Author: BTP

“The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord: and he delighteth in His [the Lord’s] way” (Psalm 37:23).

As I write this in December, 2022, we have quite a bit of snow on the ground where I live. Most of it fell during the past two or three days, and it is very beautiful before anyone disturbs it. But soon tracks begin to appear—tracks of animals, tracks of human beings, and tracks of cars, trucks, etc. Certain animals like squirrels, birds, mice, and other winter animals have very characteristic tracks, as do some human beings.

At the beginning of a new year, we have the ability to make a fresh start. What kind of tracks are you going to make? Are you going to allow the Lord to order your steps, or are you going to take your own way? If you know the Lord Jesus as your Savior, He wants to order your way. It is the happy path, and if we want to follow Him, we will find that we delight in His way. We do not know how much longer we will be in this world, but the Lord wants to lead and guide us until He calls us home.

“We await the Lord Jesus as Savior, who shall transform our body of humiliation into conformity to His body of glory” (Philippians 3:20-21 JND).

Here we are at the end of another year, and once again it is good to be reminded of the Lord’s coming for us. I hope that for each of us, our first hope is to see the face of our Lord Jesus Christ, the One who died for us. But something else will happen when the Lord comes too. We will instantly have glorified bodies. It will not be a “brand new” body, but rather the same body, changed into a body like Christ’s. There will be no more evidence in our bodies of aging or disease, nor will there be any marks from injuries that have perhaps left scars and disfiguring, such as happened to those soldiers that we considered over the last two days. Those believers who were blind will see, those who were crippled will walk, and those who were mentally challenged will be completely normal. What a day that will be!

“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9).

God’s Word is sometimes like a mirror to our hearts, in that His Word exposes what we are by nature. If we are not saved, it is good to look in God’s mirror, and to realize how sinful our hearts really are. We may think that we are not all that bad, compared to other people, but when we look into God’s mirror, it is not a good picture.

But God has a remedy for our sinful hearts; He wants to give us new life in Christ. Then, like the doctor we mentioned yesterday, God does not want us to be thinking about what we were like before we were saved; He wants us to realize what we are in Christ. When a soldier had sustained a war injury, Dr. Gillies could never make his face totally right, but when God gives us new life in Christ, it is like getting a new face. That new life wants to please God.

“His visage [face] was so marred more than any man” (Isaiah 52:14).

We have already had this verse before us about six months ago, but it is always good to remember how much our Lord Jesus Christ suffered for us. But back during World War I, many soldiers had their faces severely disfigured by terrible burns, bombs, gunshot wounds, and even being kicked in the face by horses. A doctor named Harold Gillies established a hospital in England devoted to facial reconstruction, and he did his best to help restore the faces of many of those men. Of course, he could never totally repair the damage, but he made most of those faces look much better. However, there was one thing he would never allow in his hospital; there were no mirrors! He did not want a man whose face had been shattered to look at himself, and become discouraged or upset. He wanted him to wait until the surgery had been done, and his face looked a lot better. Is there a lesson in this for us? We will look at that tomorrow.

“And he made the laver of copper, and its stand of copper, of the mirrors of the crowds of women who crowded before the entrance of the tent of meeting” (Exodus 38:8 JND).

Nowadays we are used to nice mirrors in our houses, made of glass with a special coating on the back so that they reflect an image very well. However, in the days when Israel was going through the wilderness, they had to use copper mirrors. They were not as good as glass mirrors, but if they were polished well, they would reflect an image satisfactorily.

However, these women willingly gave up their copper looking glasses so that they could be melted down and used to make the laver for the tabernacle. The laver was for the priests to wash their hands and feet, before they went into the tabernacle to perform their service there.

No doubt the women thought that they could do without those mirrors, so instead of looking at themselves, they helped to build the laver for the service of the tabernacle. Tomorrow we will speak about another situation in which there were no mirrors.

“Freely ye have received, freely give” (Matthew 10:9).

If you read this chapter in Matthew, you will find that the Lord Jesus sends His twelve disciples out to preach. When they preached, they were also to heal the sick, raise the dead, cast out devils, etc., with the Lord’s power. They had received the Lord’s message for themselves, and they were freely to give it out. They were also to do works of miracles freely, for God is a giving God.

This is good advice for us too. We have received salvation freely, and we should freely tell others about the Lord Jesus. If we have received more than we need in other resources, such as money, we should be willing to help others. We should also be willing to do things for others in the name of the Lord Jesus, without getting paid for it. I knew a Christian man who changed a tire for a woman who was stopped on the highway with a flat tire, and did not know what to do. When she offered to pay him, he refused, telling her that He did it in the name of the Lord Jesus. Then he was able to speak to her about being saved, and give her a gospel tract.

“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16).

The little girl was a bit afraid to tell her father what had made her so happy, as she thought he might be cross with her for picking up the torn piece of paper. But she told him what the paper said, and that it made her happy to think that God had given something.

As you may imagine, her father was not cross with her, as the piece of paper was only scrap anyway. But he readily showed her the other half of the verse, about how God had actually given His beloved Son. Eventually the little girl learned the whole story of the love of God, and how the Lord Jesus had died for her, so that her sins could be washed away. Then she got saved, and was even happier than before. All this happened because a scrap of paper was on the floor, with only part of a verse on it!

“For God so loved the world, that He gave” (John 3:16).

Most of you who read this calendar will know the above verse by heart, and perhaps you will wonder why I have quoted only part of the verse. But there is a story attached to this.

About 500 years ago, when the printing press had just been invented, a young girl had a father who operated a printing press and made his living printing things for people. Among other things he printed verses from the Bible. One day she was in his shop, and found a torn piece of paper on the floor, with only the words from John 3:16 that I have quoted today. The rest of the verse had been torn off. She picked it up and read it, and it made her glad. She did not know what God had given, but it gave her great joy to think that God had given something, as she had never heard the gospel before.

She was so happy that she started to sing as she went around the house, and her whole life changed. She was much more cheerful than she had been before, and after a while, her father asked her what had happened, and what had made the difference. We will find out tomorrow what she said, and what happened.

“God hath not given us the spirit of fear…but of a sound mind” (2 Timothy 1:7).

Finally, in the same verse we have considered three times, we have the phrase “a sound mind.” Another good translation of the Bible translates this phrase as “wise discretion.” Perhaps “discretion” is a big word that we do not use very much today, but it simply means having the wisdom to know when to do something, and the right way to do it. It is not enough just to have the power to do something, and the love in our hearts to want to do it. We must ask the Lord for wisdom, so as to know when to do it, and how. Harm has often been done by those who had the strength to do something right, and even the love as a motive to do it, but did not use wisdom.

Only by walking with the Lord, and with the guidance of His Holy Spirit, can we have the wisdom to know when and how to do things.

“God hath not given us the spirit of fear…but of love” (2 Timothy 1:7).

When things are going downhill among believers, we may try to prop them up by introducing rules, using our own strength and ideas to hold things together. Here we are told that one of the characteristics of the spirit that God gives us is love. This means divine love—a love that keeps on loving, even if love is not returned by the one to whom we are showing love. This is not easy, and we can do it only because we have a new life in Christ that makes us capable of it.

Divine love does not take a casual approach to something wrong, but always seeks the good of the person who is loved. That means that even if we feel obliged to say something to someone about the way he or she is acting, it should be done with love. It makes a big difference!