"In His hand is the life of every
living thing and the breath of all mankind”
(Job 12:10)
In a recent “Daily
Guideposts” article, Brian Doyle spoke
about his visit to a grade school. He was talking to the class about “Miracles”
and commented that, “a girl – it’s always
girls who ask the piercing questions, she raised her hand and said, ‘Yes
sir, but have you personally experienced miracles? Or is this just a
lecture?’”
Mr. Doyle, the editor of
Portland Magazine, continued, “There was a
long pause, and I said with dawning wonder, ‘Oh child, yes, oh, dear
Lord, yes, yes, yes. I have seen bears the size of cars. I have heard
whales moaning in dark oceans. I have had a child say, ‘I love you more
than I could ever figure out words for my love, Dad.’ I have been graced
by burly brothers. I have had sicknesses that looked to be the cause of
gravestone engravings, but here I am, cheerfully mumbling in your
classroom. Here I am and that is a miracle beyond accounting, and here
you are and that is an even cooler miracle because you are young and
strong and possible in ways that I am not anymore. Yes, my young friend,
I have seen miracles. Every moment of every day. Every breath! Yes. Any
other questions?”
And he concluded with a prayer:
“Dear Lord, it’s an utterly confusing
gift You have given us, crammed with pain and joy; but what a gift! The
greatest that ever was! We are alive!”
What is it about the word “gift”
that most of us don’t understand? In relation to the Lord, we haven’t
EARNED anything, but He has given us – everything! Your eyes! Have you
thought about your eyes? They are among the most complex structures ever
encountered and yet, we take them for granted, unless, of course, we are
about to lose them or they are already gone. And when we have eyes, most
don’t thank God for them; we just use them without thought.
But they are His gift to most who live within
humanity, and most of us have feet that walk and legs that can run. The
human brain has about 100 billion nerve cells and when those nerves
fire, the impulse travels at about 170 miles per hour. The human heart
beats 3,000 million times in a lifetime, pumping 48 million gallons of
blood, which travels 60,000 miles on its journey through the body every
day. In the last 24 hours, you’ve breathed almost 24,000 times.
Not everybody can see, walk or run. I was unable to
walk for a number of years as a child. My life was hospital beds and
wheelchairs. The gift of walking and running was returned to me years
later and I thank God for this wondrous unmerited favor He gave to me.
We are alive! We typically have a few years or decades on this planet
and then we will be gone. Have you thanked God today for the gift of
life? What will you do with the time remaining to you?
Your physical body, including your mind, belongs to
God. It’s like you are driving a rental car. It’s not yours but you are
in it and at some point it will revert to its true Owner. What you do
with it, if you mistreat it and others through it in the meantime, will
cause you to have to give an explanation to the Owner, the One who
created it and entrusted it to you.
And the question is posed: What
is “life” anyway? We think that if we can smile, see, hear, blink our
eyes, breathe, speak and walk, we’re alive! But when Jesus said in John
3:3 and Verse 7 that “You must be born again,"
His words carried the interesting implication that real life is
something more than what we call “animation” – the ability to move and
speak. And His statements also suggested that real LIFE is much more
than just what we experience on this planet, for He said, “…unless
one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.”
He continued, “That which is born of the
flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit”
(John 3:5-6). Life is more than these bodies we walk around in, and from
that perspective, our bodies are indeed like those rental cars that are
given to us for a time, but are really just on loan to us for a few
years or decades. What comes next?
As Jesus said, you “must
be born again.” You were designed to be
fundamentally CHANGED at some point, inside, in a place too deep to even
be understood by humanity. Just like we have the need to eat when we are
hungry and must breathe to prolong life, we need to be filled with the
Holy Spirit of God. And when you are, you’ll know it, for to have God
inside your very being is what LIFE is really all about!
Have you ever thought about
Matthew, the former tax collector who left everything to follow Jesus?
Shortly after Jesus spoke to a paralyzed man and not only healed him
from paralysis but also forgave the man’s sins, He encountered Matthew,
sitting at “a tax office.”
He merely spoke to Matthew and “said to him,
‘Follow Me,'”
and Matthew “arose and followed Him,”
as you can see in Matthew’s Gospel, Chapter 9, Verse 9. Isn’t that
interesting? Here was Matthew, a successful man financially, sitting at
a table covered with money, and he simply got up and walked away from it
all. Did He see real LIFE in Jesus? I think he did!
Was Matthew burned-out from years of cheating his
countrymen, the Jews, by taking excessive taxes from them? Was his guilt
getting the best of him? Was he at that point READY to take the plunge
and walk away? – from money, from power, from it all. Certainly he
recognized something deeply wonderful and alive about Jesus; so much so
that he simply got up and followed this Man from Galilee. Are you ready
to follow Him?
Jesus KNEW in advance that
Matthew was READY to trust in the Lord. He knew that all He had to do
was say “Follow Me”
and the man would do it. Two things were happening here, as it always
does in our lives. Almighty God prepares the speaker to speak God’s
Word, as God’s Holy Spirit did with Jesus Christ right at that moment,
and God prepares the listener to respond through that same Holy Spirit;
just as He is preparing you right now.
At the time of today’s Scripture
verse in the Book of Job, the man had lost his children; all ten of them
were dead. His wealth was gone. His wife, in the grief of her own loss
shouted at him, “Curse God and die!”
And his three “friends”
showed up and started questioning him and accusing him of being a
sinner. Surely, they thought, if all this sorrow had come upon the man,
he must have committed some terrible sin or this would not have
happened!
Can you imagine? His children,
all of them were dead. He had nothing left. His wife practically spat in
his face and his “friends” were following him around and telling him
that it was all his fault! To lose a child is terrible. To lose ten is
unthinkable. For your spouse to turn against you is awful; and to have
that spouse blame you for everything that has gone wrong is worse. And
then your friends show up, but instead of giving comfort like you
expect, they turn on you and blame you for all that has happened. How
would you respond in all of this? Job, a real historical person who
personally experienced these things, said, “Naked
I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return. The Lord gave
and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord”
(Job 1:21). He replied to his wife, “Shall
we receive goods from God and shall we not receive evil?”
(Job 2:10).
Jesus continued speaking in John
3:16, “For God so loved the world that He
gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but
have eternal life.” By trusting in the Son
of God, you’ll find out what LIFE really means. You’ll receive new,
better, more wonderful life, right now and forever. It’s time to entrust
the lives we have been given - to Him.
Dear Lord, I confess my sins and my need of You.
I trust in You now. In Jesus Name. Amen.
