It’s the Truth: Jesus heals our scars
Do you have a great scar story? Do you have a tall tale of something that left its mark on your body? Growing up, my scars were a badge of honor. Each new mark had a story attached. One of those goes something like this:
Like many 10 year olds, I loved playing war in my neighborhood. The battles were fierce with many cries of “I got you…No you didn’t…You have to die for 30 seconds…You missed…” Truth be told, I was still playing these games at 13. This particular day our group of 8 guys had been waging war for about an hour. I decided to come around from behind the enemy base and attack. It was a new approach and required me to run the ditch at the back of our neighborhood. Just as I was approaching the base I was spotted. I took off like a shot. Ducking in and out of branches and hopping rocks, I was making a great escape. Until….One moment I am running at full speed, and the next I am laying on my back unable to breath. The problem…I had run full speed into a barb wire fence. It hit my chest below my ribs and ripped up to my neck. There I was breathless, bleeding and wondering “What would this scar look like?”
OK…Maybe it’s crazy to think about a scar at that moment. The real bummer is that the scar faded and now you can’t even tell it happened. The reality is that we all have scars. Some are physical, but the most painful scars are the ones we have on the inside. They are wounds that others don’t see, but are all too real. What about you? Do you have the scar of loneliness? What about the scar of being betrayed? Do you wrestle with the scar of rejection? If you do, you are not alone. In fact, everyone deals with significant scars.
There is a story about a man with some significant scars. You can find it in Mark 1:40-45. Here is a man with a real problem. Wait a second…it’s not what you think. Yes, the leprosy was a problem, but it was the emotional scars that really crippled the man. Just think about it…No one wanted to get near a leper – the scar of rejection…He could not be with his family or friends – the scar of loneliness…No one cared for his needs anymore – the scar of betrayal. There is no doubt the pain ran deep. Then came Jesus!!!
“Moved with compassion, Jesus reached out and touched him. I am willing, he said. Be healed.” In an instant the man’s life changed. More than just the physical scars, Jesus healed him from the inside out. The Son of God touched a man who had not been touched in years. The scar of rejection gone!!! The Son of God embraced a man who had forgotten what a hug felt like. The scar of loneliness gone!! The Son of God took time to meet his needs. The scar of betrayal gone!! Jesus healed his scars.
Do you need to be embraced by Jesus? Do you need some scars removed. The truth is He is waiting to say “I am willing…be healed.” All you have to do is ask.
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Thursday, November 1, 2007
Devo from Bill Blair
Year Round Hunter
“You will seek me and you will find me, when you seek me with all your heart” Jer. 29:13
With hunting season in full swing, I’ll admit, it’s not easy to focus on much of anything else. It may start with your favorite hunting magazine but soon the fever takes over and you find yourself walking for hours in Bass Pro Shop, drooling over all the new scent eliminating gear, compound bows, and the latest fused bullets. For several weeks now you’ve been preparing for those crisp mornings filled with quiet waiting, cold fingers, and chance to land a massive buck. Perhaps your bow is ranged at 20, 30, and 40 yards and you’ve started shooting your broad-heads, or your scope is zeroed in and you’ve begun to expect the recoil and compensate for it. Your sleep is often interrupted by a sense of urgency to beat the light of morning to the woods.
Now the time is upon you, the woods are alive with squirrels and the occasional doe, but for all your preparation you’re at a loss for why you aren’t seeing the big guy. Did your truck lights spook him on your way in? Is he picking up your scent? Is the rut late this year? Has he moved to another part of the property?
Good hunters know that there is one element of preparation that is more important than any other when it comes time for deer season. This element gives the most advantage to hunters because it helps them focus on the area of greatest deer activity on the land. This is the element is known as scouting. Unlike other elements of preparation, scouting is year round. Good hunters don’t just appear when hunting season begins; rather, they take the careful time to be in the woods, checking the signs that deer leave, and tracing the patterns of the deer for shelter and feeding spots. Because nature produces different foods at different times, the sources of the deer’s food are periodically changing. Good hunters pay attention to these changes and adapt accordingly.
In the same way God is scouting after us. Though he knows our every movement, he seeks after us daily. With his whole heart he scouts the fields and woods of our lives hoping to spend time with us. He is excitedly awaiting the opportunities that we grant him to do something amazing in our lives. What if you granted him those opportunities every day? What if you sought him as heartily as he seeks after you? In the Bible, Jeremiah reminds us of how much God loves his people and how he longs to bring them into his presence. He knows us far better than we know him; however he created us to know him and to seek after him daily. He simply asks us to seek him out in the way he seeks us out… with all our heart.
Let’s pray, “Father God, I want to seek you with all my heart. I admit sometimes I have become too busy for you and that is ridiculous. I see now that you go to great lengths to draw me into your presence. I want to know you. Help me to stay in your presence, In Jesus name, Amen.”
Happy Hunting,
Bill Blair
“You will seek me and you will find me, when you seek me with all your heart” Jer. 29:13
With hunting season in full swing, I’ll admit, it’s not easy to focus on much of anything else. It may start with your favorite hunting magazine but soon the fever takes over and you find yourself walking for hours in Bass Pro Shop, drooling over all the new scent eliminating gear, compound bows, and the latest fused bullets. For several weeks now you’ve been preparing for those crisp mornings filled with quiet waiting, cold fingers, and chance to land a massive buck. Perhaps your bow is ranged at 20, 30, and 40 yards and you’ve started shooting your broad-heads, or your scope is zeroed in and you’ve begun to expect the recoil and compensate for it. Your sleep is often interrupted by a sense of urgency to beat the light of morning to the woods.
Now the time is upon you, the woods are alive with squirrels and the occasional doe, but for all your preparation you’re at a loss for why you aren’t seeing the big guy. Did your truck lights spook him on your way in? Is he picking up your scent? Is the rut late this year? Has he moved to another part of the property?
Good hunters know that there is one element of preparation that is more important than any other when it comes time for deer season. This element gives the most advantage to hunters because it helps them focus on the area of greatest deer activity on the land. This is the element is known as scouting. Unlike other elements of preparation, scouting is year round. Good hunters don’t just appear when hunting season begins; rather, they take the careful time to be in the woods, checking the signs that deer leave, and tracing the patterns of the deer for shelter and feeding spots. Because nature produces different foods at different times, the sources of the deer’s food are periodically changing. Good hunters pay attention to these changes and adapt accordingly.
In the same way God is scouting after us. Though he knows our every movement, he seeks after us daily. With his whole heart he scouts the fields and woods of our lives hoping to spend time with us. He is excitedly awaiting the opportunities that we grant him to do something amazing in our lives. What if you granted him those opportunities every day? What if you sought him as heartily as he seeks after you? In the Bible, Jeremiah reminds us of how much God loves his people and how he longs to bring them into his presence. He knows us far better than we know him; however he created us to know him and to seek after him daily. He simply asks us to seek him out in the way he seeks us out… with all our heart.
Let’s pray, “Father God, I want to seek you with all my heart. I admit sometimes I have become too busy for you and that is ridiculous. I see now that you go to great lengths to draw me into your presence. I want to know you. Help me to stay in your presence, In Jesus name, Amen.”
Happy Hunting,
Bill Blair
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Devotional from Ben Derrick
If you are like me, this whole idea of truth is a little confusing. It conjures up images of times when I was in trouble, and I knew that coming out with the “truth” was sure condemnation. In a way, I learned early that truth was a quick way to get into trouble. As I have gotten older, I have noticed that culture has adopted this same attitude toward truth. We are taught to avoid truth. And, in the instances where the truth is brought to bear, we are taught to be suspicious of it.
This attitude can have a dramatic affect on our faith. You see, since the time Christ came to tell us He was the truth people have been avoiding him and gazing from a distance with a large amount of skepticism. If we are not careful, we, as believers, will fall into this same sort of pattern. As you thumb through Scripture I want you to notice all the times that Jesus sought to bring people out of this posture into an experience with Him. He not only wanted them to know the truth, but he also wanted them to experience the truth. This then is how we are meant to live the Christian life. We are not simply designed to know the truth in Christ. We are designed to experience the truth in Christ by living a life following him not in the shadows but rather in the illuminating truth.
The question still remains, “If God is so big and before and after all things how can we, as limited creatures, really know the truth about Him?” I mean, haven’t we all had those people in our lives that we shared life with for days and years on end who because of some circumstance or some decision confuse us by their actions. We have all at one time or anther said of someone, “Man, you think you know someone.” If God is truth then how can we know truth? A great Christian thinker, N.T. Wright speaks to our dilemma when he writes:
If we are to speak of something that transcends space and time, that is beyond our ordinary world, how do we know what we are talking about? How can we know whether we are talking sense, let alone true sense? How can we be sure we are not (as Feuerbach, Freud, and others have suggested) merely projecting our own self-image or our authority-figure fantasies on to the cosmic stage and calling them “god.” The main stream Christian answer has always been that, though the one true God is in various ways beyond our imagination, let alone our knowledge, and though even such knowledge as we may have is beyond our own unaided power to obtain, this God has not left us to speculate, imagine, or project our own fantasies onto the screen of transcendence; this God instead, through self-revelation, has given us such knowledge as is possible and appropriate for us. And this same mainstream Christian answer has gone on to say that this self-revelation has taken place supremely in Jesus, the crucified and risen messiah of Israel.
The whole point of such a claim is, of course, that the one true God is known in Jesus himself, the human being who lived, worked, and died in first century Palestine. By close attention to Jesus himself, we are invited to discover, perhaps for the first time, just who the creator and covenant God was and is all along. And when we discover that, we discover that the claim to truth is not a power play. It is a love ploy – something that post modernity and the hermeneutic of suspicion cannot recognize but cannot ultimately deconstruct.
Man that is a long quote! What the heck does it mean? Well, it means that over time some people have seen the dilemma we are in about knowing the truth about God and decided that there is really no God. God is just something that we thought up because we needed Him. This idea is a little like a child who gets picked on a lot at school so they invent an imaginary friend that is always nice to them and helps them cope with the cruel world. This, however, is not what we as Christians believe. We believe God is real. We believe he is real in a big way a way that is bigger than our problems, our families, our successes, our failures, our past, our present, and our future. In one of the most amazing parts of any story ever, we see that even though God is this real and this big he wants us to know Him. WOW! He wants us to know him in a way that we can understand.
The main way God accomplished the task of allowing us to know Him was through Jesus. In the person of Jesus, we as people can see what God is like. What does he approve of? What does he say to people that are hurting? How does he react when people treat him poorly? All these questions have real answers that get us closer to the truth of who God is. He is a dependable truth. He is an absolute truth. If we are to try to see him from far away, we will never get to the heart of the matter. He is meant to be seen close-up. I encourage you to take some time right now and seek out this man who claimed He was the exact representation of God. That He was the truth. Start in Matthew chapter one and watch the truth unfold. You will be amazed at how available and vulnerable God actually has become to us through Jesus Christ. Take some time to get to know the truth.
This attitude can have a dramatic affect on our faith. You see, since the time Christ came to tell us He was the truth people have been avoiding him and gazing from a distance with a large amount of skepticism. If we are not careful, we, as believers, will fall into this same sort of pattern. As you thumb through Scripture I want you to notice all the times that Jesus sought to bring people out of this posture into an experience with Him. He not only wanted them to know the truth, but he also wanted them to experience the truth. This then is how we are meant to live the Christian life. We are not simply designed to know the truth in Christ. We are designed to experience the truth in Christ by living a life following him not in the shadows but rather in the illuminating truth.
The question still remains, “If God is so big and before and after all things how can we, as limited creatures, really know the truth about Him?” I mean, haven’t we all had those people in our lives that we shared life with for days and years on end who because of some circumstance or some decision confuse us by their actions. We have all at one time or anther said of someone, “Man, you think you know someone.” If God is truth then how can we know truth? A great Christian thinker, N.T. Wright speaks to our dilemma when he writes:
If we are to speak of something that transcends space and time, that is beyond our ordinary world, how do we know what we are talking about? How can we know whether we are talking sense, let alone true sense? How can we be sure we are not (as Feuerbach, Freud, and others have suggested) merely projecting our own self-image or our authority-figure fantasies on to the cosmic stage and calling them “god.” The main stream Christian answer has always been that, though the one true God is in various ways beyond our imagination, let alone our knowledge, and though even such knowledge as we may have is beyond our own unaided power to obtain, this God has not left us to speculate, imagine, or project our own fantasies onto the screen of transcendence; this God instead, through self-revelation, has given us such knowledge as is possible and appropriate for us. And this same mainstream Christian answer has gone on to say that this self-revelation has taken place supremely in Jesus, the crucified and risen messiah of Israel.
The whole point of such a claim is, of course, that the one true God is known in Jesus himself, the human being who lived, worked, and died in first century Palestine. By close attention to Jesus himself, we are invited to discover, perhaps for the first time, just who the creator and covenant God was and is all along. And when we discover that, we discover that the claim to truth is not a power play. It is a love ploy – something that post modernity and the hermeneutic of suspicion cannot recognize but cannot ultimately deconstruct.
Man that is a long quote! What the heck does it mean? Well, it means that over time some people have seen the dilemma we are in about knowing the truth about God and decided that there is really no God. God is just something that we thought up because we needed Him. This idea is a little like a child who gets picked on a lot at school so they invent an imaginary friend that is always nice to them and helps them cope with the cruel world. This, however, is not what we as Christians believe. We believe God is real. We believe he is real in a big way a way that is bigger than our problems, our families, our successes, our failures, our past, our present, and our future. In one of the most amazing parts of any story ever, we see that even though God is this real and this big he wants us to know Him. WOW! He wants us to know him in a way that we can understand.
The main way God accomplished the task of allowing us to know Him was through Jesus. In the person of Jesus, we as people can see what God is like. What does he approve of? What does he say to people that are hurting? How does he react when people treat him poorly? All these questions have real answers that get us closer to the truth of who God is. He is a dependable truth. He is an absolute truth. If we are to try to see him from far away, we will never get to the heart of the matter. He is meant to be seen close-up. I encourage you to take some time right now and seek out this man who claimed He was the exact representation of God. That He was the truth. Start in Matthew chapter one and watch the truth unfold. You will be amazed at how available and vulnerable God actually has become to us through Jesus Christ. Take some time to get to know the truth.
Thursday, September 27, 2007
Who said it?
Match the quote with the person who said it, (answers next month)
1) Adolf Hitler (WW II German ruler) “Fine words and insinuating appearance are seldom
associated with true virtue.”
2) Blaise Pascal
(Famous mathematician) “Many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on
our point of view.”
3) Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
(Author- Sherlock Holmes) “Truth is truth, to the end of reckoning.”
4) Aristotle (Philosopher) “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all
men are created equal, and that they are
5) Thomas Jefferson endowed by their creator with certain unalien-
able rights, that among these are Life, Liberty,
6) William Shakespeare and the pursuit of Happiness.”
7) George Lucas (Star Wars) “You can’t handle the truth!”
8) Confucius “We know the truth, not only by the reason, but
by the heart.”
9) Jack Nickolson
(Actor-“A Few Good Men”) “When you have eliminated the impossible,
whatever remains, however improbable, must
10) Mark Twain be the truth.”
“Liars, when they speak the truth, are not
believed”
“The victor will never be asked if he told the
truth.”
“The truth is stranger than fiction.”
It’s funny that even when we don’t know who said something, we still largely base our beliefs about something on what another said about it. So many people say that truth is relative- depends on the situation. By the very definition of the word “truth,” there can be only one “truth.” Truth is not subjective, that is, it does not depend on circumstances or people’s views to be verified, it simply is. There can be a lot of things that are true and there can be a lot of true statements, but there is only one ultimate truth.
Most of the time when Jesus spoke, he began the statement with the words, “I tell you the truth,” (just look in your concordance in the back of your Bible under “truth” and see how many times the guy said it). If we know anything about the character of Jesus, we know that statement was consistent with his character- he always told the truth. Very noble of the dude, but what makes him unique among all other people who have ever breathed air on this planet, was the fact that he said he was the truth (John 14:6). That’s a pretty bold claim, not that he knew the truth, or that he knew some true things, no, he said he was the truth. Have you ever wondered at the magnitude of that statement? The word truth appears in the Bible hundreds of times, but only once does someone say that he is the truth.
Why would someone make a claim like that? Well, he either was an idiot, or he was lying, or it really was true, those are thee only explanations. It doesn’t seem consistent with his character to always tell the truth except in that one instance. It also doesn’t seem consistent with what we know about the guy through historical writings that he was a raving lunatic either. So what does that leave us? The only possibility left is that he really was the truth. What does that mean? It means that he is the measuring stick for truth. If he said it, it was true, because he is the truth. If he did it, it was true, because he is the truth. If he told people to follow his example, it was because he is the truth.
What are some instances in the Scriptures where you can see examples of Jesus not merely being true, but being the truth?
How did Jesus being the truth, impact those around him?
How did Jesus being the truth, change the way people looked at truth?
Some passages to consider:
Luke 8:26-39. John 11:1-44. Matthew 5:1-12.
In preparation for Breakthru, I would challenge you to keep a journal. What you say, a journal? Yes, a journal, and in this I would challenge you to observe around you all of the world’s attempts to mold your idea of what is true and what is not. My challenge to you is to observe the world’s dastardly way of defining truth and how in his day the person of Jesus countered those ideas with some new radical ideas of his own, namely himself. If you want to get yourself ready for truth, then I can think of no better way than to start getting to know the person of Jesus- I mean really getting to know him, because, after all, he is the truth.
Looking forward to rocking with you all at Sumatanga, God bless.
Your “zany” pal,
Greg Taylor
Sunday, August 26, 2007
New Website! New Blog!
30 years; 18,000 teenagers; 900 nights of worship; 300 seminars; over 60 churches. All with one message: Jesus Christ! BreakThru Ministries celebrates an amazing milestone this year as 30 years of reaching students becomes a reality.
Since its first retreat in 1978, BreakThru has always been about God’s truth revealed in Jesus Christ. This years theme: TRUTH will continue that commitment. You will be challenged, encouraged and surprised at every turn.
We have launched this web site so that you can check out information, details, exciting updates, and special offerings as we count down the days to December 28. From devotions to downloads, this will be your one stop shop for all the latest BreakThru news.
I’ll be looking for you on December 28. Get ready….BreakThru 2008 is coming!!
David Cooke
Executive Director
BreakThru
Since its first retreat in 1978, BreakThru has always been about God’s truth revealed in Jesus Christ. This years theme: TRUTH will continue that commitment. You will be challenged, encouraged and surprised at every turn.
We have launched this web site so that you can check out information, details, exciting updates, and special offerings as we count down the days to December 28. From devotions to downloads, this will be your one stop shop for all the latest BreakThru news.
I’ll be looking for you on December 28. Get ready….BreakThru 2008 is coming!!
David Cooke
Executive Director
BreakThru
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