Right now you’re probably thinking, “This should be an easy devotional—I don’t blaspheme…” (except when I say, “Oh my God!” – but he knows I mean that in a nice way – or when I get the bajeebies scared out of me and I say, “Sweet Jesus!”). So I am not misusing God’s name in my work… but I will read on to see what the other people are doing.
We have an increasing number of people who claim to have God in their business. Their mission statements even start with “To glorify God through my business…” Some have Christian literature in their lobbies, crosses in the board rooms and fish on their business cards. Others have company prayer meetings, voluntary of course. Others collect prayer requests from customers and genuinely pray for them. Still others have Bible verses on their products. These things may be good, but it is possible to do them and still misuse God’s name in your business or work. How?
Doing business in God’s name without doing business in his way is misusing his name. God is really into alignment. He does not smile on us when we say we are doing business for Him and our business processes are not based on his principles. He is not pleased when we have Christian symbols on the outside but our core practices are pagan. Further, he makes it clear that we cannot claim he is #1 when we make no time for him, his desires, his dreams, or his plans.
Observe the Sabbath day… so that your maidservant and manservant may rest as you do. Deuteronomy 5:12-14
In God’s kingdom we cannot observe the first three commandments—make God #1, no idols, no misusing his name—if we don’t operate from a place of rest (commandment #4). When we do anything from human effort and striving instead of from a place of rest we are blowing it. Yet most of us are so strung out, so stretched, that we don’t have meaningful time for God. We blame it on work, of course, when the matter is not how much we work but how we work. And what about our leisure time, our Facebooking, our shopping, our gyming, or primping, our Christian meetings, our socializing or our sleeping? Are we a people on the move, or a people at rest? Are we making margin for God? The kingdom of this world is marked by hustle and bustle. The kingdom of God is marked by meaningful work, and rest, and margin for God. If you have the outward trappings without the inward rest and practical alignment at the core of your operations, then there’s a good chance you are unwittingly misusing the name of God in your business or career. If the name says “Kingdom business” and the operations say “strive to arrive”…
You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God… Deuteronomy 5:11
Do not let the second part of the verse wipe out the first part of the verse. Many Westerners, or those prone to thought over experience, will treat the first part of this verse as a poetic statement, and quickly jump to the second part of the verse, “in his word I put my hope.” We see the latter as the action part, something we can do. We like the verse that says “love the Lord with all your mind” because we think we know how to think. But engaging our mind in thought before we have put our soul to work waiting can be futile. It is like putting a car in gear without first starting the engine.
Truth be told, we know very little about what it means to have our soul wait on God. We rush into things head first. Yet the psalmist says, “I wait for the Lord…” Somewhere in the depths of our being where our emotions and our will and our core being come together, we are to wait.
Have you ever been in a room waiting for a dignitary to enter? Or perhaps you have been to a concert and waited in anticipation for the artist to appear. In the Old Testament once a year a priest went into the “holy of holies” in the inner temple – that would have involved some anticipation. Imagine what he was thinking as they tied the rope around his ankle so that they could drag him out in case he had sin in his life and he was struck dead. How can we wait with anticipation when this could be the outcome of an up-close-and-personal encounter with God? In the preceding verses the writer says, “If you, O Lord, kept a record of sins, O Lord, who could stand? But with you there is forgiveness, therefore you are feared. I wait for the Lord, my soul waits…” He knew that God encounters were for all of us since our sin is forgiven.
We know there are many facets to the glory of God, and one of them is truth. Friends, when we get up in the morning, make our first cup of tea and come before God, let’s wait for the whole package. Let’s not stop short at just putting our hope in his word (which often means just engaging our thinking). Let’s bring all of us to sit expectantly, waiting for our rock star, our redeemer, our hope, to enter the room with his unfailing love, his truth, his forgiveness, his miracle working power, and his energizing of us for a new day. Let’s wait before we do other things. Let’s wait for the Person of God before engaging in the activities of God.
My soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen wait for the morning, more than watchmen wait for the morning. Psalm 130:6
We read this and our mind’s eye moves to the target audience for this verse: proud parents who have a few kids, who attend church regularly, and who want the ideal life for their family. Surely they are the ones to whom these words would easily appeal… “so that it might go well with them and their children forever!” These are the same people who would buy life insurance, plan ahead, seek the best for their children educationally, socially and financially.
There is nothing wrong with these things, but that is not the context of this verse. Too often we take something that God intended for national application and we shrink it to personal proportions. We shrink the teaching about national economics to be personal finance principles. We shrink laws about education and apply them to Sunday School. We shrink national health care principles and make them personal diet fads.
At the root of this is that we take God himself—the dynamic, cannot-be-contained, out of the ordinary, unlimited God—and we put him in a box called Principles, or Rules for Life, or ancient truths, or Religion. ‘Phew!’ you say, ‘I am not religious, thank God. He cannot be talking about me.’ I am. I am suggesting that whenever you shrink your scope of application to be exclusively personal (versus your family as an intentional foundation for something bigger) you have misapplied truth and shrunk God. Said another way, if your secret motto is ‘think personal, act local’ you are on the wrong bus.
Oh, that their hearts would be inclined to fear me and keep all my commands always, so that it might go well with them and their children forever! Deuteronomy 5:29
This verse is breathed by God in the midst of his instructions on how to build a new nation in the Promised Land. Personal is good—it keeps us real. But personal to the exclusion of national and global could be a case of poor understanding, misunderstood identity, dodged destiny, or the stark truth that we don’t want the face to face with God that a nation-wide scope demands. So we tell our Moses to go and speak to God for us while we go home and ponder the small interior of our little tents.
“Go, tell them to return to their tents. But you stay here with me so that I may give you all the commands, decrees and laws you are to teach them to follow in the land I am giving them to possess.” Deuteronomy 5:30
Last night I had a dream of an earlier time when my kids were young. I remember, in the dream, cuddling with my kids and enjoying them as three and six-year olds. Then today when I woke up and went back to Psalm 65, believing there was another nugget there, I found it: “you choose and bring near.” As a dad I would not have children and then not want to be near them. The older they get the more I simultaneously enjoy them now and I miss their younger days. It is unthinkable that I, an imperfect father, would choose to have children, but also choose to have them far away. Any good parent knows this.
If this is true—and it is—then why on earth do we treat God like some alien? We develop some split-level thinking that says, ‘God has to choose me because that’s his job. But he probably doesn’t want to be near me. I will just be happy with being chosen, and will hang out with the servants in the back yard.’ It sounds ridiculous when one spells it out this way, but I cannot tell you how many times I have heard people say, “I don’t feel near to God.”
If the devil cannot stop you being forgiven he will try his best to stop you enjoying God. And sometimes satan doesn’t even need to work very hard at this because our own performance-driven, earning-oriented, ego-and-accomplishment based wiring keeps us from God. Friends, our God is one. He is not some bi-level, half-hearted, half-baked God. There is enough in who he is and what he has done to both choose us, and to draw us near. Anything that is a potential barrier to nearness has been swept away by the blood of Jesus. There is no veil, no dividing wall, no legal case against us… “nothing can separate us from the love of God.” We are chosen to be near, not just to be saved.
You are chosen: get near! Let this truth wash over you until you know it deep in your soul.
You choose and bring near… you choose and bring near… you choose and bring near.
Let’s face it, we all have days when we feel like we are about to fall over. There are times when we think we are bound to become just another fallen layer in the archeology of life. King David knew that if he didn’t collapse because of his own frailty, then there were plenty of people who were happy to do help him crumble. “How long will you assault a man? Would you throw him down—this leaning wall, this tottering fence? They fully intend to topple him from his lofty place…” How did David deal with this opposition? Rather than try to pump himself up, he made sure his frail fence was located in the right place.
5 Find rest, O my soul, in God alone;
my hope comes from him.
6 He alone is my rock and my salvation;
he is my fortress, I will not be shaken.
The question is not whether we are a leaning wall; the question is, What is our wall leaning on? You may argue, ‘I am doing fine—my health is good, my finances are great, my wall is sturdy and I have a bright future.’ That’s good, if your wall is in the right place. If your money is your wall, “though your riches increase, do not set your heart on them.” (v.10) If your strength is your wall, “men are but a breath” – two puffs and life is over, your strength is gone. If you come from a noble family, remember “the highborn are but a lie.” (v.9) The posture of your wall is less important than the positioning of your wall.
The enemy knows that the real battle is not for the condition of your fence, but for the position of your fence. Satan tried, through his accomplices, to lure Nehemiah outside the city, but Nehemiah stayed in the right place. Samson had a strong fence, but compromised its position. Job stood firm: “even if he slay me, yet will I hope in him.” (Job 13:15)
If you have your fence in the right place, if it is high up on the rocky fortress, if it is set on a rock, then it doesn’t matter too much if it falls over. If your wall falls, he is capable of fixing it. There is no fear on the rock.
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It was December and I was preparing for our annual planning meetings. This is easier to do when the year has been good and there is money in the bank. This particular year I was half expecting criticism from my colleagues because things were not as good financially as they could have been. I sensed that people were fatigued and were looking for change. Before the meetings began I sought God and I comforted myself in the Lord, and this phrase is what turned it for me: “my honor depends on God.” Not on the Profit & Loss, not on the bank balance, not on external success, and not on the esteem of my colleagues, but on the Lord.
As it happens, it was not the most jovial of planning retreats. There was somewhat of an air of criticism. I led us through Psalm 62 and we pondered its meaning. Only afterwards did I realize that people were critical, but of themselves, not of me. They had endured a tough year, but many wished they would have had more to show for their efforts. We were close to the edge of looking to our accomplishments to validate who we were, rather than looking to God to defend our honor.
Perhaps you are hard on yourself. You criticize your lack of productivity or accomplishment. If, on the other hand, you are quite content with what you do, others may criticize you for not caring enough about money, not providing for your loved ones, or not stewarding your career.
Friend, there will come a day when your honor is not dictated by the size of your bank balance, the newness of your car, or the title on your business card. There will be a time in each of our lives when we look as if a passing sparrow could cause our whole fence to collapse. There will be a time when your honor on earth is sapped. When our honor is on the line, if we abide in God and are obedient to him, then our God stands on that same line to defend our honor. We can come to our own defense, or we can say with the psalmist, “he alone… my salvation and my honor depend on God.”
What was it that God might have said—what one thing—that would cause David to hear two? I believe what we are seeing here is faith-based implicational thinking. If A is true, then B and C must also be true. Put another way, ‘If God promises me X, then he must be Y and Z, otherwise he could not make the promise.’ It is good to hang onto God’s promises, but it is a deeper thing to hang onto the God behind the promises.
David was not in good shape, it seems, and his enemies were out to cause him to crumble. While he admitted his condition (I am a leaning wall) he didn’t start with himself. He chose to start with God whom he describes this way: “He alone is my rock and my salvation; he is my fortress…” He does the Math this way: ‘God is my fortress + I am a leaning wall = I will never be shaken.’ That is a pretty awesome reality! The formula is pretty simple: God + anything of us = Enough. In fact, God on his own is enough, but God + me is enough for me.
One thing God has spoken,
two things have I heard:
that you, O God, are strong,
and that you, O Lord, are loving.
I suspect that the word God spoke to David—the “one thing God has spoken”—was the following: ‘You, David, will never be shaken.’ David must have pondered that assurance because he concludes that the God who says this must be strong… stronger than the mess around me, stronger than my enemies, stronger than my circumstances, and stronger than me. If I will never be shaken, then God must be unshakeable. “ that you, O God, are strong”
But why would a strong God want me to never be shaken? This leads David to his second conclusion: “You, O Lord, are loving.” The bottom line is this: we are safe in God. The top line is therefore that he must be strong, and he must be loving.
Have you ever noticed how unhappy people think too much? You could make a case, I suppose, that they are not thinking enough and so they do stupid things and this leads to them being unhappy. But I am thinking about smart, lots-going-for-them people who over-think, and are unhappy. What could be happening here?
Solomon was no dummy, and he was the one who made the observation. The reality is that sitting around thinking about what could make you happy is not the road to happiness. I believe a key phrase to being happy is this: “God keeps him occupied.”
So what are we to do? The backplane in your mind should not have the graffiti “How can I be happy?” sprayed on it. The backdrop of our thinking should be more along the lines of “How can I be busy serving God and blessing others today? And how can I take pleasure in the small joys, such as crossing something off my To Do list, or feeling the sunshine on my face, or tidying my desk, or holding the chubby hand of a child?” Whatever you do, don’t think too much.
He seldom reflects on the days of his life, because God keeps him occupied with gladness of heart. Ecclesiastes 5:20
We sat at lunch one day with a team from our office. It was a farewell meal for an intern who had joined us for three or four months. He was a very likeable chap, had a bright mind, and was a genuinely nice guy. For our part, we had put him in tasteful accommodations, given him a car to drive, had him participate in some interesting projects, and given him exposure to life in Silicon Valley when all was well in Dot.com land. So at the end of it all my wife asked, “What did you learn from your time with us?” His answer caused more than one person to nearly choke on their Chinese food: “I don’t like maintenance.” That was it. The grand conclusion from the twenty year old on what he had learned from his work stint: maintenance sucks.
The first to respond was our Information Technology manager (who, incidentally, spent most of his day maintaining other people’s computers). He gently explained how he had married an older woman who already had a child and was, no surprise, grown up. He, on the other hand, came straight from home and his mom was still picking up his dirty laundry and cooking all his meals. There were some tough consequences of not having learned the basics of maintenance.
Others around the table piled on so much maintenance advice that the young intern was quickly regretting his what now seemed less-than-astute observation.
Finally I said to him, “God is a maintainer.” Every day forgives our sin, cleans up after us, renews the cells in our body, causes the sun to rise, sends rain, filters our dirty air and refreshes our spirits. If we want to get into God’s business we need to remember that God is not just an Architect, he is also running Maintenance.
We are staying in a rental house and every day I try to do something for the house. It is an opportunity to grow in stewardship, a way to reflect the character of God-the-maintainer. Left to itself, a house falls apart. Left to ourselves, we fall apart. Don’t wait for some glamorous job to come along: volunteer for maintenance. Is it not ego that says, ‘My skills are so special that I will only do thus and so’?
The new and exciting probably doesn’t get a better reward than the faithful plodding. Cleaning up gets as much kudos as building up. Finally, remember that lack of maintenance will result in a leaky roof and damage to the whole structure. Not sure what grand thing to do with your life? Take care of the maintenance and the big ideas will follow.
If a man is lazy, the rafters sag;
if his hands are idle, the house leaks. Ecclesiastes 10:18
When God drives up at a gathering he can arrive in whatever car he chooses. When God decides to show us a small piece of Who he is, he gets to decide the terms. If he wants to come with thunder and lightning, that is his choice. If he wants to come with some trumpet and fanfare… he can do it! If he wants to be in a still, small voice, the whisper of a child or the guise of a beggar: any of these are options for God. When God delivers a message, he can add whatever packaging he wants to add and it reinforces rather than invalidates the message. John the Baptist’s packaging was different than the Magi. The writing on the wall was different than the plagues in Egypt. Which was right and which was “unbiblical”? Who of us gets to dictate to God how he may or may not manifest his presence? We get so overly righteous assessing whether something was or was not God that we throw the baby out with the bath water. If there is some harmful, clearly devious evidence of a spiritual world that is not God, then weigh it, judge it and avoid it. But if God is wrapping his word in a tangible expression of his presence, don’t stay at a distance.
In the past year we saw God’s presence in ways that were, for us at least, unusual. (At least they start off as unusual.) Someone becomes aware of angels in a room so that what we have sung for decades—“and I know that there are angels all around” —takes on a whole new meaning. Another actually sees angels. What appears to be a fine gold dust appears on one’s face, hands, or clothing. A colleague was moving house and opened the trunk of her car to see a pile of “gold dust”—she called others over to witness it and to take a photo. The laptop on which I am typing was brand new with a mat black finish: now only the topside has a fine spray of gold dust, and it has been that way since April when I was at a conference at Bethel Church in Redding, CA, sitting in the lobby doing emails… when I closed my laptop I noticed the gold. Many have verified that they see it too.
The people said, “This is out of our comfort zone!” and Moses said:
Do not be afraid. God has come to test you, so that the fear of God will be with you to keep you from sinning. Exodus 20:20
Let’s remember the context. God had just delivered The 10 Commandments. The people desperately needed an experience of the supernatural presence of God if they were to comprehend and walk out the heart of these weighty commandments. Instead of saying, “Give us more of your presence or we can never handle these commandments” they said, “We don’t want to deal with the spooky stuff that is outside our comfort zone.” Yet the manifestation of God’s presence is often proportional to the assignment at hand. God doesn’t dish out jobs without offering to be present in whatever way fits the situation, from trumpets to silence. Don’t run from the smoke and lightning and thunder and trumpets when they may be just what you need to carry out the instruction of God.
The people remained at a distance while Moses approached the thick darkness where God was. Exodus 20:21
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