“And all who saw it said, ‘Such a thing has never happened or been seen from the day that the people of Israel came up out of the land of Egypt until this day; consider it, take counsel, and speak” Acts 19:30. When I began ministry over a quarter of a century ago, I had a combination of enthusiasm and naivety that believed the gospel was such good news that anyone hearing it would be compelled to obey it! Forgive-ness of sins? Eternal life with Christ? How could they not? It didn’t take long to realize it takes a lot to shake people out of their spiritual complacency. Then it happened to me. It took my first wife dying of brain tumors to reevaluate my faith and recommit to the enthusiasm I once had. For the Israelites, it took the cut-up pieces of a dead concubine killed by fornicators in Benjamin to shake them from their spiritual slumber. Not since the time of Gideon almost two centuries before had they really returned to God, and slowly through that time they had accepted an increasingly compromised version of what it meant to be God’s people. I wonder what it would take today—when I see the watered-down version of cultural Christianity that many live. What shakes you up?

“And he answered, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself” Luke 10:27. What does it mean to love God? 1 John 4:10 tells us, “In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” So, to love God in the way that He wants us to means understanding first how He loved us. In the melancholy hymn, “O Sacred Head,” we lament the physical wounds that Christ endured to bear our sins in His body upon the cross. Music has always helped us to worship in spirit as well as in truth, and so it helps us realize the depth of love that the ‘Word made flesh’ had for us that we must have for Him to truly sing “My Jesus, I love Thee.” How easy it is to love One who loves us so! And so, Jesus demands “that you love one another as I have loved you” and then further explains what He means, “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends” John 15:12-13. To love “your neighbor as yourself” means then that just as Christ died for us, we are to love Him and show that by laying down our life for others.

“Do not fear what you are about to suffer. … Be faithful unto death, and I will give you the crown of life” Revelation 2:10. Smyrna had so much tribulation and poverty that in an earthly sense it was hard to see how those who adhered to the illegal religion of Christianity in the Roman Empire there could hold on. Life under Nero was hard; thirty years later under Domitian, life was impossible. Not from God’s perspective, though. Jesus said they were rich. Yet, they were also being slandered by those who were identifying as God’s own, but Jesus said they were Satan’s instead. Today we wonder if we will suffer with the craziness of the world; then they were told that they were and how it would happen. But—God will be in control in the chaos, and their complete suffering would be a test. If they remained faithful unto death in their suffering (indicating that some of them would die), they would receive the crown of life, which, James 1:12 tells us, is given to those who persevere. So what about us? Without being told, everything feels like Christians are about to suffer like Smyrna would. So … we must accept God’s plan for us, knowing that He is faithful. Are we faithful unto death?

“… And he rejoiced along with his entire household that he had believed in God” Acts 16:34. Had the jailer ever rejoiced … about anything? Whatever pagan gods he worshiped gave him no hope or reason for joy. Instead, sweat and blood ran from him trying to please and appease them. If religious, he threw himself into his work with fervor, which often meant flogging prisoners with zeal and making their stays in his charge tortuous. But then came in these two who, instead of shrieking and moaning long into the night, sang and prayed instead. In fact, the other prisoners were silenced into listening to their joy? But how? They had wounds just like the others. He knew—because he had inflicted them himself. And the deity they sang and prayed to—one who had died and had now overcome death … who was he? And then came the earthquake, and when he could get himself to his feet and inspect the cells, he found the doors open. They had all escaped—how could they not? Since it was his life for theirs, he pulled out his sword to kill himself, but they were all there. Falling to his knees, trembling, he had to know. “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” In what can we rejoice in this life?

“Why should I fear in times of trouble, when the iniquity of those who cheat me surrounds me, those who trust in their wealth and boast of the abundance of their riches?” Psalm 49:5-6. One quality of the psalms is its enduring timelessness. And that is because it speaks to the very heart of the human condition—in any age. When David asks why the wicked seem to prosper in Psalm 37, the answer from God is that the wicked are temporary and that he must trust and delight himself in the LORD, do good, and commit his way to Him—which is the path to what is eternal. In a deeper sense, Psalm 49 the sons of Korah are told that riches cannot offer anything beyond this world. What a needed message to those of us who are trying to live as a sanctified people, set apart from this world that is not our home, and yet struggling against the world’s bombardment of hedonism and materialism with its lures that are so attractive. And there are certainly a lot out there today! The psalmist answers this with a question, however: why should I fear in times of trouble? No one could ever pleasure or purchase their way into heaven. Stand firm, Christian. Is your trust and delight in Him?