Tag Archives: mercy

What to do about Christmas, December 25, 2017

Today’s Podcast

Bible Reading Plan – www.Bible-Reading.com

We are taking a short break from The Story for Advent and Christmas season. We’ll be back into The Story next week. We’re taking this one more week from the consecutive schedule so that our readings at Easter coincide with the events as recorded in The Story. This is our third and last week away from that study, but rest assured we will go back to it next week and then finish our journey exploring God’s plan to bring us back into a face to face relationship with Him.

You may or may not be listening to this podcast as it is being released, but it was released at 5:00 am Christmas morning. Growing up, that was the about as late as my mom could stand it. She would wake all of us up (if we weren’t already awake). We’d rush down the hall to the living room and get stopped in the hallway until dad could set up the camera. Then we would rush into the living room to see what Santa left under the tree. The next ten or thirty minutes were spent oohing and aahing over that magical thing that appeared under the tree from the night before.

Next, we would open all the other presents under the tree that belonged to our family. As the family grew, with five kids, it took a little while for all of them to get opened, chaos to subside and all the wrappings to be gathered and trashed. Once the unwrapping was done we got to pick one thing to take with us to granny’s house where all who could came for breakfast. Granny’s husband died when my father was only five and remained a widow the rest of her life, so most of her kids came home every Christmas to join her for breakfast. Many of the grandkids also stopped by, so it wasn’t unusual to have forty or fifty people trying to run shifts at the table or sofa or just find some standing room in her tiny two bedroom house.

But one thing that always happened at Granny’s house was that someone read the Christmas story from Luke Chapter 2 after breakfast. Then we would shower her with gifts. She never wanted anything and after she moved into an assisted living facility, they found many of those gifts unused in closets, under beds, stuffed away wherever she could find a spot because she just didn’t know how to receive gifts very well and didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings by taking anything back or regifting as is common today.

Granny made sure everyone knew what Christmas was about. It wasn’t about presents and decorations and shopping and the hustle and bustle we seem to make it so many times today. Granny made sure we knew it was about Jesus’ birth. She even made Him a birthday cake that all us grandkids enjoyed every year on Christmas day for lunch. She always made Him the center of everything that day and made it clear to the family we were celebrating His coming.

Granny would tell me when I was growing up that her call in life was to raise a Christian family. Of the 96 family members at her funeral when she died, a fourth were in full-time Christian ministry. Many served as Sunday School teachers, sang in choirs, served on church boards and committees, and gave their time and energy in myriad ways to their local church. You could count on one hand the number that weren’t in church regularly. And by regularly, I mean every service. Then it meant Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night. Granny raised a family committed to Christ.

We live in a highly mobile society and kids and grandkids no longer live close enough to do what Granny’s family did every Christmas. We were only an hour or so away the whole time I was growing up. When Carole and I had kids, we were half a world away from their grandparents. Unfortunately, that’s the way with a huge portion of the population now. We can’t spend time with family like we did in days gone by.

But we can still remember Jesus on Christmas. We can still embrace the importance of community and reach out to those around us. To build a family of friends, not to replace our flesh and blood kin, but to share the love of Christ and the importance of this special day. Does that mean we have to prepare big meals with ham and turkey and lots of side dishes and desserts and spend half the day in the kitchen for a 20 minute meal? No.

At Granny’s we had biscuits, eggs, bacon, sausage, and that’s about it. All of us pitched in to help cook so the meal was pretty simple, quick and easy and it wasn’t the food we went for anyway. We went for the fellowship. It can be the same with any gathering. We don’t need to impress anyone with preparations to enjoy their company. If you have to do that, then those are the wrong people to invite. Invite the ones that don’t care if pillows are out of place or dishes don’t match. The ones that will get their own beverages after you show them where they are the first time.

Spend Christmas in community with people you love. Just sharing Jesus’ love with those around you will make a big difference in your life and theirs. Remember those two commands Jesus gave us that wraps all the others together? Love God and love people. When we do that, something incredible happens. We share the grace and mercy we’ve been given to others in the same way God has give His grace and mercy to us. We learn to give cheerfully from a heart full of love. Those around us see Jesus in our actions when we truly love with His love.

I don’t know what kind of traditions you have in your family. Ours have changed through the years because of experiences we had through our military travels that took us far from family and even sometimes separated us. We made accommodations to what use to be long held traditions because of things that change around us with health and age and place and time. But through it all, there is still one constant.

Jesus is the center of our celebration. We recognize there would be no Christmas without Christ. He is the reason we have the holiday. He is the reason we gather together. He is why we laugh and cry and live and breathe. Jesus is why.

If we lose the real reason for Christmas we lose it all. Whatever you do this day or this season, don’t forget why we celebrate in the first place. Don’t lose the centerpiece of all that happens in this season named for the one to whom it truly belongs. Keep Christ, not just at Christmas, but all year long.

Next week we will return to our study of The Story, God’s plan to restore a face to face relationship with us. We finished chapter 14 before our short break. Next week we will begin reading chapter 15.

You can find me at richardagee.com. I also invite you to join us at San Antonio First Church of the Nazarene on West Avenue in San Antonio to hear more about The Story and our part in it. You can find out more about my church at SAF.church. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed it, tell a friend. If you didn’t, send me an email and let me know how better to reach out to those around you. Until next week, may God richly bless you as you venture into His story each day.

The Voice Bible Copyright © 2012 Thomas Nelson, Inc. The Voice™ translation © 2012 Ecclesia Bible Society All rights reserved. In accordance with the requirements for FTC full disclosure, I may have affiliate relationships with some or all of the producers of the items mentioned in this post who may provide a small commission to me when purchased through this site.

Better than Christmas (Revelation 22:20), May 25, 2017

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Today’s Podcast

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Thanks for joining me today for “A Little Walk with God.” I’m your host Richard Agee.
This is better than Christmas…maybe. It depends on who you believe.
Scripture
1. Revelation 22:20
2. The Anointed One: Yes. I am coming soon.
Devotional
1. I enjoy watching my grandkids as special days start to approach.
  1. Birthdays
  2. Christmas
  3. Start counting very early
  4. Anxious for its arrival
2. We sometimes do the same with
  1. Vacations
  2. Weekends
  3. New jobs
  4. Retirement
3. Jesus talks about an event without a date
  1. He says He is returning soon
  2. His disciples have been looking for that day since He ascended into heaven a few days before Pentecost
  3. Some did some things Paul and others warned them against
    1. Sold all their belongings
    2. Stopped working
    3. Sat and waited
4. We’re not to stop everything and just sit in a room and wait
  1. We have a task to complete
  2. Told us to teach
  3. Share the message
  4. Make disciples
  5. We should be growing in grace and becoming more like Him
  6. That takes work and can’t be done by sitting and waiting for His return
5. Also says He will return at a time we don’t expect
  1. Only the Father knows the time and day of His return
  2. Comes like a thief in the night
  3. Promised to return
  4. Wants to give us every opportunity to come to Him
  5. His delay is not failure to keep His promise
  6. Opportunity to see His grace and mercy at work
  7. Wants all to come to know Him as Lord
6. He will come
  1. Soon is relative when thinking about eternity
  2. But He is coming soon to claim His own
  3. Be ready
If you want to learn more about my church, you can find us at SAF.church. If you like the devotional, share it with someone. If you don’t, tell me. I hope you’ll join me again tomorrow for “A Little Walk with God.”

Extend a little mercy (Matthew 12:7-8) March 13, 2016

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Today’s Podcast

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Today’s Bible reading plan:

Read it in a year – 1 Corinthians 5-6

see the whole year’s plan [here](http://www.bible-reading.com/bible-plan.pdf)

Today’s Devotional

Matthew 12:7-8
Do you not understand what the prophet Hosea recorded, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice”? If you understood that snippet of Scripture, you would not condemn these innocent men for ostensibly breaking the law of the Sabbath. For the Son of Man has not only the authority to heal and cast out demons, He also has authority over the Sabbath.

What do Jesus’ words mean for us today?

Jesus points back to a peculiar prophet. God told Hosea to demonstrate His words through actions that all of Israel would understand. God told Hosea to marry a prostitute who then ran away from him and went back to her long list of lovers. But Hosea went after her and brought her home. Hosea graphically showed us God’s incredible love for us and His attempts to bring us back into His fold through Hosea’s actions with his wayward wife.

One of the outcomes of Hosea’s demonstration was the realization that God shows mercy to His children. He is more interested in mercy than the rituals we go through year after year and day after day to try to please Him. It’s not those rituals that He wants. He wants our love, He wants us to show others grace and mercy just as He shows us grace and mercy. He wants a relationship with us.

One of the things necessary to build a relationship with God is obedience. And one of the things He demands of us is mercy to others. Because He shows us mercy, we should show mercy to others, something the Pharisees seemed to have in short supply. They were ready to condemn Jesus’ disciples for being hungry and eating a few grains of wheat on the Sabbath. Their rules said you couldn’t harvest on the Sabbath and the disciples act of running their hand across a ripe stalk of wheat growing in the field and eating those few grain, they considered harvesting.

Now, you and I would probably think about harvesting as cutting down the whole field then thrashing the wheat to separate the grain from the chaff. We would think about that kind of work as a harvest activity, not the simple act of running your hand across one or two stalk to get a few grains to satisfy your immediate needs. But the Pharisees carried their rules and regulations to extreme. They put limits on even the simplest of activities. The distance you could walk on the Sabbath. The maximum weight of any object you could lift. The types of activities in which you could participate. The preparation of meals allowed and disallowed. The type of food you could eat. The clothes you could wear. They tried to control every aspect of life.

It was bad in Hosea’s day and got continually worse. God reminded His people through His prophet that He wanted them to give each other mercy. Don’t be so hard fast with rules that you forget people are involved. Don’t forget the mercy He showed you when you broke His rules and failed to obey the commands He gave you. Remember, all of us have sinned. All of us fail in our attempts to reach God in His glory. Yet He extends His mercy to us. We should extend mercy to those around us in the same way.

God instituted the ritual sacrifices to point out the necessity of coming to Him to ask forgiveness for our sins. He pointed out through those rituals that He is God and we are not. He deserves our worship and He extends His mercy to us. He reminds us the consequence of sin is death and the price demanded takes the life of the animal sacrificed in the rituals that remind us of that consequence. God gave His people those rituals as reminders of the awful justice that sin demands, but He extends His mercy to us when we follow Him. As His children, He forgives and substituted first animals and then Himself as the price for our sins.

Can we do anything short of showing the same mercy to those around us who fail to meet the standards that we hold? Does that mean we condone bad behavior? Absolutely not! No more than God condones bad behavior. But we can learn to forgive. We can show mercy and demonstrate God’s love to others. We can show others how to extend grace and in so doing, bring them into the knowledge of God. We can introduce them to the One who brings hope and joy and life to a world of hopelessness and death.

The people around Jesus that day didn’t listen to Hosea and many of them didn’t listen to Jesus. Unfortunately, it’s the same today. But the few that will listen and understand, find His peace, the legacy He left behind. They find His joy, His love, His life coursing through their veins. All it takes is trusting in Him and following His commands.

Extend a little mercy today. You’ll be surprised at the difference it will make in you.

The Voice Bible Copyright © 2012 Thomas Nelson, Inc. The Voice™ translation © 2012 Ecclesia Bible Society All rights reserved.
In accordance with the requirements for FTC full disclosure, I may have affiliate relationships with some or all of the producers of the items mentioned in this post who may provide a small commission to me when purchased through this site.

Justice and wrath, the flip side of mercy and grace, it’s coming (Hebrews 12:14-29), July 16, 2015

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Today’s Podcast

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Today’s Scriptures

Today’s Bible reading plans include:

Ready – Hebrews 12:14-29

Set – Isaiah 24; Hebrews 12

Go! – Isaiah 22-24; Hebrews 12

Hebrews 12:14-29
¹⁴ Pursue peace with everyone, and holiness, since no one will see God without it. ¹⁵ Watch carefully that no one falls short of God’s favor, that no well of bitterness springs up to trouble you and throw many others off the path. ¹⁶ Watch that no one becomes wicked and vile like Esau, the son of Isaac, who for a single meal sold his invaluable birthright. ¹⁷ You know from the stories of the patriarchs that later, when he wished to claim his blessing, he was turned away. He could not reverse his action even though he shed bitter tears over it.
¹⁸ You have not come to the place that can be touched (as Israel did at Mount Sinai)—to a mountain crowned with blazing fire, darkness, gloom, and a windstorm— ¹⁹ or to the blast of a trumpet and the sound of a voice—a voice and message so harsh that the people begged not to hear another word. ²⁰ (They could not bear the command that was given: that if even a beast touches the mountain, it must be stoned. ²¹ The sight was so terrible that even Moses said, “I am trembling with fear.”)
²² No, instead you have come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, to the heavenly Jerusalem, to heavenly messengers unnumbered, to a joyful feast, ²³ to the assembly of the firstborn registered as heaven’s citizens, to God the righteous Judge of all, and to the spirits of all the righteous who have been perfected. ²⁴ You have come to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant between God and humanity, and to His sprinkled blood, which speaks a greater word than the blood of Abel crying out from the earth.
²⁵ See that you don’t turn away from the One who is speaking; for if the ones who heard and refused the One who spoke on earth faced punishment, then how much more will we suffer if we turn away from the One speaking from heaven— ²⁶ the One whose voice in earlier times shook the earth now makes another promise: “Yet once more I will shake not only the earth, but also the heavens”? ²⁷ The phrase, “Yet once more,” means that those things that can be shaken will be removed and taken away, namely, the first creation. As a result, those things that remain cannot be shaken. ²⁸ Therefore, let us all be thankful that we are a part of an unshakable Kingdom and offer to God worship that pleases Him and reflects the awe and reverence we have toward Him, ²⁹ for He is like a fierce fire that consumes everything.

Today’s Devotional

From today’s background scripture God might say:

Have you every noticed what happens when My messengers, the angels come to visit the earth? People fall on their face. The ground shakes, earth trembles as they touch the ground. Fire consumes the things they touch. Armies find themselves defeated at the hands of a single messenger of Mine. Men and women are always awed by the power they wield and the magnificence of their presence.

My messengers, though, hold little power compared to Mine. I created each of them, just as I created all else in the universe. All in heaven and earth came about because I spoke it into place. The Israelites glimpsed My power at Mt Sinai in the fire and smoke and thundrous voice as I spoke to them in the desert. They saw a token of My power when I rescued them from their enemies and when I rescued some of My followers, like Daniel and David, from those who tried to destroy them.

Some saw Me create new eyes from a little mud. Some saw Me make limbs straight and whole. Some watched as I raised others from the dead. Some witnessed My power when they saw Me alive and communing with them after a brutal beating and death by cruel crucifixion. When I come again, the earth and heavens will tremble at My coming.

The demonstrations of My power are real. Some will try to tell you My word is only a collection of stories. But you’ll find that as archeologists make new discoveries to try to disprove My word, they only serve to find new evidence that My word is true. The things of the past being true, you can trust My promises for the future are just as true. I’m coming back. Until then, it’s best to do what I ask.

I am a God of mercy and grace, but a time will come, when you will see the other side of grace, justice. Those not for Me are against Me and will feel the wrath I have held back to extend My mercy as long as possible. I am a God of mercy and grace, but I am a holy God. As such, I will deal with those who have not set themselves apart for Me. Remember My words in Hebrews, without holiness, you will not see Me. Take advantage of this era of mercy and grace before I decide it’s time to unleash My wrath. It won’t be long.

The Voice Bible Copyright © 2012 Thomas Nelson, Inc. The Voice™ translation © 2012 Ecclesia Bible Society All rights reserved.
In accordance with the requirements for FTC full disclosure, I may have affiliate relationships with some or all of the producers of the items mentioned in this post who may provide a small commission to me when purchased through this site.

Do you judge or forgive? (Luke 6:36-49), Jan 6, 2015

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Today’s background scripture comes from Luke 6:37-49.

It is so easy to condemn others. To judge their words when you don’t even know what they mean. Men and women today have become so sensitive to the words people speak and assume they know their hearts. They don’t. Only I know the hearts of people. Only I understand the intent of the words that come out of someone’s mouth.

Do you think I enjoyed the prayer of the Pharisee at the altar of My temple? His words often spoke highly of Me, but only so others could hear what he thought were beautiful prayers. His selfish words were meaningless to Me. On the other hand, the tax-collector spoke gruffly, almost vulgarly, afraid to approach My altar because of his sins. His prayer of repentance touched My heart and I heard his prayer. His sins I forgave.

I know men’s hearts, men do not know each other’s hearts, though. You cannot see inside each other’s soul to see what lives there. Over time, what is there bursts through in moments of anger, fear, or selfish desire. Man cannot contain what is in his heart forever. Whether good or evil resides there, it comes out when you react in the heat of the moment. But I see your heart all the time. I know what you think every moment.

So how can you best serve Me and others? Forgive in the same measure I forgive you. Give grace and mercy to those that wrong you. Recognize you cannot know their heart and so forgive them. Do good for everyone you meet. Don’t assume you know them. You don’t. Don’t assume you understand the problems they face or the struggles they have. You probably don’t understand their problems as much as you think you do.

Just extend grace and mercy and forgiveness. Lend and helping hand. That doesn’t mean to always coddle people. Sometimes tough love is necessary to lend a helping hand. But tough love always includes grace and mercy as well. When you jump to judge, remember I forgave you without extending My justice toward you. I extended grace and mercy instead. Follow My example and do the same.

Ready – Luke 6:37-49
Set – Genesis 15; Luke 6
Go! – Genesis 15-17; Luke 6

Luke6:37-49
If you don’t want to be judged, don’t judge. If you don’t want to be condemned, don’t condemn. If you want to be forgiven, forgive. 38 Don’t hold back—give freely, and you’ll have plenty poured back into your lap—a good measure, pressed down, shaken together, brimming over. You’ll receive in the same measure you give.

39 Jesus told them this parable:

Jesus: What happens if a blind man leads a blind man? Won’t both of them fall into a pit? 40 You can’t turn out better than your teacher; when you’re fully taught, you will resemble your teacher.

41 Speaking of blindness: Why do you focus on the speck in your brother’s eye? Why don’t you see the log in your own? 42 How can you say to your brother, “Oh, brother, let me help you take that little speck out of your eye,” when you don’t even see the big log in your own eye? What a hypocrite! First, take the log out of your own eye. Then you’ll be able to see clearly enough to help your brother with the speck in his eye.

43 Count on this: no good tree bears bad fruit, and no bad tree bears good fruit. 44 You can know a tree by the fruit it bears. You don’t find figs on a thorn bush, and you can’t pick grapes from a briar bush. 45 It’s the same with people. A person full of goodness in his heart produces good things; a person with an evil reservoir in his heart pours out evil things. The heart overflows in the words a person speaks; your words reveal what’s within your heart.

46 What good is it to mouth the words, “Lord! Lord!” if you don’t live by My teachings? 47 What matters is that you come to Me, hear My words, and actually live by them. 48 If you do that, you’ll be like the man who wanted to build a sturdy house. He dug down deep and anchored his foundation to solid rock. During a violent storm, the floodwaters slammed against the house, but they couldn’t shake it because of solid craftsmanship. [It was built upon rock.]

49 On the other hand, if you hear My teachings but don’t put them into practice, you’ll be like the careless builder who didn’t bother to build a foundation under his house. The floodwaters barely touched that pathetic house, and it crashed in ruins in the mud.