Daily Devotion (Monday, July, 20th - Friday, July 24th)

Monday

And the Child grew and became strong in spirit, filled with wisdom; and the grace of God was upon Him.
--Luke 2:40

When Jesus was on Earth, He didn't empty himself of His divine attributes, but accepted the limitations of humanity.

For example, we know that Jesus became weary like we do. On one occasion, as He came to Samaria, we read that He was weary (see John 4:6). Why? He had been walking all day in the hot sun of Israel.

Now if I were God, I probably would have said to the disciples, "You boys go on up to Samaria, and I will see you there." Then I would have just appeared in Samaria. After all, why tire myself out like that?
But Jesus voluntarily went through the process of feeling what it was like to be tired and exhausted.
We see this throughout Scripture. We know that Jesus was tired. We know that He experienced physical thirst. As He hung on the cross, Jesus said, "I thirst" (Luke 19:28). The very God who created water allowed himself to experience thirst.

We also know that He was hungry. Jesus experienced physical hunger after fasting for 40 days during His temptation in the wilderness (see Matthew 4:2). But did Jesus have complete omniscience and omnipotence as a baby in the manger? Luke's Gospel tells us, "And the Child grew and became strong in spirit, filled with wisdom; and the grace of God was upon Him" (Luke 2:40). So it appears that Jesus went through a learning process like anyone else.

Jesus grew as a human, but there was never a moment when He suddenly became God or when deity was transferred to Him. That was always a part of His life. He was fully God and fully man.


Tuesday

"O God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, my body longs for you, in a dry and weary land where there is no water" (Ps. 63:1).

The desert holds a special place in God's Word. The Scriptures portray the desert as a place of inspiration and exaltation - a place where people met God in a powerful new way. King David wrote the 63rd Psalm while in exile in the Desert of Judah. He was hiding from his son Absalom, who wanted to replace him as king of Israel.

For Joseph, a deep pit in the desert was the first stop on a 13-year journey through desolation and despair. That 13-year desert experience served to break Joseph's self-will and self-confidence. It taught him that he could not control anything and that he needed to rely on God to manage the events in his life. Joseph's desert trial prepared him by scorching the youthful pride and arrogance out of his young life so that when he was 30 years old he could rule Egypt at Pharaoh's side in a spirit of humility and servant-hood.

Before becoming king of Israel, David was a shepherd. Part of his training for leadership involved hand-to-claw combat with the beasts of the wilderness, including the lion and the bear. Elijah learned the principles of spiritual leadership while in the wilderness of Gilead. And Jesus was tempted and tested for 40 days in the desert before He began to preach.

Perhaps God has given you a dream, but now it seems that your dream has withered and died under the scorching desert sun. It seems that God has gone away and is not listening to your prayers. But I want you to know that that your dream still lives. God is with you, even if you can't see Him, hear Him or sense His presence. He is preparing you in the desert.

Wednesday

"Neither before nor after Josiah was there a king like him who turned to the LORD as he did - with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his strength, in accordance with all the Law of Moses" (2 Kings 23:25).

What type of person does God raise up when a nation becomes synonymous with idol worship and sin? God raised up a leader that had the courage to destroy the evil and bring the nation back to God. His name was Josiah. "The nation of Israel had been led away from God by Manasseh who reigned in Jerusalem fifty-five years. He did evil in the eyes of the LORD, following the detestable practices of the nations the LORD had driven out before the Israelites" (2 Kings 21:1,2).

Manasseh's son Amon reigned for twenty-two years after him and was also wicked. However, Amon's son was named Josiah and became king at eight years old after his father was assassinated.
"Josiah did what was right in the eyes of the LORD and walked in all the ways of his father David, not turning aside to the right or to the left" (2 Kings 23:8). He was a courageous leader. "Nevertheless, the LORD did not turn away from the heat of his fierce anger, which burned against Judah because of all that Manasseh had done to provoke him to anger. So the LORD said, 'I will remove Judah also from my presence as I removed Israel, and I will reject Jerusalem, the city I chose, and this temple, about which I said, 'There shall my Name be'" (2 Kings 22:13).

God responded to the Godly reforms that Josiah brought to his nation. "Because your heart was responsive and you humbled yourself before the LORD . . . Therefore I will gather you to your fathers, and you will be buried in peace. Your eyes will not see all the disaster I am going to bring on this place'" (2 Kings 22:19-20). Judgment always follows the sin of a nation. If there were ever a time we needed God to raise up Josiahs in our cities and nations, it is now. Pray that God brings forth Godly leaders into your city and nation.


Thursday

"But after the men were healed, God told Joshua, 'Today I have rolled away the reproach of Egypt from you'" (Josh 5:9).

God is calling thousands of people out of Egypt, out of their old lives of bondage. He's calling them to become new people, living out His plan for their lives in the Promised Land, a land flowing with milk and honey. God wants Christians to take their places in the financial marketplace, the corridors of commerce, the capitals of information and entertainment, and the halls of government.

When the people of Israel crossed over the Jordan River and set foot upon the land of promise, God told Joshua to make flint knives and revive a ritual that had fallen into disuse: circumcision.

The rite of circumcision, of course, is the surgical removal of the foreskin (prepuce) of the penis. This rite was established as a sign of God's covenant with Abraham in Genesis 17, but it had not been practiced during the 40 years that Israel wandered in the wilderness before reaching the Promised Land. Joshua obeyed God's command and had all the Israelite men circumcised at a place they called Gibeath Haaraloth (a rather graphic name that means "hill of foreskins").

The rite of circumcision is painful, bloody and personal, and the Israelite men were incapacitated until the wound had healed. With the removal of the foreskins, the men of Israel became a new and different people. They were no longer slaves of the past; they were free people with a future. It was time to put aside the old way of life and to put Egypt behind them and enter the Promised Land with confidence and power.

The people of Israel would go on to fight 39 major battles before the Promised Land came under their control. The Israelites couldn't compromise with the evil and idolatry that was in the land. God told them to destroy it. As believers, we will always be in a battle against evil until the war is won.

God has designed a bright future for us - and it's ours if we accept His calling and cling to Him as He reshapes us and remakes us.


Friday

"But thanks be to God that, though you used to be slaves to sin, you wholeheartedly obeyed the form of teaching to which you were entrusted. You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness" (Rom. 6:17-18).

Becoming a new person in Christ is part of a life-long journey that begins at conversion. Before coming to Christ, we were living (in a metaphorical sense) in Egypt, in the land of bondage. Just as the people of Israel toiled as slaves in Egypt, we were slaves to sin and worldly ambition.

Before we came to Christ, we sweated and toiled to build our career and acquire material possessions. Work was our idol. Greed was our taskmaster. We may have had all the trappings of power in the business world - a corner office, a staff of our own, a key to the executive washroom - but we were living as a slave in the land of Egypt. We didn't run our career; our career ran us.

Jesus once said, "No servant can serve two masters. You cannot serve both God and money" (Luke 16:13). In the original language, the word translated "money" was an Aramaic word, Mammon. This does not refer merely to money as a medium of exchange but also to a demonic spirit designed to promote a mind-set of ambition for riches, power and worldly gain. The word is capitalized in the original text because the people of Jesus' day thought of Mammon as a false god. Jesus was saying that those who spend their lives seeking worldly gain are idolaters. No one can serve two masters. No one can worship both the true God and a false god.

We cannot experience the grace that God gives to His children because we are too busy striving for riches and enslaved to Mammon. The only way we can be free is to turn away from Mammon and allow the one true God to transform us into a different person.

Ask yourself today if your life is best represented as Egypt or the Promised Land.