October
Tabernacling
by Cynthia Saladin
“This world is not my home; I’m just a-passin’ through.” If we belong to Christ, we identify with this sentiment. We confess that we are aliens and strangers in this world (Hebrews 11:13). We are here temporarily, looking towards the kingdom of God (2 Corinthians 5:1-4). And that’s a very comforting concept and promise to remember when we find ourselves in the midst of health problems, financial stress, relationship issues - troubles of many kinds. We know that this is all temporary. We’re just tenting - tabernacling - here. This is not going to last forever. And if we’re truly His, we wouldn’t really want it to.
And yet, we get distracted.
When my black labs were young, I would let them out of the house. They raced each other out of sight within seconds. It didn’t take very long before I realized I couldn’t let them do that. They would stay gone for hours, chasing rabbits and squirrels and investigating the myriad of delicious smells out there. Many were the days that I went looking for them. How disgusted I often was to find them (albeit relieved). Oh, they’d lift their heads to acknowledge that they saw me and heard me calling, but they were much too busy to actually come when I called.
Do you know people like that? Life is so good that they don’t really have time for God. They are happy doing what they’re doing. They have the misconception that a relationship with God is going to make their life less enjoyable, that they’ll be restricted from having fun. They think they are fine where they are; they don’t need God.
There is a contingent of people out there like that. But on the continuum, there are also people who know, intellectually, that God is good and that He is to be worshipped and obeyed. They just make one little choice here and another small choice over there - and building the relationship with God is not the priority. It’s more important, to them, to do this thing on the Sabbath. It’s more important to choose this activity over Bible study and prayer. They believe that life is good and their relationship with God is okay.
But all of us are tabernacling in this life. That means that we do experience problems. The car breaks down. Our bodies don’t work as well as they used to. We have unexpected money demands. We run into conflicts with the people around us. We have trouble. That’s life. Sometimes those troubles are a result of our sin. And sometimes they are part of living in a sinful world. Regardless, there’s stress.
When the labs were young, I could count on one stress that would cause them to return home as fast as their legs could carry them - if they heard a gun shot. Similarly, there are times in our lives when we experience something so terrifying that we immediately turn to God for help - regardless of the state of our relationship with Him. If, however, the stress isn’t too overwhelming, sometimes we just determine to persevere and to push through the trouble in our own strength. It might not even occur to us that our troubles would not seem so bad if we had our eyes fixed on the Master and had the confidence of a close relationship with Him.
All of these thoughts flashed through my head yesterday morning when I was walking the dogs. You see, now when I walk the dogs, I just open the door and let them all go. The labs still take off as if they were puppies, but they have aches and pains, and they don’t go so far anymore. They still want to smell all the smells and bark at the squirrels and the rabbits. But their bodies keep them more grounded. They end up walking most of the route with me each morning. The side benefit of that is the reception of treats from my pocket as we walk along the way. Furthermore, once the walk is over, they are content to lie on the front porch or in the front yard, on guard duty with each other. They may not have the bodies, energy, or wildness of youth, but my labs are happy.
I couldn’t help thinking of how much Christians are like that too. As these tabernacles, our bodies, slow us down with aches and pain, and as we experience the troubles of life, we realize that there are wonderful rewards in walking with Him. We have learned that a relationship with God is worth more than what we thought were the pleasures of this life. This maturation in our relationship with God means we are less likely to go our own way; we are more likely to heed His call to obedience. We find that there is contentment and quiet pleasures in an ever closer relationship with our God - regardless of the troubles we experience.
As we prepare for the upcoming Feast of Tabernacles, I’m going to be thinking about tabernacling in this life. I’m going to be contemplating how God has provided for me and led me along the way. I’m going to be considering my relationship with Him and how much I long for it to be more intimate. And I am going to remember to thank Him for being with me, being my God, as I tabernacle.
Yes, There is Good News! - By Bill Rollins
We have given some thought to the three aspects of how we are to love God. Someone may say, “Now I know something about loving God; how is that good news?”
I believe that is a fair question. But in asking the question, one must assume that good news comes only from receiving something, and not giving something. And from a purely human standpoint, I must disagree with this assessment. True joy comes to us when we can give of ourselves to another. It is only a child that believes comes from receiving. The anticipation of a gift on the part of a youth can be delightful to watch. Why? Because we can understand the maturity level held by a child.
When an infant is born, the maturity level stands at a flat zero. There is only room for growth. How much love does the baby have for others? The answer is also zero. A newborn has many needs, one of the greatest needs it has is for love. The love a mother and father have for the infant is inherently great enough to make up for the lack of love in the child. One might say the “love” that a human has is directly proportional to the level of maturity that exists in a human. Allow me to make another formulaic statement: The level of maturity that exists in a human is directly proportional to the joy he or she receives in giving of self to another. Maturity and love for others travel hand in hand.
Okay - so let’s not get too out of hand. We are talking about love for God, and how that can be the good news we are looking for. But we also made the analogy of an infant’s love for a parent. The love of a parent will teach the infant how to love. And so it is with our Father in Heaven. The scripture leads us to this same conclusion. The epistle of 1 John is said to be the “love book” in the Bible. And the topic of love comes to an apex in the fourth chapter. As we make our way down this chapter, we come to the nineteenth verse where we read, “We love because He first loved us.”
Can we just stop here and ponder the fact that even before we understood that there was a God, even before we knew who that God was, He loved us!
In the proceeding chapter of 1 John, Chapter 3, we read, “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are.”
Now, don’t get me wrong, I cannot as of yet place everyone on the Earth as being called children of God. But you ... you are reading this column and I pray you are being led to see God’s love for you and so are coming to see what manner of love you are to have for this Father of ours.
In considering God’s love for us and our response to Him, we come to July 4th, Independence Day. Think about the thousands of men and women who shed their blood on the battlefield of the American Revolution some 240 years ago. We, today, get caught up in all the celebrations and can forget that this day is a memorial of what our forefathers accomplished in winning freedom from tyranny of the king of England.
Oh, it is a day to celebrate all right - parades, picnics, cookouts, and of course the day’s end fireworks celebration. The victory, of the somewhat rag-tag colonists over the world’s best equipped fighting force, set in motion one of the greatest political experiments on this planet. Our nation became a worldwide symbol of freedom and we, today, still stand in the afterglow that made this nation great.
I do not believe this to be a circumstantial coincidence that somehow just fell into the “laps” of men like John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, etc. I believe (as they did) that the hand of God was involved. Excuse me while I quote from the book “The Thousand Year Leap” by W. Cleon Skousen, “ ... they (the framers of the Constitution) declared that the formation and the adoption of our new system of federal government represented a political achievement unprecedented in human history. They looked upon it, moreover, as an event that was actually ‘influenced, guided and governed’ by the hand of God.” In my words, “It was a blessing of extreme importance.”
Are you with me on this? What happened 240 years ago was indeed “Good News.” But you, like I, have seen the sometimes gradual, sometimes precipitous slide this nation has taken. We have fallen away from these freedoms that were won for us.
So as I pondered these freedoms through the shedding of blood, my mind swung around to another event that took place almost 2000 years ago, to grant all men freedoms that will never fade, never grow old and can never be taken away. These freedoms were also won by the shedding of blood, not on a physical battlefield, but on a spiritual one. They were won by the Son of God as he hung on a cross; Jesus Christ came to Earth to set men free. He came to redeem us from our sins, He came and died to set us at liberty.
There is good news . . . to be continued.
Tabernacling
by Cynthia Saladin
“This world is not my home; I’m just a-passin’ through.” If we belong to Christ, we identify with this sentiment. We confess that we are aliens and strangers in this world (Hebrews 11:13). We are here temporarily, looking towards the kingdom of God (2 Corinthians 5:1-4). And that’s a very comforting concept and promise to remember when we find ourselves in the midst of health problems, financial stress, relationship issues - troubles of many kinds. We know that this is all temporary. We’re just tenting - tabernacling - here. This is not going to last forever. And if we’re truly His, we wouldn’t really want it to.
And yet, we get distracted.
When my black labs were young, I would let them out of the house. They raced each other out of sight within seconds. It didn’t take very long before I realized I couldn’t let them do that. They would stay gone for hours, chasing rabbits and squirrels and investigating the myriad of delicious smells out there. Many were the days that I went looking for them. How disgusted I often was to find them (albeit relieved). Oh, they’d lift their heads to acknowledge that they saw me and heard me calling, but they were much too busy to actually come when I called.
Do you know people like that? Life is so good that they don’t really have time for God. They are happy doing what they’re doing. They have the misconception that a relationship with God is going to make their life less enjoyable, that they’ll be restricted from having fun. They think they are fine where they are; they don’t need God.
There is a contingent of people out there like that. But on the continuum, there are also people who know, intellectually, that God is good and that He is to be worshipped and obeyed. They just make one little choice here and another small choice over there - and building the relationship with God is not the priority. It’s more important, to them, to do this thing on the Sabbath. It’s more important to choose this activity over Bible study and prayer. They believe that life is good and their relationship with God is okay.
But all of us are tabernacling in this life. That means that we do experience problems. The car breaks down. Our bodies don’t work as well as they used to. We have unexpected money demands. We run into conflicts with the people around us. We have trouble. That’s life. Sometimes those troubles are a result of our sin. And sometimes they are part of living in a sinful world. Regardless, there’s stress.
When the labs were young, I could count on one stress that would cause them to return home as fast as their legs could carry them - if they heard a gun shot. Similarly, there are times in our lives when we experience something so terrifying that we immediately turn to God for help - regardless of the state of our relationship with Him. If, however, the stress isn’t too overwhelming, sometimes we just determine to persevere and to push through the trouble in our own strength. It might not even occur to us that our troubles would not seem so bad if we had our eyes fixed on the Master and had the confidence of a close relationship with Him.
All of these thoughts flashed through my head yesterday morning when I was walking the dogs. You see, now when I walk the dogs, I just open the door and let them all go. The labs still take off as if they were puppies, but they have aches and pains, and they don’t go so far anymore. They still want to smell all the smells and bark at the squirrels and the rabbits. But their bodies keep them more grounded. They end up walking most of the route with me each morning. The side benefit of that is the reception of treats from my pocket as we walk along the way. Furthermore, once the walk is over, they are content to lie on the front porch or in the front yard, on guard duty with each other. They may not have the bodies, energy, or wildness of youth, but my labs are happy.
I couldn’t help thinking of how much Christians are like that too. As these tabernacles, our bodies, slow us down with aches and pain, and as we experience the troubles of life, we realize that there are wonderful rewards in walking with Him. We have learned that a relationship with God is worth more than what we thought were the pleasures of this life. This maturation in our relationship with God means we are less likely to go our own way; we are more likely to heed His call to obedience. We find that there is contentment and quiet pleasures in an ever closer relationship with our God - regardless of the troubles we experience.
As we prepare for the upcoming Feast of Tabernacles, I’m going to be thinking about tabernacling in this life. I’m going to be contemplating how God has provided for me and led me along the way. I’m going to be considering my relationship with Him and how much I long for it to be more intimate. And I am going to remember to thank Him for being with me, being my God, as I tabernacle.
Yes, There is Good News! - By Bill Rollins
We have given some thought to the three aspects of how we are to love God. Someone may say, “Now I know something about loving God; how is that good news?”
I believe that is a fair question. But in asking the question, one must assume that good news comes only from receiving something, and not giving something. And from a purely human standpoint, I must disagree with this assessment. True joy comes to us when we can give of ourselves to another. It is only a child that believes comes from receiving. The anticipation of a gift on the part of a youth can be delightful to watch. Why? Because we can understand the maturity level held by a child.
When an infant is born, the maturity level stands at a flat zero. There is only room for growth. How much love does the baby have for others? The answer is also zero. A newborn has many needs, one of the greatest needs it has is for love. The love a mother and father have for the infant is inherently great enough to make up for the lack of love in the child. One might say the “love” that a human has is directly proportional to the level of maturity that exists in a human. Allow me to make another formulaic statement: The level of maturity that exists in a human is directly proportional to the joy he or she receives in giving of self to another. Maturity and love for others travel hand in hand.
Okay - so let’s not get too out of hand. We are talking about love for God, and how that can be the good news we are looking for. But we also made the analogy of an infant’s love for a parent. The love of a parent will teach the infant how to love. And so it is with our Father in Heaven. The scripture leads us to this same conclusion. The epistle of 1 John is said to be the “love book” in the Bible. And the topic of love comes to an apex in the fourth chapter. As we make our way down this chapter, we come to the nineteenth verse where we read, “We love because He first loved us.”
Can we just stop here and ponder the fact that even before we understood that there was a God, even before we knew who that God was, He loved us!
In the proceeding chapter of 1 John, Chapter 3, we read, “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are.”
Now, don’t get me wrong, I cannot as of yet place everyone on the Earth as being called children of God. But you ... you are reading this column and I pray you are being led to see God’s love for you and so are coming to see what manner of love you are to have for this Father of ours.
In considering God’s love for us and our response to Him, we come to July 4th, Independence Day. Think about the thousands of men and women who shed their blood on the battlefield of the American Revolution some 240 years ago. We, today, get caught up in all the celebrations and can forget that this day is a memorial of what our forefathers accomplished in winning freedom from tyranny of the king of England.
Oh, it is a day to celebrate all right - parades, picnics, cookouts, and of course the day’s end fireworks celebration. The victory, of the somewhat rag-tag colonists over the world’s best equipped fighting force, set in motion one of the greatest political experiments on this planet. Our nation became a worldwide symbol of freedom and we, today, still stand in the afterglow that made this nation great.
I do not believe this to be a circumstantial coincidence that somehow just fell into the “laps” of men like John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, etc. I believe (as they did) that the hand of God was involved. Excuse me while I quote from the book “The Thousand Year Leap” by W. Cleon Skousen, “ ... they (the framers of the Constitution) declared that the formation and the adoption of our new system of federal government represented a political achievement unprecedented in human history. They looked upon it, moreover, as an event that was actually ‘influenced, guided and governed’ by the hand of God.” In my words, “It was a blessing of extreme importance.”
Are you with me on this? What happened 240 years ago was indeed “Good News.” But you, like I, have seen the sometimes gradual, sometimes precipitous slide this nation has taken. We have fallen away from these freedoms that were won for us.
So as I pondered these freedoms through the shedding of blood, my mind swung around to another event that took place almost 2000 years ago, to grant all men freedoms that will never fade, never grow old and can never be taken away. These freedoms were also won by the shedding of blood, not on a physical battlefield, but on a spiritual one. They were won by the Son of God as he hung on a cross; Jesus Christ came to Earth to set men free. He came to redeem us from our sins, He came and died to set us at liberty.
There is good news . . . to be continued.
