The Table

Psalm 78:19, Yes, they spoke against God:

They said, “Can God prepare a table in the wilderness?

This is what the Israelites said after they escaped the Egyptian army by walking through the Red Sea on dry land. Definitely one of the greatest miracles of all time.

Of course Psalm 23:5 says, You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies;

Obviously God can prepare a table in the wilderness. Why wouldn’t He be able to.

This verse is so profound. I realize that we do it all the time! We don’t believe that God can rescue us from the situations we are in. We live through miracles but the next time something comes against us we want to give up and start questioning whether God even knows of our existence. We doubt His provision and His favour. We doubt that He has a plan for our situation. But He does because He always does.

Our unbelief is what stops Him from doing the miracles we want to see. We all want to see miracles bur we aren’t always prepared to believe that the miracle will happen. There are so many reasons that we tell ourselves why God isn’t going to come through for us. And by ‘us’ I’m referring to believers. Children of God. Sinners who have been washed by the blood of the Lamb. Forgiven, redeemed and made righteous. But we tell ourselves all kinds of lies, plus we believe the lies that the enemy tells us.

I’m going through difficulties because God is punishing me;

God really wants to teach me a lesson by letting me suffer so I just have to suffer;

I don’t deserve good things because I have done some bad things in my life;

I’m not sure that God has forgiven me for my sins;

Numbers 23:19, God is not a man, that He should lie,

Nor a son of man, that He should repent.

Has He said, and will He not do? Or has He spoken, and will He not make it good?

Psalm 103:12, As far as the east is from the west, So far has He removed our transgressions from us.

If God says our sins are forgiven and removed from us, they are! No questions asked, no correspondence will be entered into and we aren’t allowed to think about them again. Gone forever!

We are righteous because we have been bought with the blood of Jesus. We are forgiven. All we need to do is ask God and He forgives us. I’m not totally sure of the Grace message that says we’re forgiven anyway and we don’t need to ask. I now that if I have done something wrong it makes me feel a whole lot better if I confess my transgression to God and ask Him to forgive me. But I have to do it with the absolute belief that I have been forgiven and I have to put it behind me and go forward in the knowledge that I am righteous. We mustn’t do any of this, “I can’t really know if I’m going to heaven, nobody knows for sure.” That is another lie from Satan. If we believe in our hearts and confess with our mouths that Jesus died for us and that He is the only Son of God, then we are saved. End of story.

As people who are righteous we have a right to stand before God and to put our prayers and petitions to Him. We can ask with as much confidence as the next person because God doesn’t have favourites. No matter what we might think, He loves all of us equally. If we don’t believe that we have to go back to basics and remind ourselves of the truth. Maybe we are believing the lies the enemy is telling us.

Isaiah 40:4, Every valley shall be exalted

And every mountain and hill brought low;

The crooked places shall be made straight

And the rough places smooth;

Isaiah 50:7,  For the Lord God will help Me;

Therefore I will not be disgraced;

Therefore I have set My face like a flint,

And I know that I will not be ashamed.

If this is what God is saying to us we can believe with confidence that He can prepare a table in the wilderness. Take a seat at that table and receive the blessings He is giving you.

Burning Coals

What does it mean to heap burning coals on someone’s head?

Proverbs 25:21-22, If your enemy is hungry, give him bread to eat;

And if he is thirsty, give him water to drink;

For so you will heap coals of fire on his head,

And the Lord will reward you.

I interpret this to mean that when someone is really mean to you and shows animosity towards you, that you must not return those feelings or actions. As it says here, “If he is hungry, give him bread to eat, and if he is thirsty, give him water to drink.” Don’t do to him what he has done to you. Just imagine this, a colleague was dishonest and stole a lot of money from the firm you both worked for. The dishonesty was detected and there was an investigation. All the evidence pointed to you. This colleague had planted evidence to make you look guilty and you had no means of disproving it or of defending yourself. There is a long, stressful court case and you end up going to prison. After seven long years behind bars you are released and have to start building a life for yourself. Your family shunned you and you obviously don’t have a job to go back to. You find odd jobs to do and eventually start your own garden services business. You do really well. One day as you are on your way home you see a man lying face down in the gutter next to the road. It looks like he’s been injured so you stop your vehicle, and get out to try and help. You turn the man face up and you see that it’s the colleague who framed you. He is bleeding profusely from a chest wound. What do you do? Do you leave him there and pretend you know nothing about it? Do you call it blind justice and walk away, or do you call on your first aid experience and phone an ambulance?

Most of us will never face such a serious decision, but is it any different from the decision of greeting someone who has been gossiping about you? People who have wronged you, expect you to react the same way they treated you. If you show them compassion it will result in their embarrassment. Burning coals will be heaped on his head.

Look what the good Samaritan did.  The Jews, hated Samaritans to such a degree that they destroyed the Samaritans’ temple on Mount Gerizim. Therefore the injured man, being a Jew, was very definitely the Samaritan’s enemy. The Samaritan would have been justified in passing by the injured Jew because of their history of enmity. But instead of passing by, like the religious Jews had, he stopped, helped him, took him to an inn where he could recover and even paid his expenses. This is in Luke 10:25-29.

What do you have to have inside of you to be able to do this? What kind of love and kindness must reside inside of you to be able to look past the faults of others and past the offences you have taken, to step out and do what we have been commanded to do? You have to have the love of Jesus in your heart. 150%. You have to be so secure in the knowledge of who you are and who your Father is, that you don’t let the actions of people confuse or condemn you. You have to know that you are a child of the most high God and that nothing in heaven or on earth can ever change that. That’s who you have to be. Your identity must be rooted in Jesus and nothing and nobody must be able to shake that. The burning coals will be on your enemies head, but the overcomers crown will be on yours.

Pray for the bad guys

I am reading ‘The President’s Keepers’ by Jacques Pauw. It is insightful and shocking to say the least. I am not getting upset or cross while I read because the things that are written are in the past. They have happened and I can’t change the past no matter how hard I try. I am reading the book in order to understand why the situation in the country is as it is. I want to understand how the politicians and their associates think. Even though there is nothing I can do about the past, there is something I can do about the future.

I can pray.

Last week I heard a gentleman say that the churches have it all wrong because you shouldn’t be praying for corrupt politicians as they aren’t going to change. Matthew 5:44 – ‘But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use and persecute you.’ That statement Jesus made is so profound I think I should read it every day just to remind myself what prayer is all about. In the next chapter (Matt 6:9-13) Jesus gives his disciples The Lord’s Prayer or the Our Father. It’s lovely and most Christians know it off by heart. What we choose not to read though is verse 14 and 15 which state the following, “For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. Therefore we aren’t only called to pray for our enemies but we also have to forgive them.

If someone is cursing you, hating you, spitefully using you or persecuting you, you are called to love them, do good to them, pray for them and forgive them. Are you doing all these things because you approve of what they are doing or because you excuse their behaviour? Not at all! You are setting yourself free from the bondage that holding a grudge or living with unforgiveness brings. You are asking God to set you free so that you will be able to live your life to its full potential. Living with unforgiveness makes you sick. It’s like hanging a potato around your neck on a string. At first you feel the weight of it all the time but after a while you actually get used to it. Then, you start to smell something and much to your dismay the potato has started to go rotten. It is in your nostrils all the time and you can’t even get a good night’s sleep because of the stench. You can’t get rid of the potato and the smell unless you cut the string. Cutting the string is forgiving the person for whatever they have done to you and then praying for them. Who benefits from the string being cut? The potato is still in the same state it was. It’s not going to suddenly revert to being a good potato. You are reaping the benefit because now your friends won’t mind being around you again, you can enjoy life and sleep well at night.

So, we have to love and do good and forgive and pray irrespective if our ‘enemies’ are politicians, criminals, acquaintances or our brothers and sisters that we had a disagreement with. What will God do then? In Psalm 35 David is speaking to God about the people who are trying to kill him. Verse 5 says “And let the angel of the Lord chase them.” I believe if we do the things that the Bible tell us to do and if we earnestly see the Lord and put Him first in our everyday life, He is going to make our paths straight and we can say, “Praise the Lord, O my soul! It is well with my soul!