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Remember your leaders, who spoke the word of God to you. Consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith.  Hebrews 13:7 

“Just do what I do” has become a well-known cliché.   It has permeated our Christian world and initiated a club of copycats.  I was one for decades and still have to be careful not to fall into this trap.  Here’s how it works ~

I watch the lives of other believers I admire and then copy their behavior.  I observe how many hours they serve in the church and consider it a template to follow.  I watch how they make decisions and adopt their method as my own.  For the most part, I am simply a copycat of my heroes.  I might even talk like one of them ~ using their trademark expressions.

Is this what the writer of Hebrews is advocating?  No. Scripture does not hold up another person’s behavior as the thing to ultimately focus on.  God is heart-centered, not performance based.  When I see a leader I greatly respect, I am to prayerfully consider what has shaped their heart for Christ. What spiritual disciplines have they embraced that have resulted in such an outpouring of the fruits of the Spirit?

Their pursuit of Christ, not how they lived and served, is the pathway I am to follow.

Copycats never come off as genuine because they are not.  My passion for Christ may be similar to yours but how we live that out according to our God-given bents is quite different.  When I have to change my personality to try to become like someone else, I’ll know I’ve taken the wrong road.

Your children can have mentors and still be genuine.  Lead them on the right paths in their relationships.  Amen

“Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.”  So, we say with confidence, “The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can mere mortals do to me?”  Hebrews 13:5b-6 

Going it alone.  It’s an awful experience when you’re in trouble.  If you have a friend with you, there’s comfort, even if your friend is as helpless as you are.  At least you can rehearse your current dilemma and how it all unfolded.  You can explore your options, if any, and process your thoughts and feelings in a fellowship of suffering.

The next time you’re in a bad place and you’re wringing your hands, picture Jesus walking in.  He says, “You’re not alone anymore.  I’m here.  I will go through this with you.”  Would that not be the best news?  He is the perfect companion on so many levels.  First, He understands suffering.  He’s no novice and the thought of that gives you the freedom to pour out your fears and complaints.  He also understands you.  He knows what you’re feeling and why you’re feeling it.  He’s ahead of you in how you are connecting the dots.  He knows the limits of your stamina and what kinds of things will cause you to lose hope.  With such knowledge, He can speak a kind of customized set of encouragements that are specific to your own needs.

Oh, but that’s not all.  He’s no mere friend.  He’s God, first and foremost.  He sees the bigger picture of the trial.  He knows the joy of the ultimate deliverance, whether on earth or in heaven, and He knows what needs to unfold to coincide with His Father’s redemptive plan.  He will give you mental, emotional, and spiritual resources.  He will equip you with instruction.  He will tell you when to harness your thoughts but also when to lay back and rest.  He keeps watch while you sleep.

With these realities, surely you and I can say that the Lord is our helper; we will not be afraid.  Indeed, what can mere mortals do?  God is our companion.  God holds evil on a leash.  God has already marched into the future to redeem this present suffering.  God can multi-task; He is celebrating the final victory while sharing tears with us in our valleys.  For the Jews who were hated and enduring unspeakable persecution, this reassurance of God’s presence filled their spirits with iron.

Fainting is only momentary until I remember You’re right here.  Amen

Your life should be free from the love of money. Be satisfied with what you have, for He Himself has said, I will never leave you or forsake you.  Hebrews 13:5

 These two separate concepts are familiar to me.  Being free from the love of money and God never leaving nor forsaking us.  But why are they connected here?  How does the comfort of God never leaving me enable me to be satisfied with what I have?

The answer is not given in this text.  It’s the kind of dilemma I love – finding connections and trails – working out the mysteries of the kingdom.  I’ve been pondering this for a day and a half now.  I woke up early and God showed me how it applies to my own heart.  Perhaps yours as well.

I asked myself these questions.  Why am I drawn to money?  Why do I feel good when I have stuff and deprived when I don’t?  It’s because material things provide a kind of significance and security.  They fill an emptiness inside, at least temporarily, until I feel I must have more to stay full. The problem is ~ the emptiness is there to be satiated by God, not money.   And because God promises to never leave me, the void that feels so threatening never need stare me in the face.  Jesus completes me.  His love fills up my soul.  I feel rich beyond measure and the need to accumulate what are mere trinkets (according to C.S. Lewis) is put into perspective.

What did this message mean to the Jewish people who received it?  They were literally losing everything under the oppressive boots of persecution.  Homes were destroyed or confiscated.  Food was scarce. Provisions were not certainties but luxuries.  As they watched their material world dissipate, this message of hope hit them hard.  They may be wanting in this world but Christ will always be with them, filling them up with Himself.  He is the treasure that addressed their wants and with their eyes on Him, they could live in plenty, or in want, and not be shaken.

Whether we sit in palaces or in a 900 square foot apartment, our souls can be filled.  The poor who have Jesus can perfectly fellowship with the rich who have Jesus.  Our eyes are not on bank accounts but on the eternal treasures of which Jesus is supreme.

Food and shelter, even beautiful things.  I, once again, put it in perspective. Amen

Let marriage be held in honor among all . . . Hebrews 13:4a

To hold marriage in honor means to treat it as precious.  And it is!  God created it to give us an earthly picture of what His love is like.  Divine affection was such a priority that He instituted this earthly sacrament to make sure we get the message.

But if the experience of marriage has been, or is for you, deeply flawed, then you will have trouble thinking it honorable.  You will have an aversion to the topic and won’t even want to read this. There are good reasons why.

• If your parents had a bad marriage, home was not a place you felt at peace. You lived on pins and needles and covered your ears to drown out the fights.
• Or maybe it is your marriage that brings you pain of the deepest kind. You’re treated as God would never treat you. Daily, you pick up your battered soul and bring it to God with a big ‘why?’
• Perhaps it is you who has failed in the marriage. You were unfaithful and have seen your infidelity worn on the face of your spouse.  The word marriage reminds you, even years later, of your failure and you live with a crippling sense of regret.

Marriage is, for most people, a dirty word.  How can I make such an outrageous claim?  By the statistics of divorce.  Through a lifetime of experiences in ministry where I’ve heard stories of people’s lives.  Most marriages are not happy.  So this begs the question?  How does a married person with scars get to a place where they consider marriage precious?  Is it possible?

Here’s how. Your earthly spouse doesn’t get to ultimately define what marriage is.  On earth, it has been perverted, pain has been inflicted, but Jesus is your bridegroom.  He is standing with open arms to welcome you to Perfect Love.  This Bridegroom shed His blood to pledge His love in covenant. There isn’t a moment when He regrets it or when He withholds His love. There isn’t a scar that His words won’t heal.  There isn’t a refusal that His welcoming embrace won’t erase.  Though our outward man feels the effects from the wounds of others, our inner man dines with Jesus and grows stronger each day.

If God’s love is evident in your marriage today, thank Him.  It is a work of grace.  But if God’s love is not evident in your home, know that your Bridegroom offers love, right now, when your spouse won’t give it. If you’re languishing in matrimony, remember – you’re married to another.  Savor Him and live.  The wedding feast is being prepared and His love heals all scars, starting now.

You heal the sores of earth, Jesus.  Amen

“Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it.”

There have been a few times in my life where I wondered if I had had an encounter with an angel.  One of them, however, stands out as a certainty.

Nearly ten years ago, I was driving by myself on a two-lane road in north Georgia.  It was early in the morning and I was on my way to a speaking event several hours away.  I saw a young man walking on the side of the road carrying a child in his arms.  It struck me as unusual as this was quite remote in its setting.  In my spirit, I thought I heard the Lord say, “Go back and offer this man and his child a ride.” Immediately, I questioned it.  I was a woman traveling by myself and the thought of picking up a strange man seemed reckless and potentially dangerous, even if he did have a baby.  But just days earlier, I had been asking God to teach me radical obedience.  If He spoke, I would obey.  So, after wrestling for a minute with this decision, I turned my car around.

Less than two minutes had passed.  When I reached the place where he should be, he was gone.  I checked and re-checked that mile-long corridor several times, driving back and forth, but he had simply vanished.  I looked for side roads that he might have taken, driveways, even some kind of pull off, but there were none.  He was gone.  I finally concluded that he had been an angel and this had been a test of obedience.

Obviously, I don’t advocate picking up strangers if you are driving alone.  Yet, God often asks us to do things outside the box.  He calls his children to mission work in dangerous places.  When God speaks, we go.

Entertaining angels doesn’t always involve feeding a stranger a meal.  It can take many forms.  But in each case, obedience is what prompts it and obedience is often our greatest test of faith.

I’m still such a novice.  Don’t let me miss an opportunity.  Amen

Continue in brotherly love.  Hebrews 13:1

God’s love is inclusive.  Mine is often not.  God’s love is instinctive, and He is quick to extend affection.  I do not love by default and often contemplate whether or not love will be demonstrated.  While ‘love one another’ sounds like an elementary message as I begin the last chapter of Hebrews, it is complicated.

This letter was written to the Jewish people who struggled to include the Gentiles in their circles.  They had understood for centuries that they were God’s chosen people and now they were being called to embrace ‘foreigners’ as fellow disciples of Christ. Treating them as brothers was difficult.  Perhaps they considered each one an add on instead of an equal.  The offense was large enough that the author of this letter to the Hebrews included this strong reminder.

If you’ve ever moved and joined a church, you remember how it felt to be a newcomer.  You came up against the old guard, perhaps, and knew that your opinions and votes didn’t matter yet.  You hadn’t put in your time.  You might have felt that the old timers were cliquish and slow to accept you.   While it shouldn’t be like this, it is.  Flawed humanity makes up the family of God.  The message in today’s scripture is clear.  We are all to continue in brotherly love.  Even to newcomers.

Biases are numerous.  They can exist in small towns as a certain resident is described as ‘someone from the wrong side of town.’  Already, love is compromised.  Biases can exist in families where marriages have crossed ethnic lines.  For the one who is different, there is nothing he can do to earn acceptance.  He is made to feel on the outside of family fellowship.  Within a region of a country, there can be prejudices.  The United States has deep fracture lines and they only seem to be getting worse as angry voices define our politics.

How readily do I embrace someone who is not like me?  Do I describe them to others with respect?  Or do I make fun of their culture?  Am I global in my vision for the spreading of the Gospel?  I need to rejoice when any unbeliever responds to the call of God’s Spirit, even those hostile to me, or my family, or my country, or to Christianity in general.  My love should not suffer.  Jonah’s did and without Holy Spirit help, mine will too.

I still love with strings attached.  Change me.  Amen

He walks upon the wings of the wind; He makes the winds His messengers, flaming fire His ministers. Psalm 104:3-4

I’m an over-achiever. I like to work hard and feel that I accomplished something. I enjoy stretching myself to learn new things. While none of these are bad traits, in ministry they can be dangerous. I can begin to believe that my efforts are what yield success. I would do well to remember that humans generate earthbound results. Only God gives rise to true spiritual outcomes.

Several years ago, I had a vivid dream.  I was mixing together three unlikely ingredients in a bowl to make something to eat.  Jesus was standing nearby so I asked Him about it. “What is this going to be, Lord?”  He answered, “It’s going to be manna for the people you’ll be feeding in my name.”  I was surprised because the ingredients were such that you’d never mix them together to create anything appetizing.  So I said, “But how will these three things produce something edible?  I don’t understand.” He laughed and replied, “The secret is in the wind.”

With that I felt a gentle breeze enter the room.  It blew over the ingredients and stirred them up so that they rose into the air to form a swirl before settling back into the bowl.  The Spirit had touched the common ingredients and transformed them into something supernatural.

Wind has always been a sign of God’s presence.  Wind and breath are often synonymous in scripture.  Jesus breathed on His disciples and filled them with a power beyond themselves.  No longer limited but Spirit filled, the Gospel message would spill out of their mouths with power and passion. Continents would never be the same as these ordinary men were transfigured into agents of heaven. Without impressive credentials, people would say of them, “We can tell they have been with Jesus.” The spiritual wind accompanied them. It disturbed the deep. The vast emptiness of people’s souls was filled with the Bread of Life.

God walks on the wind. He begs to be invited and is anxious to intersect today with the ordinary. He is passionate to alter the common things. He dreams of restoring what the Fall has eaten away. Where are you languishing? Why are you panting from self-effort to repair something in vain? The wind promises to blow across the carnage of our lives. We are meant to smell the aroma of Eden. Wherever the Spirit of God will hover today, the landscape will change. Transformation begins with an awareness of my great need.

Come, Holy Spirit, to my ordinary world.  Amen

See to it that no one fails to obtain the grace of God; that no “root of bitterness” springs up and causes trouble, and by it many become defiled; that no one is sexually immoral or unholy like Esau, who sold his birthright for a single meal.  Hebrews 12:17 

Esau was called unholy because he didn’t recognize the value of his birthright.  He traded it in for a pot of stew.  It’s preposterous, isn’t it?  Such outright disregard for something of infinite worth.  The inheritance he spurned was the inheritance of Abraham, passed down to Isaac, and it was a fortune.  By then, the Israelites had become a small nation.  There were thousands of sheep, camels, goats and donkeys.  Even more valuable than any of this was the favor of God that was bestowed on the one the father blessed.  This, he exchanged.

In Matthew 13, Jesus told a parable about someone finding a treasure in the field and seeing its immense value, he hid it so no one else could find it.  Then he went away to sell everything he had so that he had enough money to go back and buy it.  Jesus said that the treasure represented the kingdom of God.  “Having the omnipotent, saving reign of Christ in our lives is so valuable that, if we lose everything in order to have it, it is a joyful sacrifice.”  John Piper

God couldn’t work with Esau.  When pressure came, it took precedent over things related to the kingdom.  If he would cave to the purposes of God in order to eat a bowl of stew, how could God trust him to persevere under greater pressures?  He was not leadership material even though he was a gifted hunter and fairly responsible son.

The enemy is in the middle of getting God’s children to cave and not wait for God’s promise.  He is all about getting us to abandon the kingdom in favor of earthly solutions.  In the wilderness, He tempted Jesus in just this way.  The message was ~ “Don’t wait on God. Eat now. Enjoy power now.”  The temptations Satan offers us, even now, are temptations to get out of pain early.

Waiting on God is always the harder choice.  We want our ‘stew’.  We want justice today.  We want the love and affection that is tangible over what is intangible.  We want to see answers to prayer now.  When a counterfeit spiritual solution comes into view, our needs can easily become an obsession to the point of pushing God aside.  The lure of what Satan offers is that we can have what we want without waiting any longer.  Along with that comes insinuations that God isn’t good for His promise anyway.

Who will stand?  Who will wait?  Who will treasure the kingdom?  Who will suffer without name calling?  Who will hurt without turning their back on their faith?  How much do I treasure the kingdom of God, the sovereign rule of God, in my life?  Trading it in doesn’t just get me immediate relief.  The danger is always in what I’ve lost.  One day, the comparison will be on full display.  I’ll have embraced plastic trinkets instead of waiting for Jesus, the supreme treasure.

I’ve waited so long for some things, don’t let me cave into apathy.  It is the trinket that brings emotional relief.  You are the rewarder of faith and I will keep looking up to trust You.  Amen

Strive for peace with everyone, and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord. Hebrews 12:14

People who live in an atmosphere of constant conflict often lament, “Oh, if I could just have peace!”  Made in the image of God, we crave peace and spend a lot of money to go places where peace is present.

Craving peace is understandable but striving for peace and making peace are different from each other.  Striving means that peace may not always be possible.  While Jesus promotes unity and while He came to make it possible for us to have peace with God, He also came to bring the sword of truth that would pierce men’s hearts.  Jesus was not a ‘peace at any price’ Savior.  How am I to internalize this scripture then?  Understanding begins when I acknowledge that it takes two people to have peace in a relationship.

Paul said, ‘If it is possible, live at peace.’  The ‘if’ is important to digest because it’s possible, due to people’s sinfulness, to never achieve peace.  People in marriages, families and friendships, deeply hurt another, then offer a generalized, token apology that is pretty meaningless.  “Guess I’m a bad friend.  Chalk me up to being a bad spouse.”  Some consider that an adequate apology and then want everything back to normal.  These are not grounds for peace nor are they grounds for reconciliation!

We are told to be wise as serpents and harmless as doves.  We get the harmless part of the equation and cave to the pressure to gloss over things instead of being wise.  There are few truth seekers.  By nature, we weren’t born to own the truth as God defines it.  But the closer I get to Jesus, the more truth I embrace.  With that, the more spiritual sparks I feel from others around me who are repelled by Jesus.  The kingdom of heaven and the kingdom of darkness will always cause a combustible reaction.

What if there hasn’t been an offense but just a difference of opinion?  There isn’t a ‘wrong’ vs. ‘right’ but there are strong feelings attached to each position.  Jesus must show me the path I’m to take.  Is this a hill worth dying on?  Perhaps making peace to love and serve my brother would please God more than digging in my heels. Here is the pitfall. I must repent of pride for automatically assuming that I am right or know best, that I am on the side of truth.  Humility in prayer will allow God to show me what’s really going on.  Perhaps I love to be right more than I love to love others.

As Steve Brown says (the founder of Key Life), “God didn’t save you to make you right, He saved you to make you His.”  Humility becomes us as we defer but humility also clothes God’s warriors.

Lord, for those needing wisdom, grant it.  Amen