Skip to main content

Watch with me


So, my dear friends, listen carefully; those who embrace these my ways are most blessed. Mark a life of discipline and live wisely; don’t squander your precious life. Blessed the man, blessed the woman, who listens to me, awake and ready for me each morning, alert and responsive as I start my day’s work. When you find me, you find life, real life, to say nothing of God’s good pleasure. But if you wrong me, you damage your very soul; when you reject me, you’re flirting with death. (Proverbs 8:32-36)

Having a "storehouse" gives us the ability to "save up" for the days of leanness that are sure to come. God's storehouse has resources always available for us: Direction; Strength; Success; and Insight. We can access his storehouse at any time - making the necessary withdrawals. It is also important to lay up for times of leanness in our own lives - things like Trust, Patience, Endurance, and even Faith. The blessings God distributes to his children are also things we need to "tuck away" in our storehouses: Unending Riches such as wealth, honor, justice, and emotional wholeness. Sometimes we only think of wealth in the sense of what we have in our bank accounts and investments - God thinks of wealth as what we possess in the way of relationships! Gaining the right perspective on what he prepares for us as "items" which "fill our storehouses" will help us to embrace them as they are provided.

Those who have full storehouses possess the ability to remain watchful. They are constantly on the lookout for what will best "fill" the storehouse. Following Christ involves watchfulness. It is easy to miss what can "fill" you like nothing else ever will - just because you are neither watching "for" nor "after" what you have been given. One is expectation - the other is nurturing. We expect, so we watch "for". We want to preserve and have at the ready, so we watch "after" what we have been entrusted with until it is nurtured into something of full value in our lives.

The concept of "watching after" what we are given in life is foreign to many. We live in a world of disposable everything - even relationships. The first relationship to watch over is the one we have with our Creator and Lord, Jesus Christ. If there is insufficient attention paid toward maintaining this one, all the others we work on maintaining will pale in comparison. The thing which keeps relationships strong is the willingness to nurture them. Nurturing requires some investment on the part of the individual within the relationship. Nurturing involves feeding - we have to "feed" any relationship. When we don't "feed" our bodies, what happens? We run down, don't think very clearly, and soon we begin to burn muscle / fat - reserves we have stored up against a "future day". The same is true in relationship - when we don't regularly "feed" it, we burn through the "reserves" we have built up within it! Just sayin!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

What did obedience cost Mary and Joseph?

As we have looked at the birth of Christ, we have considered the fact he was born of a virgin, with an earthly father so willing to honor God with his life that he married a woman who was already pregnant.  In that day and time, a very taboo thing.  We also saw how the mother of Christ was chosen by God and given the dramatic news that she would carry the Son of God.  Imagine her awe, but also see her tremendous amount of fear as she would have received this announcement, knowing all she knew about the time in which she lived about how a woman out of wedlock showing up pregnant would be treated.  We also explored the lowly birth of Jesus in a stable of sorts, surrounded by animals, visited by shepherds, and then honored by magi from afar.  The announcement of his birth was by angels - start to finish.  Mary heard from an angel (a messenger from God), while Joseph was set at ease by a messenger from God on another occasion - assuring him the thing he was about to do in marrying Mary wa

A brilliant display indeed

Love from the center of who you are ; don’t fake it. Run for dear life from evil; hold on for dear life to good. Be good friends who love deeply ; practice playing second fiddle. Don’t burn out; keep yourselves fueled and aflame. Be alert servants of the Master, cheerfully expectant. Don’t quit in hard times; pray all the harder. (Romans 12:9-12) Integrity and Intensity don't seem to fit together all that well, but they are uniquely interwoven traits which actually complement each other. "Love from the center of who you are; don't fake it." God asks for us to have some intensity (fervor) in how we love (from the center of who we are), but he also expects us to have integrity in our love as he asks us to be real in our love (don't fake it). They are indeed integral to each other. At first, we may only think of integrity as honesty - some adherence to a moral code within. I believe there is a little more to integrity than meets the eye. In the most literal sense,

Do me a favor

If you’ve gotten anything at all out of following Christ, if his love has made any difference in your life, if being in a community of the Spirit means anything to you, if you have a heart, if you care—then do me a favor: Agree with each other, love each other, be deep-spirited friends. Don’t push your way to the front; don’t sweet-talk your way to the top. Put yourself aside, and help others get ahead. Don’t be obsessed with getting your own advantage. Forget yourselves long enough to lend a helping hand. (Philippians 2:1-4) Has God's love made ANY difference in your life? What is that difference? Most of us will likely say that our lives were changed for the good, while others will say there was a dramatic change. Some left behind lifestyles marked by all manner of outward sin - like drug addiction, alcoholism, prostitution, or even thievery. There are many that will admit the things they left behind were just a bit subtler - what we can call inward sin - things like jealousy,