Archive for Pictures of God

Marriage Supper of the Lamb

2016-12-15 Devotional with Hymn, Pictures of God No comments

from the devotional book, PICTURES OF GOD

Read Revelation 19:7-9

In New Testament times, marriages actually began with the betrothal. For a time, the two individuals were considered husband and wife, even though they didn’t live together. They were fully obligated to be faithful to each other. The wedding itself took place after the betrothal period and began with a procession to the bride’s house. The wedding party then returned to the house of the groom for the marriage feast.

In the same way, we the Church are engaged to Christ (2 Corinthians 11:2). We are eagerly awaiting our wedding day, when the Groom will return for His bride and take us with Him to heaven for the marriage feast, which will go on through all eternity.

To imagine what all that will be like, visualize a perfect marriage between Jesus and His people – an eternal union full of intimacy, love, joy, and all the very best of life. Forever we will celebrate together with a grand marriage feast.

Scriptures throughout the Old and New Testaments help us anticipate this marriage supper of the Lamb:

  • Isaiah’s prophecy regarding the Lord’s lavish banquet for all peoples (Isaiah 25:6-10a)
  • The Lord’s Supper (Matthew 26:26-29; Mark 14:22-25; Luke 22:17-20; 1 Corinthians 11:23-26)
  • The parable of the marriage feast (Luke 14:15-24)
  • The Emmaus meal (Luke 24:13-35)
  • Breakfast with His disciples (John 21)

To our surprise, however, Revelation refers to this feast yet gives us no details about it. But elsewhere scripture gives us glimpses:

  • We will feast on all the best nourishment of life. God will remove forever all death, all crying, and all our shame. Our long wait for the fullness of God will finally be over (Isaiah 25:6-10a).
  • People will gather from all over the earth and feast together (Luke 13:29).
  • Christ will have fully cleansed His bride and made her holy, spotless, and beautiful, fully adorned for her Husband (Ephesians 5:25-27; Revelation 21:1-4).

What will it be like when this long-awaited occasion is not just metaphor, but full reality?

Listen and sing:
Hymn: Come, Our Lord!
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The Banquet

2016-11-24 Devotional, Pictures of God No comments

from the devotional book, PICTURES OF GOD

Read Isaiah 24:1-3, 19-23; 25:1-10a

Are you ready for a sobering view of the future? Read Isaiah 24. It tells about the day when God judges the entire earth. As He has promised, He will cleanse this world of all evil in every form. He will remove everything that is not absolute truth, everything that is not love, everything that is not of Himself. Injustice, greed, lies, selfish lust – it will all be burned away. Imagine the devastation to the current world order! The entire earth will be shaken to its very core before the Unshakable Kingdom becomes reality:

Then the moon will be abashed and the sun ashamed,
For the Lord of hosts will reign on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem.
(Isaiah 24:23, NASB)

Or, in the words of Revelation 11:15:

The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ, and He will reign forever and ever. (NASB)

Isaiah 25:1-5 is then a hymn of praise to the Almighty King who brought about such judgment and salvation.

But notice especially the verses that follow, Isaiah 25:6-10a. Now that the Holy and Sovereign Lord of the Universe has re-asserted His rule, He celebrates by throwing a lavish banquet.

Of course, He will spread out all the very best nourishment for all His people. But pause and imagine what He promises in verses 7-8:

  • God will finally “swallow up the covering which is over all peoples, even the veil which is stretched over all nations. He will swallow up death for all time” (v.7-8a, NASB). Wow! And this was written many centuries before Christ.
  • “The Lord God will wipe tears away from all faces” (v.8b, NASB).
  • All the cursed fruit of all our sin – all our suffering, all our disgrace, all the shame that has engulfed our entire race – will be removed forever. He has spoken, and He Himself will do it (v.8c).

After all God’s people have gone through, imagine them crying this together, with all their hearts:

“Behold, this is our God for whom we have waited that He might save us.
This is the Lord for whom we have waited.
Let us rejoice and be glad in His salvation.” (v.9, NASB)

All that our hearts have longed for is coming. It will be full reality. Wait patiently.

How Do We Keep the Lord’s Supper Meaningful?

2016-11-10 Devotional, Pictures of God No comments

from the devotional book, PICTURES OF GOD

There is nothing magic about the Lord’s Supper. The eating and drinking in themselves won’t save us. They won’t draw us closer to God. They can become dry routine like anything else. How can we keep them meaningful?

  • The Lord’s Supper is a remembrance. Remember. Remember what He did, and remember He did it for you. Remember how dear was the price.
  • The Lord’s Supper is a celebration. Come joyfully! Rejoice in what He has done!
  • The Lord’s Supper is a feast. Your Banquet Host has spread a rich table of life and love for His people. Come and partake!
  • The Lord’s Supper is a means of grace. Realize how unworthy you are. Come humbly. Come seeking. Come with thanksgiving.
  • The Lord’s Supper is a foretaste, an anticipation. Look ahead to what it will be to sit down with Christ and all His people at the marriage supper of the Lamb. 
  • The Lord’s Supper is for all God’s people. Come with them, as a member of His beloved family. Be conscious of the togetherness. Enjoy His grace with His other children.

The Meaning of the Lord’s Supper

2016-10-20 Devotional with Hymn, Pictures of God No comments

from the devotional book, PICTURES OF GOD

Read Matthew 26:26-29; Mark 14:22-25; Luke 22:17-20; 1 Corinthians 11:23-26

Four times scripture narrates Jesus’ institution of the Lord’s Supper. Please read them all as listed above. As Jesus did this, what was He wanting us to understand? What did He want us to never forget?

  • He Himself is our deliverance, so He redefined how we celebrate our deliverance. The unleavened bread had symbolized the pressured situation in which the Passover deliverance happened. They didn’t have time for the bread to rise. That bread, broken and distributed for their strengthening, was now His own body, broken for them. The wine, with which they celebrated together, was now His own blood, His very life poured out for them.
  • Jesus was acting out the truth He had spoken in John 6: “I am the bread God has sent you from heaven. Eat my flesh and drink my blood, and you will receive eternal life” (see John 6:48-58).
  • The Lord’s Supper symbolized a new covenant. The old covenant demanded our obedience, an obedience we were too weak to give. The new covenant tells us that Christ has bought our redemption and has fulfilled the law. We must simply trust and feast on Him.
  • Remember God’s past deliverance, and it will help you anticipate its completion. You are part of the entire sweep of God’s marvelous work of salvation.
  • Some truths are too important to commit to words alone. In the Lord’s Supper we remember with all our senses. We see, hear, smell, taste, and touch.

The scene is made more poignant by remembering its highly personal nature. Jesus was there with His closest friends, with whom He had lived day and night for three years. In Luke’s account, Jesus expresses His frame of mind this way: “I have earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer” (Luke 22:15, NASB).

John says this: Jesus knowing that His hour had come…having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them to the end [or “to the uttermost”] (John 13:1, NASB).

Jesus had tried to communicate what was about to happen, and they couldn’t grasp it. So He acted it out for them. That first communion was not a formal ceremony. It was friend to friend and face to face.

Listen and sing:
Hymn: Lord, from Your Hand
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The Lord’s Supper and Passover

2016-09-29 Devotional with Hymn, Pictures of God No comments

from the devotional book, PICTURES OF GOD

Read Exodus 12:1-28, 43-51

When Jesus initiated the Lord’s Supper, He and His disciples were celebrating Passover. To understand the Lord’s Supper, we must look briefly at Passover.

Passover memorialized God’s deliverance from the hopeless and bitter bondage of slavery into the glorious freedom of God’s chosen and blessed people.

Read the Exodus 12 account of Passover while keeping the Lord’s Supper in mind. What parallels do you see? Here are a few:

  • Both were remembrances, re-enactments of God’s salvation. God reveals Himself primarily by His actions, and some memories of His actions are too important to be entrusted to words alone. Both Passover and the Lord’s Supper were ways of physically acting out what God had done for His people.
  • The Lord’s Supper, the new Passover, is so sweeping that it makes the first Passover, which is glorious in its own right, into a mere foreshadowing of what God did for us in Christ.
  • The first Passover celebrates the defeat of the greatest power among nations, the oppressor of God’s people. The Lord’s Supper celebrates the defeat of all evil.
  • With Passover, God demonstrated His power through killing Egypt’s firstborn. With the Lord’s Supper, God demonstrated His love by offering His own firstborn.
  • Jesus invested the bread and wine, parts of the Passover meal, with a new meaning. They became symbols of His own body and His own blood. He Himself was the meal God offered.
  • Jesus became the unblemished Passover Lamb on whom God’s people feasted. It was His blood that saved them from death.

Listen and sing:
Hymn: Remember Your Lord
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Better Bread

2016-09-15 Devotional with Hymn, Pictures of God No comments

from the devotional book, PICTURES OF GOD

Read John 6:26-34

The crowd that Jesus had fed from the loaves and fishes followed Him to other side of the Sea of Galilee. When they caught up with Him, their opening question was, “Rabbi, when did you get here?” (John 6:25, NASB). Jesus knew what they really wanted, so He ignored their question and cut straight to the point:

“Truly, truly, I say to you, you seek Me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate of the loaves and were filled.” (John 6:26, NASB)

A “sign” is a miracle intended to verify the truth of a teaching. Jesus intended the feeding of the five thousand to be a sign pointing to Himself as the Bread of Life, the satisfaction for all their deepest hungers. The crowd didn’t see the sign, only the free food. For people who worked hard for daily bread, free food was a powerful motivator. But Jesus continued to press them to understand the real purpose of the sign: 

“Do not work for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you, for on Him the Father, God, has set His seal.” (John 6:27, NASB)

He urged them to look beyond physical bread, shallow and temporary. He tried to redirect them toward Himself as the satisfaction for all their deeper needs. But their hearts were focused on themselves, not on Him, and on their physical desires, not their spiritual needs.

They pointed out that Moses had provided manna in the wilderness and suggested that Jesus should do the same for them. But they were missing the point. Manna had been intended to teach the people to depend on God, not on physical bread:

He humbled you and let you be hungry, and fed you with manna…that He might make you understand that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord. (Deuteronomy 8:3, NASB)

Their self-centered, materialistic hearts were causing them to overlook God’s greater provision, just as the Jews in the wilderness had done.

What needs are you feeling in your life right now? God is using them to draw you to Himself.

Listen and sing:
Hymn: We Taste Your Life and Long for More
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True Food

2016-08-25 Devotional, Pictures of God No comments

from the devotional book, PICTURES OF GOD

Read Isaiah 55

Isaiah ministered in the 700’s B.C., long before Judah’s exile. But the book that bears his name refers to times far in the future: their exile, their return, and beyond to the Messiah.

From Isaiah 40 on, God has been talking about the wonderful redemption and restoration that He would bring about through Messiah. With all that complete and available, in chapter 55 He issues an invitation.

In verses 1-2, who is He inviting? All who are thirsty, and those who have no money.

What is He offering? Water…but more: wine, milk, and bread, nourishing and delicious.

What are the terms of His offer? Everything is free. No money needed. All you have to do is want this food, and come to receive it.

This is true food and drink. Unlike our usual food, this won’t just nourish your body for a few hours. It will nourish your essential life, your complete self, and it will do so forever. It will totally satisfy you! It’s like a buffet of all the most delicious, nutritious foods. Just come, eat your fill for free, and “delight yourself in abundance” (Isaiah 55:2b, NASB).

What does this passage tell you about God? What picture does it draw of Him?

  • He is a Banquet Host who loves to give His very best.
  • He gives it all freely and joyfully. This host enjoys entertaining and giving.
  • He hates to see us wasting our entire lives on what is shallow and temporary, on what will only keep our bodies going for a few more hours. He is passionately concerned about our deepest, most lasting benefit.

Seven centuries later, this Banquet Host would send His only Son from heaven to earth to make the same offer in person:

“If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who says to you, ‘Give Me a drink,’ you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water. 

“Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again; but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never thirst; but the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water spring up to eternal life.” (John 4:10, 13-14, NASB)

Psalm 65

2016-07-28 Devotional with Hymn, Pictures of God No comments

from the devotional book, PICTURES OF GOD 

All the silence of our most profound worship,
All the exuberant joy of our unbridled praise,
All the promises we have ever made,
All the hopeful prayers our hearts have whispered
we give to You alone, our Lord, our Almighty God, our Father!

We are sin.
We are weakness.
We are deepest need in all its forms.
Yet You choose us.
You draw us near to You.
You pour out Your goodness,
deeper and more varied than all our need.
You abundantly satisfy all our hungers
with all You are.

Your creation teaches us,
reminds us,
engulfs us
in Your power,
Your mystery,
Your faithfulness, and
Your joyful generosity.
Every sunset, every sunrise
sings of You.
Every rainfall permeates our world with Your blessings.
Every harvest celebrates
Your overflowing, never-failing goodness.
The pastures, the hills, the forests, and the valleys join the dance,
the dance that began at creation and
will never end.

O Lord, how many are Your works!
In wisdom You have made them all.
All that is, is Yours! (Psalm 104:24, para.)

Listen and sing:
Hymn: You Are Good
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Our Shepherd Forever

2016-06-30 Devotional, Pictures of God No comments

from the devotional book, PICTURES OF GOD

Revelation 7:9-17

When God’s timeless purposes are complete, when He has done in Christ everything He ever wanted to do for His people, what will our relationship with Him be?

They are before the throne of God; and they serve Him day and night in His temple; and He who sits on the throne will spread His tabernacle over them. They will hunger no longer, nor thirst anymore; nor will the sun beat down on them, nor any heat; for the Lamb in the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and will guide them to springs of the water of life; and God will wipe every tear from the eyes. (Revelation 7:15-17, NASB)

Psalm 23:1 will be full reality for each of God’s people.

The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing. (NIV)

As the Good Shepherd, the glorified Christ will pasture them:

They will hunger no longer. (Revelation 7:16a, NASB) 

He will lead them “beside quiet waters” (Psalm 23:2b, NASB):

“…nor will they thirst anymore…for the Lamb…will guide them to springs of the water of life.” (Revelation 7:16-17, NASB)

He will meet their every need in full measure: 

God will wipe every tear from their eyes. (Revelation 7:17b, NASB)

As the Good Shepherd, God Himself will be their shelter and protection:

They are before the throne of God; and they serve Him day and night in His temple; and He who sits on the throne will spread His tabernacle over them. (Revelation 7:15, NASB)

He will be with His flock personally, constantly, completely, and forever. “The Lord is my Shepherd.” What a beautiful picture of God’s love!

Feed My Sheep

2016-05-26 Devotional with Hymn, Pictures of God No comments

from the devotional book, PICTURES OF GOD

Read John 21:1-17

The setting was the Sea of Galilee (also called the Sea of Tiberias) after Jesus’ resurrection. Peter had gone fishing, which was his former profession, and six other disciples had joined him. Jesus appeared, and without introducing Himself, blessed them with a huge catch of fish, then cooked them breakfast on the shore. What had been frustrating work was now rewarding and relaxing.

After breakfast, Jesus and Peter apparently got alone and had a conversation in private. Jesus was probably looking straight into Peter’s eyes when He asked him,

“Simon, son of John, do you love Me more these?” (John 21:15, NASB)

What did Jesus mean by “more than these”? More than Peter loved the other disciples? Or perhaps more than the other disciples loved Jesus? Maybe, but it seems more likely that Jesus was asking if Peter loved Him more than fishing and the other familiar, comfortable things in life to which Peter had now returned. In any case, He was pointedly asking Peter where He stood in Peter’s values.

Jesus basically asked the same question three times, using two different words for “feeding” or “taking care of” sheep, two different words for “sheep” (“sheep” and “lambs”), two different words for “love”, and two different words for “knowing”. Some make much of these differences, but I think Jesus was using virtual synonyms to drive home His point. He was gently giving Peter the chance to reaffirm his love after Peter had denied Jesus three times on the night of His trial.

How did Jesus ask Peter to prove his love?

“Tend My lambs…
“Shepherd My sheep…
“Tend My sheep.” (John 21:15-17, NASB)

What is the best way to thank our Shepherd and express our love for Him? Feed His sheep. Nurture those He loves. Jesus has the heart of a Shepherd, and He longs for us to join Him in that work.

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