Chosen Vessels
From Max Lucado’s Devotional God is With You Every Day:
Ananias answered, “Lord, I have heard from many about this man, how much harm he has done to Your saints in Jerusalem.” . . . But the Lord said to him, “Go, for he is a chosen vessel of Mine.” (Acts 9:13, 15)
God’s chosen vessels aren’t always gleaming and golden. They may be tarnished or cracked, broken or even discarded. They may be a Saul, driven by anger, motivated to hurt. Saul was. Eager to root out and persecute the early Christians.
But God saw possibilities in Saul and sent Ananias to teach and minister to him. What will you do when God sends you to salvage one of his chosen vessels? What will you do when God shows you your Saul? The Saul that everyone else has written off.
“He’s too far gone.” “She’s too hard . . . too addicted . . . too old . . . too cold.” No one gives your Saul a prayer. But you are beginning to realize that maybe God is at work behind the scenes. You begin to believe.
Don’t resist these thoughts.
Of course, no one believed in people more than Jesus did. He saw something in Peter worth developing, in the adulterous woman worth forgiving, and in John worth harnessing.
Don’t give up on your Saul. When others write him off, give him another chance. Tell your Saul about Jesus, and pray. And remember this: God never sends you where he hasn’t already been. By the time you reach your Saul, who knows what you’ll find.
— Outlive Your Life
Revelation 5:1-10
Revelation 5:1-10 “Then I saw between the throne and the four living creatures and among the elders a Lamb standing as if it had been slaughtered, having seven horns and seven eyes” (Revelation 5:6) On Halloween Eve, I cannot imagine a more frightening image from the Bible than Revelation 5:6. (Though, bonus points if you find an even scarier one. In fact, those who send in “scary images from scripture” selections will be officially enrolled in a contest to win a free lunch with the...
Psalm 125
“Trust” and “faith” are functionally the same thing throughout scripture. We may, in our times, delineate the two, but not typically to our benefit. Today, we might talk about trust as both a feeling and an action, whereas we most frequently speak of faith as mere feeling alone. Collapsing this distinction is important if we’re to understand the joyful complexity of this opening line from Psalm 125.
Objectively, the claim that we are to be people who trust/have faith in God and that this will make us like a mountain makes sense. We often (rightly) admire the faith of those whose convictions make them a bulwark against every sin, calamity, and challenge. We see their faith as unmovable against situations and conditions that we know, down deep, would bring us to our knees.
Matthew 10:24-33
Every week, you are asked to stand up in worship and give an “Affirmation of Faith.” To an outsider, such a practice very clearly resembles brain-washing. To an addict in recovery, such a practice looks like a communal step in individual healing. For the Church, though, it is merely the public practice of acknowledging Jesus before others in the sure hope that we will one day be acknowledged by Jesus before God.
Psalm 42
I remember learning long ago (we’re talking grade school, maybe junior high, here) that there were certain tribes of Native Americans in the western part of what is now the United States (but was, at that time, just wilderness) who tamed wild horses. They would pursue these horses in a pack of men who would chase the horse, taking care to essentially make it run in circles. They would take turns running this wild beast until it could run no more. Naturally, a horse can outrun a man any day – both in terms of speed and longevity – so they needed to work in a group, each man taking a turn to run the horse in a long circle before the next, rested man tagged in. Again, I have no idea about the historical veracity of this “knowledge.” It may very well be a thing my junior high track coach told us to keep us running in circles.
