 Chronicles 29:11).
As we have noted throughout this prayer series, the focus of this prayer is two-fold: It is both an acknowledgement of the awesome, praiseworthy glory of our God, and it is a petition for our lives to be empowered to help others see our glorious God and Savior for themselves.
For these reasons, this doxology, I believe, is an indispensable part of this majestic prayer.
Listen to the podcast of this post by clicking on the player below, and you can also subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or Audible.
Last week we mentioned that one of the things the Holy Spirit did after the Day of Pentecost was to unite individual Christians into the Church. In a world divided by religious and political factions, the unity of the Christians set them apart. Is our culture any different? Of course not! So the unity that the Holy Spirit brings is just as vital today.
In Psalm 133, David longs for this unity among believers. This psalm is in the collection of “Songs of Ascent.” That means that pilgrims to Jerusalem sang these songs as they literally went up the hill to Jerusalem. Psalm 133 opens with David singing, “How good and pleasant it is when brothers and sisters live together in unity” (v. 1).
Maybe David thought back to the time when people were joining him to give him support as king—David went out to meet them and said to them, “If you have come peaceably to me to help me, my heart shall be knit to you…” (1 Chronicles 12:17 AMP). In the next two verses of Psalm 133, David explains how this unity from being knit together is seen as a blessing.
Last week, we talked about the blessing of peace the priests pronounced on the people. That word for “peace” is shalom which could be defined as “nothing missing.” But couldn’t we also say that shalom is “no one missing”? Yes, because each and every part of the Body of Christ is vital and indispensable!
We see this same unity when the followers of Jesus were baptized in the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost. Acts 2:1 says these Christians were “all together” (or some translations say “one accord”). This is one word in Greek (homothumadon)which describes the beauty of unity. One Greek dictionary defines this word,“The image is almost musical; a number of notes are sounded which, while different, harmonize in pitch and tone. As the instruments of a great concert under the direction of a concert master, so the Holy Spirit blends together the lives of members of Christ’s church.”
This picture of a majestic musical is further amplified in the next verses of Acts 2 where people from all over the world heard these Christians praising God in their own native tongues. Luke goes on to use homothumadon again and again throughout Acts to show what a powerful testimony their unity was to the watching world.
Paul emphasized the need for unity in the Church when he wrote—
As a prisoner for the Lord, then, I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received. Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope when you were called; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all. (Ephesians 4:1-6)
How does the Holy Spirit help us handle our differences and keep this unity? We first need the Spirit’s help to distinguish whether it’s a biblical, unbiblical, or non-biblical issue.
Biblical issues must send us back to the Bible to find the truth (2 Timothy 3:16-17).
Unbiblical issues—where a brother or sister is living in a way contrary to Scripture—call on us to speak the truth in love and correct in love only after allowing the Holy Spirit to examine our own lives (Ephesians 4:15; Matthew 7:1-5; James 5:19-20). Notice that we are to do this with fellow brothers and sisters, not with those outside the Church.
Non-biblical issues are the trickiest. These are issues over which we should immediately stop fighting as we defer to the weakest brother or sister (Romans 12:10, 14:19-21).
The Church needs this unity today. We need to be in “one accord.” In a world divided by religious and political factions, our unity enhances our witness.
Although the word in English is “joy,” there are two different Hebrew words used here. Think of them this way—one is the root and the other is the flower.
In verse 10, the Hebrew word chedvah is only used twice in all of the Old Testament (it’s also used in 1 Chronicles 16:27). This word describes the source of joy—or the root—which is found exclusively in God’s presence.
In verses 12 and 17 the word for “joy” is simchah. This word essentially becomes the outward expression—or the flower—because it is nourished by the chedvah root.
Here’s how it plays out in the book of Nehemiah. Because the people had heard and been given understanding of God’s Word, they joyfully celebrated. And because God helped them complete the wall around Jerusalem and reestablish worship at the temple, they also happily celebrated. God was the chedvah root of their joy, and their outward celebration was the simchah flower.
God alone is the Root—the Source—of chedvah. My simchah celebration both glorifies Him as the Source and points others to Him. My simchah flower will make others desirous for the chedvah root that has brought about this outward joyful expression from me.
To be a joyless Christian is a contradiction of terms. To not express simchah means either I am not abiding deeply in the root of chedvah, or that I don’t believe it is worthwhile enough to share with others. But of course, if I have truly been to the Source, I will want others to enjoy this relationship with God as well.
Two questions for me to ask myself: (1) Is my heart abiding deeply in God as my Source of joy? And (2) Is my outward joy a making others desirous to know this Source of joy for themselves?
I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that to be a Christian and to be unhappy is a sin. A joyless, unhappy Christian gives God no praise, robs Him of glory, and paints God in a bad light. A happy Christian knows the Lord is his strength, his comfort, his supply. The joy-filled, happy Christian lifts God high and invites others to know this All-Good, All-Happy God too!
David said, “…I had it in my heart to build a house as the place of rest for the ark of the covenant of the Lord. … But God said to me, ‘You are not to build a house for My name…’” (1 Chronicles 28:2-3).
David’s son Solomon would later write about how we make plans in our hearts, but God directs all our steps (Proverbs 16:9, 19:21).
David not only had the desire to build this temple for God but he said the Holy Spirit gave him the plans (1 Chronicles 28:12, 19). As a result of this, David began amassing resources and organizing personnel. All of this David could then hand over to Solomon, the man who would build the house for the ark of the covenant of the Lord.
I am sure David felt a twinge of disappointment when God said “no.” Still, David continued to work the plan the Spirit had given him. Who knows how Solomon would have begun his reign as king if David hadn’t done all of this for him. Many of the plans God gives me will not be forme but for the following generations who will benefit from my diligence in those plans.
A mark of a godly leader is one who knows that obedience to God IS success.
In one of David’s psalms, he prays for success and for his heart’s desire to be fulfilled, but he also acknowledges God’s sovereignty over these things (Psalm 20). May I always keep in mind that obedience IS success. Success isn’t limited only to what I can see and measure during my lifetime.
This is part 53 in my series on godly leadership. You can check out all of my posts in this series by clicking here.
The Hebronites faithfully served God and King David without any fanfare or recognition. God shined His light on these “men of outstanding capability” so that they were finally recognized publicly. Note that they didn’t try to promote themselves. They faithfully served and God promoted these humble men in His timing.
“Just because they say it’s impossible doesn’t mean you can’t do it.” —Roger Bannister, who broke the “impossible” barrier of running less than a 4-minute mile on May 6, 1954
Craig T. Owens 