The 260 Journey

Day 207

Today’s Reading: Hebrews 3

Thomas Edison had very little formal education. In fact, he was only in school a few months before his mother pulled him out and began teaching him herself. She encouraged him in reading, writing, and arithmetic, and allowed him to pursue other interests that appealed to him. Always a curious boy, he was particularly fascinated with mechanical things and chemical experiments, which his mother encouraged.

How did it come about that his mother pulled him out of school? And why? According to a rare interview Edison gave to a now-defunct literary journal, T. P. Weekly, published on November 29, 1907, his mother’s staunch support and belief in him made him the successful inventor he became:

“One day I overheard the teacher tell the inspector that I was “addled” and it would not be worthwhile keeping me in school any longer. I was so hurt by this last straw that I burst out crying and went home and told my mother about it. Then I found out what a good thing a good mother is. She came out as my strong defender. Mother love was aroused, mother pride wounded to the quick. She brought me back to the school and angrily told the teacher that he didn’t know what he was talking about, that I had more brains than he himself, and a lot more talk like that. In fact, she was the most enthusiastic champion a boy ever had, and I determined right then that I would be worthy of her and show her that her confidence was not misplaced.”

Thomas Edison’s mom spoke encouragement, life-giving words, into her son’s life and gave us one of the greatest inventors in history. Because of her staunch belief in her son and her words about and to him, the world has the light bulb, phonograph, camera, telegraph, generators, microphones, alkaline batteries, cement, and a host of other things.

Words are powerful. As Mother Teresa said, “Words which do not give the light of Christ increase the darkness.” In today’s chapter, the writer of Hebrews describes the heart challenge we all face and the antidote for it to be fixed:

“Take care, brethren, that there not be in any one of you an evil, unbelieving heart that falls away from the living God. But encourage one another day after day, as long as it is still called “Today,” so that none of you will be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.” (Hebrews 3:12-13)

We are told that any one of us can find our heart moving into unbelief. The writer says that we are to be aware of that enemy. And before we can even be afraid, we are told there is an answer to it—encouragement. Encouragement is what keeps our hearts soft. That is the power of encouraging words. Those kinds of words don’t just give us a Thomas Edison, they give us strong, faithful Christians.

Can I vent for a moment? I want to give you my pet peeve of “religious” encouragement. It’s when people give you the preface before the encouragement. They say something like, “I don’t want you to get a big head or get prideful, but you preached well, you sang well, your words were powerful.” Their preface waters down their encouragement. I want to tell them, “You’re not the pride police. Just say something nice without the caveat.” People are so discouraged today, and a word of encouragement gets them in the game, so give someone a word of encouragement without your “concern” for their pride. Be more concerned of an unbelieving heart than a prideful heart. That means just say the good words.

More people fail for lack of encouragement, I think, than for any other reason. Encouragement is oxygen to the soul. We don’t have enough encouragers out there. We need more encouragement in the home and in the church. Who knows what a word of encouragement could do for your spouse, your child, or the person you sit next to at your job. Just a “great job” could get someone through the day.

We need to make deposits into people’s emotional bank accounts. It will help them finish their day, the week, their life well. Day-to-day encouragement. Send someone a text of encouragement. Make a quick Mom-and-Dad phone call and encourage them. The people you think don’t need it because they always look happy are many times the ones who need it most.

A pastor friend told me about something that happened in his church. An elderly lady told him when he buries her that she wants a Bible and a spoon in her casket. He asked her why. She said, “At all the church fellowships I have been to over the last seventy-five years, when they come around after the dinner and give us spoons they are saying the best is yet to come—dessert. And when I die, I want people to know that the best is yet to come.” Well, he’d heard the story before—it’s been going around for years. But that’s not the end of the story. My friend said there was a part B.

A little while later, he needed to step down from ministry for a season due to some personal issues. It was a hard year for that pastor to be attending the church he’d led for decades but who was now on the sidelines. After the year was up, he prepared for his first Sunday back. He was nervous and scared and wondered if the church would even want him back.

That first Sunday back, he stepped up to the pulpit and watched in amazement as the entire congregation stood. They didn’t applaud. They held up spoons. They were encouraging him that the best is yet to come.

Day 206

Today’s Reading: Hebrews 2

My wife, Cindy, and I were sitting with our children’s pastor some years ago. As we were talking in our living room, our four children were playing in the basement. All our kids were under the age of eight, so there was a lot going on. At that time the children’s pastor was not married and had no children.

While we were talking we all heard a cry from the basement, but Cindy and I just kept talking. Finally he said, “Aren’t you guys going to do something?”

“It’s okay,” we told him. “That’s a ‘You took my spot!’ cry. It’s all good.”

We kept talking and then another cry came from the basement. We never flinched. He was unnerved. “Should we go check on them?”

“It’s all good,” Cindy and I said. “That’s a bug cry.”

We kept talking. Then a third cry came and we got up and left. He sat confused. “Where are you going?”

“That’s an ‘I’m hurt!’ cry,” we said as we rushed to the basement. “Someone hurt themselves and we need to go.” Meeting postponed.

When you are a parent, you know the cry of your children. Hebrews 2 is about our Savior who knows the cry of His kids. Let’s read this very encouraging passage:

“He had to be made like His brethren in all things, so that He might become a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For since He Himself was tempted in that which He has suffered, He is able to come to the aid of those who are tempted.” (Hebrews 2:17-18)

The King James Version doesn’t use the phrase, come to the aid. It uses a very old English word, “He is able to succor them.” The word succor actually means to run to the cry. I think it’s important to know that Jesus runs to the cry and not to the articulate. Sometimes all we have is a cry, and that moves our Savior to our rescue.

Psalms show us this over and over:

“In my distress I cried out to the Lord . . . my cry to him reached his ears.” (Psalm 18:6, NLT)

“In my trouble I cried to the Lord, and He answered me.”

(Psalm 120:1)

“I love the Lord because he . . . heard my cry.” (Psalm 116:1, NIRV)

David over and over uses cries for prayer. A cry is inarticulate but still has meaning. A cry is not grammatically correct, but it is understandable to God. A cry may be wordless but speaks with force and passion in the ears of God.

Tears are prayers. Tears talk when we can’t. There’s an old poem by John Vance Cheney that says in part, “The soul would have no rainbow had the eyes no tears.” Let me show you the rainbow of this verse. The writer of Hebrews was telling us that since Jesus became like us “in all things,” He knows the cry and the pain of those things. He can recognize the emotions of situations that we forget Jesus became familiar with.

In 100 Days in the Arena, David Winter recounts a horrific time in the early church when the Christians were being killed for their faith. He includes this prayer:

“You give yourself with such total generosity, it might almost seem that you need us. There has never been a king like you ever before. You have made yourself available to everyone who needs you. Instead of high security, you have made yourself vulnerable even to those who hate you.”

What makes Jesus amazing is that our tears are enough to get His attention. It’s not our experience, our vocabulary, our education, our position, or our finances. A cry is enough to make Him run to our help. There is no such thing as a bad prayer—even if it’s just a cry.

Bruce Howell tells the story of a father and his young son and daughter who went swimming in the Atlantic Ocean off New Jersey. Though they were all great swimmers they got separated, and the dad, looking around, realized that the tide was carrying them out to sea. He called out to his daughter, “I am going to shore for help. If you get tired, turn on your back. You can float all day on your back. I’ll come back for you.” He and the boy made it to shore and then set out on a frantic search for the girl. After four hours, they found her far out in the sea. She was calmly swimming on her back and wasn’t frightened at all. The father was hugely relieved when the calm girl was finally back on shore. Everyone wondered how she could be so calm. She said, “Daddy said he would come for me and that I could float all day, so I swam and floated because I knew he would come.”

This is what Jesus is all about. He will always come for us. He will always be there.

Day 205

Today’s Reading: Hebrews 1

At Trafalgar Square in London stands the 170-foot-high iconic Lord Nelson column. Resting on top of the pillar is Lord Nelson. It towers way too high for a passerby to distinguish his features and really know who it is. So about forty years ago a new statue, an exact replica of the original that is on top, was erected at eye level so everyone could see Lord Nelson way up there. Someone had the idea that if you want to know who is “way up there,” we have to bring the exact representation down low enough for everyone to see.

This also happened about two thousand years ago in a very big way. God transcends our ability to see Him for who He is. The eyes of our understanding cannot define or figure out His divine features. So God pulled a Lord Nelson for us. He set before us an exact representation, “the image of the invisible God.” Now to know God, we must only look at Jesus. Here’s what the writer of Hebrews tells us:

“In these last days he has spoken to us through his Son. God made his Son responsible for everything. His Son is the one through whom God made the universe. His Son is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact likeness of God’s being. He holds everything together through his powerful words. After he had cleansed people from their sins, he now holds the honored position—the one next to the majestic God [the Father] on the heavenly throne.” (Hebrews 1:2-3, GW)

We live in a highly religious society today. I don’t think America is godless; I think America has many gods. The issue is, what does America’s god look like? One of the first things God did when He gave the Ten Commandments was to issue a warning from the very beginning about counterfeit gods. The Bible says this in Exodus 20 in the first commandment:

“You shall have no other gods before Me. You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth. You shall not worship them or serve them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God.” (Exodus 20:3-5)

Here is what stands out—that God gave the commandment against other gods not to pagans and idolaters but to Israel, the very people of God, a monotheistic people. Being religious never guarantees the worship of the true God. This was what we remember as we enter the book of Hebrews. Hebrews was written to religious people who were losing sight of Jesus. They were losing sight of the exact representation and likeness of God seen only in Jesus. And the book reminds them that God is in Jesus.

Divine truth must come from outside to us. It cannot be self-generated by us and come from within ourselves. Truth must be revealed by God to us. Without Jesus we come up with our own version of God; thus the thousands of religions in the world who have self-defined God instead of letting God define Himself in Jesus. As Colossians 1:15 says, “We look at this Son and see the God who cannot be seen” (MSG). God is fully revealed in Jesus.

That’s why any religion that doesn’t give Jesus the honor that God gets is counterfeit. Jesus tells us, “The Son will be honored equally with the Father. Anyone who dishonors the Son, dishonors the Father, for it was the Father’s decision to put the Son in the place of honor” (John 5:23, MSG). The Son is equally honored with the Father, because the Son is God in the flesh.

There are only two approaches to knowing God: one that begins with humans or the one that begins with God. Jesus is God’s self-revelation. We know God only through Jesus. Lloyd C. Douglas was the author of the classic book, The Robe. He lived in a boarding house when he was a university student. He tells the story that when he lived on the first floor, he resided next to a retired music teacher, wheelchair bound and unable to leave his apartment. Every morning they had a ritual: Douglas came down the stairs, opened the man’s door, and asked, “Well, what’s the good news?” The other picked up his tuning fork, tapped it on the inside of his wheelchair, and said, “That is middle C! It was middle C yesterday, and it will be middle tomorrow. It will be middle C a thousand years from now. The tenor upstairs sings flat, the piano across the hall is out of tune, but my friend, that is middle C.”

Says Donald McCullough of the story: “The old man had discovered a constant reality on which he could depend, an unchanging truth to which he could cling. Jesus Christ is our tuning fork, ringing out middle C in a cacophonous world of competing truths; his pitch defines tonal reality and sets every other note in its proper place.”

Society may be flat. The church may be sharp. But as McCullough reminds us, “When we listen to middle C two things happen: the revelation of Jesus Christ both separates us from God and unites us to God.”

Astronomers observe stars with telescopes. Biologists examine cells with microscopes. Sociologists discover patterns of human behavior with surveys and interviews. Psychiatrists delve into the mind through conversation. Humanity can know God by the life and words of Jesus Christ. When we grasp the hand of Jesus, we meet God in Person.

Day 204

Today’s Reading: Philemon 1

You can be forgiven of your past but still have an unfixed past. Forgiven and fixed are two different things, and sometimes people confuse them at salvation.

Being born again will change your relationship with God, but won’t necessarily change your relationship with your family, the courts, the IRS, the law, a judge, a probationary officer, VISA, a collection agency, a halfway house, or a bad marriage. At least not immediately. You are forgiven but not fixed yet.

Let me give you a scenario. If you robbed a bank and got saved after that, are you forgiven and really going to heaven? Yes. Are you going to jail? Yes. Are you now innocent since you are forgiven? Nope.

You are forgiven, but you may have a past that still needs to be fixed. You can be going to heaven and going to jail at the same time. God’s forgiveness always exonerates in the courts of heaven, but is not guaranteed in the courts on earth. Salvation forgives sin (past, present, and future) but it does not resolve it.

This is such an important issue that a whole book of the Bible is devoted to it. A twenty-five verse book, which is the best and most practical help on this issue—Philemon. The verses will pop off the page when I give you the background. We have three characters in the story: Paul, who is in prison, is the aged apostle and the writer of the letter; Philemon is a Christian who had a slave who ran away (and has the church in his house); Onesimus is the slave who ran away and who gets saved while he is trying to get lost among the residents in Rome.

In the first century, two million of the five million people in Rome were slaves. To purchase a slave was very expensive. There were 120 occupations for them—some were executives and had salaried positions; most slaves served between ten and twenty years and usually were free by the age of thirty. But if a slave ran away, it was like he was committing suicide. It was punishable by death or branding the letter “F” on his head, which stood for the Latin word Fugitivus.

Bottom line: Onesimus ran away.

Bottom line: by law he can be killed or branded.

Paul knows this. Onesimus knows this. Philemon knows this.

While Paul is in prison in Rome, guess who he meets? Onesimus. And guess who Paul leads to the Lord? Onesimus.

Now we come back to our original thought: you can be forgiven but your past is still unfixed. So Paul has to write a letter and send Onesimus back to Philemon with that letter.

Listen to some of Paul’s letter to Philemon. This is a masterpiece:

“I appeal to you for my child Onesimus, whom I have begotten in my imprisonment, who formerly was useless to you, but now is useful both to you and to me. I have sent him back to you in person, that is, sending my very heart, whom I wished to keep with me, so that on your behalf he might minister to me in my imprisonment for the gospel; but without your consent I did not want to do anything, so that your goodness would not be, in effect, by compulsion but of your own free will. For perhaps he was for this reason separated from you for a while, that you would have him back forever, no longer as a slave, but more than a slave, a beloved brother, especially to me, but how much more to you, both in the flesh and in the Lord.” (Philemon 1:10-16)

Jesus has forgiven Onesimus. Will Philemon forgive Onesimus?

Paul doesn’t mention the name Onesimus in the letter for nine verses. I want you to keep this in mind—this letter is being hand delivered. The Jerusalem postal service is not doing it, but the subject of the letter is; Onesimus. I wonder if he knows exactly what is in the letter as he is coming back to Philemon.

Commentary writer William Barclay says, “Christianity never entitled anyone to default on debts.” Paul leads him to the Lord and then leads him to address his debt issue. The IRS. The police. The outstanding credit card and collection agencies—for the Christian all these have to be addressed with an Onesimus letter.

Don’t call your irresponsibility a trial that God is going to get you through. Irresponsibility is fixed by integrity not a miracle. You address the unresolved, not rebuke it. That’s what the letter to Philemon teaches us.

Paul writes in verse 21 “I am confident as I write this letter that you will do what I ask and even more!” (NLT). Paul is saying, “You may be heating up the branding iron with the F on it. I’m asking you to put it down. I want you to forgive him—that’s the F I want heating up in your heart.”

Onesimus was useless when he was in verse 11. He stole from Philemon in verse 18. But here’s the game changer: he is now a brother in Christ, not just an employee.

Now the big question: what is the end of the story?

No one knows. The Bible does not tell us if Philemon forgives him or if Onesimus lives. I want to make a guess from something I saw in a church history book. In Earle Cains’s Christianity through the Centuries, he writes:

"Some fifty years after Philemon was written, just on the heels of the apostles, was the church father, Ignatius, a martyr on the way to his death. He was allowed to write letters of encouragement and one of those letters was written to the church in Ephesus. And in that letter he makes mention of their pastor. His name? Onesimus."

A coincidence or a miracle? Did the runaway slave become a pastor? Did the man who tried to hide out in Rome find himself leading the church in Ephesus? You may say, “That’s a big stretch. That’s a tall order.”

If an ex-murderer can write most of the New Testament letters, then I think this is feasible with God. Wait! That ex-murderer is the writer of this Philemon letter—the apostle Paul.

Jesus says it like this, “With people it is impossible, but not with God; for all things are possible with God” (Mark 10:27).

Day 203

Today’s Reading: Titus 3

Research experts tell us we communicate only 7 percent with our words, 38 percent with our tone of voice, and 58 percent with our actions. This is why Paul emphasizes the word deeds to the young pastor Titus.

In today’s chapter we are getting from the apostle Paul the last of the pastoral letters. His emphasis to Titus in chapter 3, and really throughout the entire Epistle, is focused on the 58 percent. I imagine Paul feels like Benjamin Franklin who said, “Well done is much better than well said.” Basically, it is better to be a good doer than a good talker.

John Donne said: “Of all the commentaries on the Scriptures, good examples are the best.” Another word for example in the book of Titus is good deeds. The apostle Paul is really careful to tell us it’s not the good deeds that make us Christians and get us to heaven: “He saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit” (Titus 3:5).

But it is good deeds that should be coming from God’s people. He wants us to know that though we are not saved by good deeds, we pursue good deeds because they are the outflow of the work of God in our lives:

"Remind the people to be subject to rulers, to authorities, to be obedient, to be ready for every good deed. . . . This is a trustworthy statement; and concerning these things I want you to speak confidently, so that those who have believed God will be careful to engage in good deeds. These things are good and profitable for men." (Verses 1, 8)

Be ready for every good deed and engage in good deeds. Then he repeats in verse 14: “Our people must also learn to engage in good deeds to meet pressing needs, so that they will not be unfruitful.” Again, he encourages us to engage in good deeds.

But these exhortations are not limited to Titus 3. In Titus 1:16, Paul tells Titus about people who know how to talk but not live: “They profess to know God, but by their deeds they deny Him, being detestable and disobedient and worthless for any good deed.” Or as one Colin Morris put it, “Your theology is what you are when the talking stops and the action starts.”

Then Paul speaks about good deeds in chapter 2, two more times: “In all things show yourself to be an example of good deeds, with purity in doctrine, dignified. . . . Who gave Himself for us to redeem us from every lawless deed, and to purify for Himself a people for His own possession, zealous for good deeds” (verses 7, 14).

Zealous for good deeds.

It seems like “good deeds” is the emphasis Paul is giving to Titus: Titus, let your people show their Christianity, not just speak it. You can preach a better sermon with your life than with your lips.

Our challenge is to live what we say. People will see with their eyes before they will listen with their ears. Our actions can bring someone closer to Jesus or be the very thing that turns them from Jesus.

Charles Banning was right when he said, “Too many of us have a Christian vocabulary rather than a Christian experience. We think we are doing our duty when we’re only talking about it.” People may doubt what we say but they will believe what we do.

As the late British evangelist Gypsy Smith once quipped, “There are five Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and the Christian, but most people never read the first four.”