MONDAY 22ND JUNE
Lamentations 3.22-33
God’s unfailing love
This passage of the Bible contains such a fantastic promise! Remember, God is so faithful and always keeps His promises. As we read and meditate on this scripture, our faith will grow very strong. God tells us that He has so much love and compassion for us. When we surrender to Him and put our faith and trust in Him, we can never be destroyed or crushed. However bad things may seem, God will not let them break us. He will cause everything to work out for us in a victorious way. His Word says in Romans 8.28, “We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him, who have been called according to His purpose.” As we begin each day, it is important to put aside time to pray and read God’s Word. If we do, our faith in God is renewed every morning.
As we read the Word and are reminded of His promises, our faith grows so strong and we can face every day. We know that the Lord has committed Himself to help us. There is no doubt about this! Because of this we wait for Him and never give up. God is always ready to help those who seek Him and put all their faith and trust in Him! Sometimes we need to have a lot of patience. If we wait quietly we will be rewarded. Rome was not built in a day. Sometimes God seems to be so slow in coming to our aid, but because we know He has so much compassion for us and loves us so much, we are given courage and strength to go on waiting. God’s unfailing love will never fail. We will never be let down by Him.
PRAYER: Father, thank you that you have so much love and compassion for us because your faithfulness is so great. Give us patience and a faith in you which will never give up because we know you want to help us so much, through Jesus our Lord and Saviour. Amen.
TUESDAY 23RD JUNE
Psalm 30
His favour lasts a life-time
Again, today, the Word of God in this Psalm shows us what a fantastic God that we have! As we read it our hearts are filled with joy and all we want to do is to exalt the Lord our God. We exalt Him because He is a great healer. There have been many times when we have called to the Lord for help and He has, indeed, answered our prayers! The most wonderful thing He did for us was to give us the miracle of new birth. He healed our sick souls by taking all our sins away. Many of us have experienced God healing our bodies as well. Sometimes, when things go wrong because we step out of God’s will, we are punished for it, but then we discover His anger is short-lived while His favour lasts a life-time. We may be sad for a while when the nights come and we are all alone, but when we come into God’s presence in our morning quiet-time, our hearts are really filled with joy. As we get closer to God in prayer, praise and worship, our sorrows turn to joys; our wailing turns to dancing and we get so appreciative of the Lord that we want to sing to Him and go on and on giving Him thanks.
PRAYER: Father, thank you for helping us so much, for giving us new birth, for healing us and helping us in many ways. Strengthen our faith to trust in you to turn our troubles into joys, through Jesus our Saviour. Amen.
WEDNESDAY 24TH JUNE
2 Corinthians 8.1-3
The Grace of Giving
If you accept the teachings of the Bible in 2 Corinthians 8 and 9 and put them into practice, you will see that God keeps His promises and you will never doubt God again! This is what I personally have discovered and why I have no doubts! Two weeks after my wife and I were both filled with God’s Holy Spirit in September, 1973, God spoke to Wendy and said, “I want you to give $20 per week to the church” (that was a third of our stipend). I said, “Let’s see what the Bible says”. I opened my Bible and it fell open at the passage you have before you today. I read, “And now my brothers, I want you to know the grace God has given the Macedonian churches. Out of the most severe trial, their overflowing joy and extreme poverty welled up in rich generosity. For I testify they gave as much as they were able and even beyond their ability, entirely on their own”.
When I read these words I couldn’t believe it. These people were able to give what they could not afford to give. They trusted God to look after them when they gave more than they were able to give. God had just told us to give far more than we were able to afford. We were at least a month behind with all our bills and never had enough to live on. We believed what God could do for the Macedonians 2,000 years ago He would do for us today. We trusted He would give us the grace of giving (that is, faith to believe God would help us to be generous), so we put $20 in our church envelope each week. God was true to His promise. Within two weeks we were given a cheque by the husband of one of our parishioners - a lapsed Roman Catholic. When I thanked him for the cheque he said, “This is for you and Wendy, not the church. I don’t know why I’m giving it to you”! Ever since that time we have always been able to give more than we could afford and God has looked after us. We took the step of faith, or the risk of faith, and God poured the grace of giving into our laps.
PRAYER: Father, thank you for the grace of giving. Give it to us right now. Show us that when we give more than we can afford you give back to us and enable us to go on being generous. Yes Father, give us the power to give, through Jesus who gave up everything, who became so poor to make us so rich. Amen.
THURSDAY 25TH JUNE
2 Corinthians 8.4-15; 9.6-12
Made rich enough to be generous on every occasion
We continue to think about the enormous generosity of the Macedonian Christians. What led them to be so generous? It was their total commitment to the Lord and to the Church. They gave themselves first to the Lord and then to the other Christians.
When we become Christians, it’s so easy to hold something back. The people of Corinth were like that. They excelled in the spiritual gifts, in faith, in speech and in knowledge. They were very earnest and had a very strong love, yet they found it hard to give. Paul sent Titus to them with this letter to encourage them to give so that they would excel in the grace of giving! You can give without loving, but you can’t love without giving. Paul did not want to force the Corinthian Christians to give. He knew that God only accepts gifts that are given from the heart. He did, however, tell them he was testing the sincerity of their love by comparing it with the earnestness of others. He said the example they should follow is the example of the Lord Jesus Christ. Though He was rich, He made Himself poor so that through His poverty they may become rich!
God always equals things out. You can’t out give God. If you give too much He will see that others will give to you. Even if you give too little He will look after you. If we refuse to give, we are the losers. In the story, The Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens, Scrooge was the most miserable man alive until he was taught to give. Then he became so happy. 2 Corinthians 9 says two important things about giving. Firstly, if we sow sparingly we reap sparingly (v6) and secondly, if you give a lot, “you will be made rich in every way so you can be generous on every occasion” (v11). To sum it all up, generous people are very happy people and they make God happy too.
PRAYER: Father, make us to be like the Lord Jesus. Give us the desire to make others rich. Give us the courage to trust in you and sow generously. Help us have the faith to believe your promise that you will make us rich enough to be generous on every occasion, through the One you gave to us, Jesus our generous Saviour. Amen.
FRIDAY 26TH JUNE
2 Samuel 1.1; 17-27
The Incredible Power to Love
Over the past two days we have been thinking of the grace of giving and seeking God’s help to make us more generous. Today, we are looking at a different type of giving: the ability to give love to those who have treated us badly or abused us.
David had this incredible ability to love those who hurt him. King Saul was so jealous of David that he tried to kill him on many occasions. David had to run from him to stay alive. We would expect David to hate Saul, but the opposite was true. He never stopped loving him. When Saul was killed in battle David composed the beautiful lament we have read today. Maybe one of the reasons David loved Saul was because of his great friendship with Saul’s son, Jonathon. There was a very strong bond between them. They were like brothers. David had such a strong relationship with Jonathon that he could not hate his father.
May the mutual bond that both parents have with their children stop them from hating each other and splitting up when they hurt each other. Where relationships have broken down completely, let’s pray to Jesus to give us the incredible power to love. He poured this power to love down from the cross. He is pouring it down to us now. Hatred and animosity and resentment do more to destroy the victims of violence and abuse than abuse itself. It eats into their minds like cancer and destroys them as people. If they pray Jesus’ prayer from the cross, “Father, forgive them, they don’t know that they’re doing”, Jesus will take away all that hatred, animosity and resentment and give them the incredible ability to love those who have hurt them.
PRAYER: Father, thank you for the incredible ability to love which you gave to David. Thank you that Jesus pours out this power to love from the cross. Please fill me with this power and enable me to completely forgive and love all those who have hurt me, through Jesus our Saviour. Amen.
SATURDAY 27th. JUNE
Mark 5.21-43
Two Remarkable Miracles
A man used by God greatly in the healing ministry in the United States in the 1950s, William Branham, once said, “Faith is believing what God has revealed”. He drew very close to Jesus and had visions of people he would heal. Once he had a vision of a little boy dying in a car accident and being raised from the dead. While travelling in Finland, Branham’s car was behind a car that struck two small boys. His car picked up one of the boys to take him to hospital. Branham felt his pulse and realised his circulation had stopped. He knelt down on the floor of the car and prayed for God’s mercy. The boy came back to life and started to cry. He was soon released from hospital.
In our reading, Jairus, the synagogue ruler, drew near to Jesus. As he got close to the Lord, he was filled with faith. He knew that if Jesus laid His hands on his dying daughter, she would live. When they eventually pushed their way through the crowds and arrived at the house, it seemed it was too late. The little girl had died. Her death did not dampen Jairus’ faith in Jesus. He led Him to his daughter’s bed and rejoiced to see her raised from the dead. When they were on the way they had an interruption which slowed them down. A woman in the crowd pushed herself close to Jesus. “If only I can touch His clothes”, she said to herself, “I will be healed”. Immediately, her bleeding problem stopped. Jesus knew that healing power had gone out of Him and waited for her to identify herself and then assured her that her faith had made her well.
The secret of being healed and helped by Jesus is to get close to Him. When we get close to Him, He gives us the faith to believe. Very few of us have visions, but we can all get close to Jesus. Jesus said, “Seek me and you will find me”, and He told us He has already found us and is knocking at the door of our hearts waiting to come in. Draw near to Jesus, let Him in and you will be filled with faith and you will see many miracles in your life.
PRAYER: Father, show me how I can get close to Jesus. Reveal His presence to me so that I can be filled with faith. Show me that when I’m seeking Him, He is waiting at the door of my heart for me to let Him in. Come into my heart Lord Jesus, there is room in my heart for you. Amen.
SUNDAY 28 JUNE
THIS WEEK’S MESSAGE
God loves us all so very much. He’s so compassionate, so kind, and always ready to come to our aid. He is always there for us when we need Him. His interest in us is intensely personal and immensely practical.
When we are treated unfairly, God’s love relieves our bitterness. When we grieve our loss, it relieves our pain and anger and denial. When we struggle with disability, it relieves our self-pity. When we endure physical pain, it relieves our hopelessness. When we deal with being sinful, it relieves our guilt. No problem is too hard for God to solve!
To get God’s help we need to seek after Him. When Jairus’ daughter was dying, he fell at Jesus feet and pleaded for help. Jesus was eager to go with him. When she died, He brought her back to life. On the way a woman with a bad bleeding problem longed for His help. “If only I can touch His garment I will be healed,” she said to herself. The moment she touched Him all her bleeding stopped.
Over the years we have seen several people healed by the Lord Jesus when they have reached out to touch Him by faith. In our family, Wendy healed of a dreadful back to enable her to have six more children. David healed of Meningitis when he was six months old. Andrea was healed of Leukaemia and has given birth two beautiful daughters. We have seen many people healed of cancer. Some of these had been told by the doctors they only had a short while to live.
The Bible is so full of God’s promises. We discover them when we read the bible and get close to God in prayer.
Praising and thanking Jesus and worshipping God makes us very close to Him. It releases God’s healing light.
All God’s graces, salvation and healing are received by faith. The Bible’s definition of faith is, “FAITH IS BEING SURE OF WHAT WE HOPE FOR AND CERTAIN OF WHAT WE DO NOT SEE. (Hebrews 11:1 NIV 84) Faith is believing before we see. Faith comes when we believe God’s promises.
When we have faith we feel happy and blessed even when the symptoms of our disease do not go away and our prayers don’t seem to be answered.
God is so generous with us. When we get close to him a miracle happens. He makes us to be like Himself. He makes us very generous. He gives us the incredible ability to love in the same way that he loves. This is His promise to us: “You will be made rich in every way so you can be generous on every occasion. Through us your generosity will result in thanksgiving to God” (2 Corinthians 9:11)
PRAYER: Thank you so much Father God for loving us so much that you want to help us and heal us. Help us all to believe all your promises in the Bible so much that we are filled with the faith to believe that we can be CERTAIN that you will always keep your promise through your most wonderful Son, Jesus Christ our Lord and promise giver. Amen.