The 260 Journey

Day 150

Today’s Reading: 2 Corinthians 1

There is a fine line between gossip and intercession. Intercession is when you talk to God about other people. Gossip is when you talk to people about people—and they can only listen but never be a solution. My dear friend R. T. Kendall says these profound words: “Remember this rule of thumb: if people gossip to you, they will also gossip about you.”

Gossip and intercession are so closely associated, it’s just an issue of who you go to about other people. The Corinthians chose intercession and not gossip. Intercession is so important. They are about to show us what prayer for people can do for them.

Charles Bent wrote, “Intercessory prayer might be defined as loving our neighbour on our knees.” The Corinthian church loves Paul and loves him on their knees. Listen to these words:

As you labor together with us through prayer. Because there are so many interceding for us, our deliverance will cause even more people to give thanks to God. What a gracious gift of mercy surrounds us because of your prayers! (2 Corinthians 1:11, TPT)

Or if you want a real punch to this verse, read it out of The Message:

You and your prayers are part of the rescue operation—I don’t want you in the dark about that either. I can see your faces even now, lifted in praise for God’s deliverance of us, a rescue in which your prayers played such a crucial part.

Every time you pray for someone, you are helping them. Intercession is so much better than gossip. Choose to talk to the right person about the information you have about people. The Corinthian church did, and amazing things happened. The Message says it best: “You and your prayers are part of the rescue operation.” You get to be connected to people through your prayer life and be on a rescue mission for them.

When your prayer life is weak, so is your helping. People we love and their deliverance from a situation could very well be connected to your prayer life. Your greatest contribution to the people you love is to develop a prayer life on their behalf.

Here’s an important lesson I have learned: when I pray for people, I don’t gossip about them.

Let me be practical for a moment. Be deliberate in asking people if you can pray for them and then really pray for them. Don’t just tell them, “I’ll be praying for you.” Actually do it. Write it down. Get a notebook and label it “Intercession.”

Here’s a thought for you at church. Go one more step in your greetings and your hellos in church. We have so much surface, “Hey, how you doing?” and responses like “Great,” “Good,” and “Praise the Lord.” Make it a point if you hear of a need, pray for them right then and there. You don’t need to have an answer for their situation, but you can be part of the solution with prayer. Ask them, “Can we pray right now about that?” If you are having lunch with them, pray for their request while you pray for the meal.

Think of Paul’s words to these Corinthians: “You and your prayers are part of the rescue operation—I don’t want you in the dark about that either. I can see your faces even now, lifted in praise for God’s deliverance of us, a rescue in which your prayers played such a crucial part.”

Can you imagine one of the members of the Corinthian church having this on their next job application: “Name a big project you helped create and worked on that had success.” And they write, “I helped the apostle Paul with his second missionary journey.” Did they go with him?

No, they just prayed for him and he said they played a crucial role. And then they hand the interviewer Paul’s “reference” letter.

We don’t think prayer counts. But according to the Bible, it counts. Big time. We need to have a high view of prayer. Prayer is participating in someone’s life. Prayer makes me part of your adventures. And you part of mine.

One of my favorite quotes on intercession is by Walter Wink. In fact, it’s one of the five prayer quotes I try to say every day before I pray. And this one is always a good reminder about 2 Corinthians 1:11. It’s simple but powerful: “History belongs to the intercessors.”

Make history today. Pray for someone today.

Day 149

Today’s Reading: 1 Corinthians 16

Seriously, a connection between the rapture and the offering at church? It’s not my idea but the apostle Paul’s. And there is a big-time connection.

As we discussed previously, the chapters and verses of the Bible were not divided until much later. Sometimes when you connect the last verse of a chapter with the first verse of the next chapter, you will discover a cool connection and collaboration. That it is a single thought and we unintentionally removed some of its energy and poignancy when we separated them into chapters. One of my favorites in this vein is when 1 Corinthians 15 ends with this crescendo of praise:

I tell you a mystery; we will not all sleep, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet; for the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For this perishable must put on the imperishable, and this mortal must put on immortality. But when this perishable will have put on the imperishable, and this mortal will have put on immortality, then will come about the saying that is written, “Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?” The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law; but thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your toil is not in vain in the Lord. (1 Corinthians 15:51-58)

How powerful are these verses? Heaven, our earthly bodies, the rapture, twinkling of an eye, where is death’s sting, death is swallowed up, thanks be to God who gives us the victory, so we need to remain “steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord.”

Without skipping a beat—remember no chapter divisions in the original letter—see what Paul does: “Now concerning the collection for the saints”

(1 Corinthians 16:1).

Wow, what a switch. From the rapture to the offering. Paul, are you serious? Let us down a little gentler. You just had us shouting, now you have us groaning as we reach for our wallets. To the average person, it would seem a downer to go from the rapture to the offering, but not so with Paul.

There is no transition, no segue, no bridge. He does a Left Behind series talk and then jumps right to “It’s time for the collection.” The rapture and the collection can be mentioned together because they are both important to God. It’s important to get the saints home to heaven. And it’s important to get money for the work of the ministry on earth.

We would think they have no connection, but not to the Holy Spirit.

Giving and the rapture, if it’s in the Bible, it’s important no matter where their placements are. Let’s read the rest of the passage and make a few comments to help us today.

Now, concerning the collection I want you to take for God’s holy believers in Jerusalem who are in need, I want you to follow the same instructions I gave the churches of Galatia. Every Sunday, each of you make a generous offering by taking a portion of whatever God has blessed you with and place it in safekeeping. (1 Corinthians 16:1-2, TPT)

Two documents reveal a lot about us: our schedules and our bank accounts. They show how we use our most precious resources—time and money.

According to a Barna poll, only 3 percent of those who attend church actually tithe consistently. This info is telling us something important about the church: church members are changing from stewards to consumers.

When you go to a doctor for your annual check-up, he or she will often poke, prod, and press various places, all the while asking, “Does this hurt? How about this?” If you cry out in pain, there’s something wrong, and the doctor will say, “We’d better do some more tests. It isn’t supposed to hurt there!” So it is when pastors preach on finances. I’m going to start pushing. Why? Because tithing is important to God.

Sixteen of the thirty-eight parables Jesus told concerned how to handle money and possessions. In the Gospels, an amazing one out of ten verses (288 in all) deal directly with the subject of money. The Bible offers five hundred verses on prayer, less than five hundred verses on faith, but more than two thousand verses on money and possessions. The Bible does not shy away from money, and neither should we.

My Brooklyn NYPD Italian father—the son of an immigrant and a man who went through the Great Depression as a kid—taught me to do three things with every check I receive:

1. Pay God: tithing;

2. Pay yourself: savings;

3. Pay your bills: integrity and wisdom.

With all of us struggling, I often hear people say, “I need money, and you said ‘Pay’ in all three things. How? How do I get money?” The answer is going to surprise you.

Need money? Need financial assistance? You may not like this, but here we go . . .

We don’t get it by dropping hints of our need with people. That is covert manipulation. We don’t really get financial assistance by simply praying. Jesus says it very plainly: we receive by giving. Why do we want to bypass that simplicity? Some pray for money without any giving. That’s impossible. It would contradict what Jesus says. Jesus does not say, “Pray, and it will be given.” He says, “Give, and it will be given”:

Give, and it will be given you. They will pour into your lap a good measure—pressed down, shaken together, and running over. For by your standard of measure it will be measured to you in return. (Luke 6:38)

Jesus put the return amount you get back in your hands: “For by your standard of measure it will be measured to you in return.” No giver has ever gone broke. In fact, it’s the contrary.

Not pray and get.

Not tell others and get.

But give, and it will be given to you.

No better way to put this into action than giving to God, or what we call tithing. Which is consistent, joyful, thoughtful giving to God’s church.

Tithing is a thank-you note to God who is our Provider. What Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 16 is just to give us the mechanism for giving—every Sunday, be generous because God has blessed us with something to give.

I want us to be in the rapture and go to heaven, and I want us to be generous with our offerings on earth. Thanks, Paul, for the reminder.

Day 148

Today’s Reading: 1 Corinthians 15

A woman asked her pastor when she should start training her child in spiritual things. “Should I start at six?”

“No,” he said. “That’s too late.”

“At three years old?”

“Still too late.”

“Then when should I?” she asked.

“With the grandparents.”

That means my mom and dad for me and for my children. It’s about generational influence.

In today’s chapter we will see how important relationships are.

The other day I called my mom and thanked her for doing a devotional with me every morning when I was growing up. She always read the Daily Bread devotion with its corresponding Scripture and prayed the verse over me.

Today as a parent, guess who never lets their kids leave the house without praying? Me! Where do you think I learned that?

Every morning before my four children leave for school, I pray over them. I would encourage you to do this as well. For your children. Your grandchildren. Your nieces and nephews.

My children never leave the house without me praying these three things: First, I pray to make them great students like Daniel.

Daniel 1:20 says, “In every matter of wisdom and understanding about which the king questioned them, he found them ten times better than all the magicians and enchanters in his whole kingdom [NIV].”

So I pray, “Make them ten times better, God. Give them a great ability to learn. Your Word says in Daniel 1:17 that God gave these four youths great ability to learn, that they soon mastered all the literature and science of the time and that You gave to Daniel special ability in understanding the meanings of dreams and visions.”

Second, I pray to make them great Christians (that God would give them great convictions and great boldness for the things of God), like Joseph and Esther who stood for God in the public arena (See Genesis 41 and Esther 5).

Third, I pray for God to give them god-honoring friendships. And then I pray 1 Corinthians 15:33 over them: “Do not be misled: Bad company corrupts good character [NIV].” My children can quote this verse and do it with a tiredness in their voices because they have heard it literally hundreds of times.

I also add a companion verse to it, which I discovered recently: “The righteous choose their friends carefully” (Proverbs 12:26, NIV).

There is a difference between authority and influence. As Erwin McManus explains in Seizing Your Divine Moment: “Influence is always more powerful than authority. Authority can shape what a person does, but influence shapes who a person becomes.” McManus says to look in the middle of the word influence and what do you see? Flu. “People who are influential pass on what they have like the flu. If you don’t want what they’ve got, stay away from them because they’ll sneeze all over you.” People with influence are contagious. How does the flu get passed on? “Human contact, but proximity still endangers your contamination. . . . And through our character we pass on attitudes, values, and other life-shaping virtues. . . . Character is the resource from which our influence draws. Relationships are the venue through which influence travels. Influence is defined as ‘a power affecting a person, thing or course of events’ especially one that operates without any direct or apparent effort.”

Here is what I think I have learned about influence with raising children. Children are influenced on four levels at different ages/stages.

Stage 1: From birth to twelve, parents are the most powerful voices in their lives.

Stage 2: When they hit their teens, from ages thirteen to nineteen, peers become the more powerful influence. This is where, as parents, we need to be cognizant of who they hang with. We still have some control of who they are with. We want to be the house where they all want to hang out, so we have more influence.

Stage 3: Once they graduate high school, ages twenty to twenty-nine, their professors and heroes become the overwhelming influence on them. They start imitating and admiring and wanting to be like a musician, an athlete, a writer, etc. A professor becomes a new voice of authority to them. (Quick note: when choosing a college, my advice is to remember that the subjects are the same, so get them connected to school that is connected to a great church.)

Stage four: Finally, things come full circle back to parents. By age thirty, most kids realize their parents are pretty wise. As Mark Twain is claimed to have remarked, “As one boy said, ‘I was thinking all these horrible thoughts about my parents when suddenly it hit me, if they’re all that bad, how come I’m so wonderful?’”

Day 147

Today’s Reading: 1 Corinthians 14

An article in a Detroit newspaper, titled “Remedy for a Prune Face,” said, “Ladies, do you want to stay young? Then join a church choir. Women who sing stay younger-looking. A singer’s cheek muscles are so well developed by exercise that her face will not wrinkle nearly as soon as a nonsinger!”

Singing makes you look good. And that’s biblical. Psalm 33:1 says, “Praise is becoming to the upright.” The Detroit newspaper article was confirming what the psalmist claimed: that you look good when you praise God.

So let me help our praise. In 1 Corinthians 14, our singing and praying are about to get expanded. Paul is going to show us how to take our singing and praying to a new level. Here it is: “What’s the solution? The answer is simple enough. Do both. I should be spiritually free and expressive as I pray, but I should also be thoughtful and mindful as I pray. I should sing with my spirit, and sing with my mind” (verse 15, MSG).

Here is how the Living Bible says it: “Well, then, what shall I do? I will do both. I will pray in unknown tongues and also in ordinary language that everyone understands. I will sing in unknown tongues and also in ordinary language so that I can understand the praise I am giving.”

It’s easy to get stuck in ordinary language. Paul tells us to go to another level—to pray and sing in the spirit. Is this Pentecostal? No, this is 1 Corinthians 14. Paul encourages us to sing and pray two ways—to pray with the spirit and pray with the mind. I believe the simple way of putting this is in English (the mind) and in tongues (with the spirit). Sometimes we sing what’s on the screen and sometimes we sing from what is filling our hearts. To sing in the spirit is to sing in tongues; we go off script.

Paul is saying the same about prayer. Sometimes it’s in English and sometimes in tongues. How do we know this “with the spirit” is tongues? Look at the next verse: “Otherwise if you bless in the spirit only, how will the one who fills the place of the ungifted say the “Amen” at your giving of thanks, since he does not know what you are saying?”

When you pray or sing in the spirit, as verse 16 tells us, people do not know what we are saying. Why? Because we are praying and singing to God. When we are praying and singing in the spirit, what is happening? It’s just a new level, a new way of saying, “Thank You.” As verse 17 shows us: “For you are giving thanks well enough.”

The story goes that Niccolo Paganini (1782–1840), an amazingly gifted violinist, willed his violin to the city of Genoa, Italy, on one condition: that no one would ever play it. What he failed to understand was that when the wood on the instrument was handled and used, the violin would wear only slightly. But unused, it would decay. Today Paganini’s lovely violin has become worm-eaten and useless.

We are given a gift by the Spirit to be used not simply to discuss the theological implications. Use it!

If the Bible gives me the option to expand my singing and praying to a new level, I’m all in. Mind is what I am comfortable with, but spirit and mind together give me another tool, another weapon, but also takes it out of my control and now under the control of the Spirit. This is important because this is something that is part of Paul’s life.

He tells us in verse 18: “I speak in tongues more than you all.”

Jackie Pullinger has made an enormous impact in Hong Kong. She is the author of Chasing the Dragon, in which she tells the story of how she went to the walled city of Kowloon in Hong Kong to minister to the Triad gang members. Because of who and where she was, Jackie says she committed herself to praying in the spirit every day for fifteen minutes—by the clock. After about six weeks of this, she found new power in her evangelism, and people were much more open to receiving Christ.

Remember, Paul is not giving you a denominational slant but a new level of singing and praying, which makes us more powerful.

Day 146

Today’s Reading: 1 Corinthians 13

Definitions are important; it gives us a starting point. Definitions guide us and direct how to view things. Some new definitions for words you may already know:

Calories: the tiny creatures that live in your closet and sew your clothes a little tighter every night.

Study: the act of texting, eating, and watching YouTube with an open textbook nearby.

Latte: Italian for, You paid too much for that coffee.

Vegetarian: a Latin phase from centuries ago; it’s original meaning is a really bad hunter.

Tomorrow: the best time to do everything you had planned to do today.

Feet: a device used for finding Legos in the dark.

Love: giving someone the last piece of cake no matter how much you want it.

Now let’s get ready to define the most powerful word on the planet. That word love is the most important word in the human language and yet it’s hard for us to define.

People say . . . I love my family. I love my wife. I love my job. I love my church. I love my dog. I love my Harley. I love your hair, your nails, that dress. I love pizza.

Here’s a “love” letter that I’m not sure about:

Dearest Jimmy,

No words could ever express the great unhappiness I’ve felt since breaking our engagement. Please say you’ll take me back. No one could ever take your place in my heart, so please forgive me. I love you. I love you. I love you!

Yours forever,

Marie

P.S. Congratulations on winning the state lottery.

How would you define love? There are so many love definitions out there. Remember, definitions guide and direct us; they are our starting points. If our definition is wrong, the longer we go with it, the further off course we will get. And that will affect our relationships with people and with God.

A group of four to eight year-olds were asked, “What does love mean?” These were their answers:

When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different. You just know that your name is safe in their mouth. (Billy, age 4)

Love is what makes you smile when you’re tired. (Terri, age 4)

Love is when a girl puts on perfume and a boy puts on shaving cologne and they go out and smell each other. (Karl, age 5)

Love is when you go out to eat and give somebody most of your French fries without making them give you any of theirs. (Chrissy, age 6)

When my grandmother got arthritis, she couldn’t bend over and paint her toenails anymore. So my grandfather does it for her all the time, even when his hands got arthritis too. That’s love. (Rebecca, age 8)

These are cute, but we don’t need cute, we need accurate. The Bible doesn’t disappoint, it defines love for us. It gives us a whole chapter—1 Corinthians 13:

Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails; but if there are gifts of prophecy, they will be done away; if there are tongues, they will cease; if there is knowledge, it will be done away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part; but when the perfect comes, the partial will be done away. When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things. (Verses 4-11)

Let’s pause at the last part: When I was a child. I think it’s important that Paul puts this here. Why? It’s a call to put away the childish ways you look at love. It’s a call to retire your high-school letter jacket and act like an adult in relationships and define love the right way. That’s the context. It’s real love up against childish speaking, thinking, and reasoning.

Paul gives us the grown-up version of what love really is: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails” (verses 4-8, NIV).

There is a lot here for what love is. That’s why when you say “I love you,” it is a big deal—especially if it’s the Bible’s definition. Thomas à Kempis was right when he said, “Whoever loves much, does much.” The word Paul uses for love is agape. In Your Father Loves You, J. I. Packer points out that “the Greek word agape (love) seems to have been virtually a Christian invention—a new word for a new thing. . . . It is almost nonexistent before the New Testament. Agape draws its meaning directly from the revelation of God in Christ.” Agape is not an emotional word or affection. It has a much deeper motivation. Agape operates by choice rather than feeling. It is natural to love those who love us, but it is supernatural agape to love those who hate us. C. S. Lewis explained it this way: “Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person’s ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.” That’s agape. That’s love.