Truly Alive

“The dead man came out, his hands and feet wrapped with strips of linen, and a cloth around his face.  Jesus said to them, ‘Take off the grave clothes and let him go.'”  John 11:44

Can you imagine this scene?  After Jesus’ audacious command to a dead man to return from the dead, get up, and shuffle out of the tomb, this crowd actually saw it happen.  Now I have to confess that if I had been one of those individuals in the crowd, I would have turned and run away even faster than I run when I am chasing an ice cream truck.  After all, dead people don’t just get back up after being in a tomb for four days!  But this impossible feat is exactly what this crowd witnessed.  Many of them had even helped roll away the stone the blocked the entrance to the tomb, so there could be no accusations of some elaborate trick.  They had heard Jesus’ prayer.  They had heard His command.  They had likely wondered about what kind of crazy Jesus had to be to actually believe that a dead man could heed his command.  And then it happened.  All of a sudden a man came into the light from the darkness of the tomb shuffling his feet because he was still wrapped in his burial attire.  Jaws must have it the ground.  Some must have run away in fear.  Doubtless, dozens stood there with blank looks on their faces.  All tried to understand the incomprehensible miracle they had just witnessed.  But Lazarus was not raised to merely be gaulked at.  He was raised for life.  So Jesus commanded those nearest Lazarus to help him remove the grave clothes so that he could genuinely experience the life to which he had been raised.  It must have been an incredible sight to see the dead return to life.

While I confess that I have never seen a tomb opened and someone walk out alive, I have seen the dead receive life.  In fact, I was once one of the dead, but now I am alive!  You see, the Bible declares each and every person without a relationship with Jesus to be dead in his or her sin.  But you need not be frightened.  God loved you enough to send His Son Jesus to die in your place so that you could experience the life and relationship with God for which you were created.  Though you may be spiritually dead, you can receive spiritual and eternal life.  All you must do is to ask Jesus to forgive you and come into your life as the boss of your life.  Then you too will have become one of the living.  Perhaps you began a relationship with Jesus years ago, wonderful!  But who do you know who still needs to receive eternal life?  Who do you know who needs to know about Jesus?

Read Full Post »

What Kind of Crazy

“When he had said this, Jesus called in a loud voice, ‘Lazarus, come out!'”  John 11:43

When Jesus called out Lazarus from the tomb, he did so in a way that all could hear.  For all those near the tomb, there could be no doubt how this incomprehensible miracle had taken place.  There were no smoke and mirrors.  There was no doubt about who said what.  There was no quiet scheming off to the side.  There was only Jesus, who after praying to His Father, cried out and commanded the dead man to get up and come out.  What must have gone through the minds of those who heard Jesus in the moment after this audacious command but before they see Lazarus shuffling out of the tomb?  Surely, they must have thought Jesus had lost His mind.  After all, Lazarus was dead.  In fact, he had been dead for four days.  What kind of crazy is this man that He honestly thinks that He has authority over death?  What a shock it must have been to discover that even death was no match for Jesus!

I wonder at times if we do the same thing when we bring our problems and circumstances to Jesus.  I wonder if we come to Him with the resignation that He cannot do anything except comfort us, when all the while He wants to do something much greater.  To be certain, there have been many times in my life when the only way that I made it through a circumstance was because of the comfort of God.  But there have also been other times when all I wanted was comfort, but all God wanted to do was to display His glory.  How would your life be different if rather than resigning yourself to those mountains that seem immovable you focused on asking God to display His glory through those mountains.  Perhaps He will choose to reveal His glory by removing the mountain.  Perhaps He will reveal His glory by simply calming your spirit.  Regardless of how exactly He will do so, you can rest assured that if your goal is for God to demonstrate His glory your goal will be fulfilled.

Read Full Post »

Protesting or Trusting

“‘Take away the stone,’ he [Jesus] said.  ‘But, Lord,’ said Martha, the sister of the dead man, ‘by this time there is a bad odor, for he has been there four days.’  Then Jesus said, ‘Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?’  So they took away the stone.”  John 11:39-41a

Lazarus had been dead for four days.  By all accounts no one thought there was anything that anyone could do.  Though Jesus had hinted around at His plans, understandably no one really thought that He was about to raise Lazarus from the dead.  So when Jesus tells the Jews who had followed them to the tomb to roll away the stone, Martha was understandably disturbed.  After all, in the Middle Eastern heat the body would unquestionably stink.  Not to mention that close contact with a dead body would mean that those involved would be ceremonially unclean and unable to worship at the temple.  According to Martha’s way of thinking, there was simply no good that could come from moving the stone.  So she objects and reminds Jesus that her brother was now a lost cause.  After all had Jesus wanted to heal Lazarus, it would seem that He arrived about four days too late.  Yet, Jesus reminds her of what appears to be a conversation unrecorded by the gospel writer.  Jesus reminds her that if she will only believe she would see the glory of God.  Remember only a little while earlier, Martha had made a profound declaration of faith.  Now was the time that her declaration of faith would be tested.  Will she trust Jesus even when trusting Him really doesn’t make sense to her?  Because the next verse declares that they took away the stone, we can easily understand that Martha eventually conceded and allowed the stone to be moved.  Of course, you must realize that the stone was really no obstacle to Jesus.  The only thing that really needed to be removed was Martha’s unbelief.

At times I believe it is easy for us to be critical of Martha despite the fact that we do the same thing.  No I don’t mean that we protest when Jesus prepares to raise someone from the dead, but I wonder if we do not protest when His command contradicts our “common sense.”  After all, who ever heard of someone raising a man from the dead four days after his death?  I wonder today if we believe that Jesus has that same power at His disposal to address the circumstances of our lives.  I wonder if we really understand that the obstacle hindering Jesus displaying God’s glory in our lives might not be the circumstance, but our lack of belief in Jesus’ ability to display His glory through our circumstance.  How much different would the story have been if Martha had persisted in her objection?  How much different would your life and my life be if we stopped protesting and simply trusted?  I don’t pretend to know all the circumstances of your life.  But I do know with absolute certainty that before you see God demonstrate His glory in your circumstance you will have to trust Him completely with your circumstance.  I know it is hard, but God has always proven Himself trustworthy.

Read Full Post »

A God Worth Serving

“Jesus wept.”  John 11:35

Yes, I know you may be thinking, “This guy must want a day off to write a devotion over Jesus weeping.”  But hold on for a moment.  Through these two simple words we learn something profound about Jesus Christ.  We learn that He really is fully human.  Wrap your mind around this for a moment – Jesus Christ wept!  The same God who spoke all of creation into existence wept!  This ought to tell us a couple of things about God.  First, God is not an aloof and uncaring person simply looking down on us with His arms folded in disgust.  So many people look at God as though He is simply “out to get them.”  God loves you and He created you to be in a love relationship with Him for all eternity.  In fact, He demonstrated this love by sending Jesus Christ to die in your place.  He is not aloof.  He is not uncaring.  He has demonstrated His love for us – even to the point of weeping.  But Jesus’ tears tell us something else about Him.  Those tears tell us that Jesus Christ was fully human just as you and I are.  He knows our pains, our sorrows, and our fears.  He is familiar with everything about us that makes us truly human.  He knows what it is to hunger.  He knows what it is to be thirsty.  He knows what it feels like to be betrayed.  He even knows what it feels like when it seems like God is a million miles away.  He knows everything about what it means to be us – and He loves us still. 

So what does this mean for you and me?  It simply means that when we surrender our lives to Jesus Christ, we are not surrendering to an uncaring God who holds lightning bolts simply waiting for us to mess up.  No the God of the Bible is a God who is holy and righteous – to be sure – but also who loves us and is familiar with all our pain and sorrow.  We serve a God who knows what it is like to be tempted and to be hurt.  We serve a God who loved us enough to become one of us so that we could spend eternity with Him.  Now that is a God worth serving!

Read Full Post »

From Our Heads to Our Hearts

“Jesus said to her, ‘I am the resurrection and the life.  He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die.  Do you believe this?'”  John 11:25-26

During my final semester in seminary, I was faced with what Henry Blackaby calls a “crisis of faith.”  I had been sending out my resume in search of where God would lead us after finishing school.  In my resume, I noted my degrees and anticipated date of graduation.  As I was filling out my paperwork in February to graduate in May, a problem arose.  There was a complication with my total number of hours for me to graduate with both of my masters degrees.  Initially, I was told that I could graduate with one or the other but not both.  As you can imagine, I had some major issues with that information.  We ended up working everything out and I ended up taking an independent study course to fix the issue of hours.  But during that time between the problem and the resolution, I was faced with the task of calling the church with whom I was interviewing and telling them of the situation.  I confess I had no clue what to expect in their response.  The pastor’s answer was simple, “Do you think this took God by surprise?”  I had taken all the classes.  I had written all the theology papers.  But somewhere in the midst of my situation, I failed to truly believe the theology I had written.  The theology had not found its way from my head to heart.

In the verses quoted above, Jesus challenges Martha to move beyond her theology to focus on Him.  Martha believed in a bodily resurrection (see John 11:24).  Her theology was absolutely dead center.  If she were in seminary her professors would have been proud.  But she had not gone far enough.  Jesus did not want her hope, faith, and trust to be in theology.  He wanted her hope, faith, and trust to be in Him alone.  Theology is great because it is through theology that we sum up all that God has revealed to us about Himself, but it is not enough.  You can know all the theology in the world and still not have a relationship with Jesus Christ.  Don’t substitute the study of God for a relationship with God.  Jesus ended this discussion with Martha with a simple question, “Do you believe this?”  He asks you and me the same question.  All of this information we say we know about God is meaningless, unless we allow it to move from our heads down to our hearts.  Do you believe this?

Read Full Post »

My Hope In Me

“On his arrival, Jesus found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb for four days.”  John 11:17

Timing is critical.  Often times to say or do something at the wrong time causes the impact of our words or our actions to be completely changed.  I am convinced that the same thing is true of God’s hand in our lives.  Sometimes we believe we are at the end of our rope and there is nothing else on which to hold.  We may know that God is in control all the while feeling as though our lives are spinning out of control.  I certainly know that I have been there.  One of those times in my life was in the Fall of 2005.  God had led us away from the church we were serving before providing us with other income.  My wife was pregnant with our second child, and I was recovering from an appendectomy.  Not exactly the most stable of situations.  Yet even without the prospect of income, the bills continued to come and our lives continued to spin.  I was certain God was in control, but I was beginning to wonder if there was something I had done to cause this storm.  Finally, I began to reach the point that I was losing hope.  Amazingly that was exactly the moment for which God was waiting – when my hope in me was gone and God was the only hope I had left.

It was at precisely this same moment that in the lives of Martha and Mary that Jesus arrives at Bethany.  Their brother Lazarus had been in the grave for four days and all hope was gone.  Popular theology at the time held that Lazarus’ spirit had hovered over his body for three days with the hopes that it might reenter and revive him.  But now even that hope was dashed away.  As their brother, Lazarus would have been the source of financial and spiritual support for Martha and Mary.  Now all that support was gone.  Their lives were about to change dramatically.  Their hope was running on empty.  Then Jesus showed up.  To be sure, these sisters had no clue that Jesus was planning on raising Lazarus from the dead, but Jesus did.  You see, Jesus showed up when it seemed as though all hope was lost so that when He did the unimaginable miracle of raising Lazarus the only explanation could be that God had done something indescribable.  What is it in your life that seems insurmountable and hopeless?  Trust me.  God knows everything about your situation.  He has not forsaken you.  Perhaps He is simply waiting for your hope in you to run out so that you are ready for Him to work.  Lay that situation at His feet and let Him work it out as He sees fit.  There is always hope, when that hope is found in Jesus Christ.

Read Full Post »

The End of the Story

“So then he told them plainly, ‘Lazarus is dead, and for your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe.  But let us go to him.'”  John 11:14-15

During a three to four-year portion of our marriage, my wife and I made some pretty poor financial decisions.  We bought a house we really did not need to buy.  We bought a car when our old car still met all our needs.  We took on a debt load that was really way over our heads.  Simply put, we made some bad decisions.  During the years since that time, we have been working diligently to dig our way out of those decisions.  Happily, I can report that we are almost there.  Often times as I look back at those decisions and I wonder why in the world God would let me do things that were that dumb.  After all, He has the power to make the pen run out of ink before I sign on the dotted line.  He knew what was going to happen.  He knew the stress that those decisions would cause.  Yet, He allowed me to do all of that dumb stuff.  Why?  So that He can be glorified through it.  You see, now that we can – by His incredible grace – see the end of this process we have the ability to see His provision and His abundance with totally different eyes.  We are able to revel in His abundance because we have experienced our own failings.

After becomes apparent that the disciples don’t quite understand Him, Jesus tells them plainly that Lazarus is dead.  There was not sugar-coating and no breaking it to them easily.  In starkly clear language Jesus declares that His friend – whom He loved – is dead.  But in the same kind of language Jesus goes on to say that He is even glad that Lazarus is dead.  I don’t know about you but that sounds incredibly callous and cold-hearted.  However, we cannot forget that Jesus’ statement is not the end of the story.  Jesus knew that He would raise Lazarus from the grave a day later.  He knew that the raising of Lazarus would be so profound that many would come to faith.  He knew that the pain of the moment would be superceded by the incredible joy of being used by God to glorify the Son.  The present circumstance would be replaced by rejoicing if they will only wait until the end of the story.  What is it that you are going through today?  Whether your circumstance involves poor decisions you have made – like my financial decisions – or has nothing to do with choices you have made, you can rest assured that if you turn it over to God He will use it to bring Him glory.  Don’t give up.  Hold on because you haven’t made it to the end of the story.

Read Full Post »