Bible Verses

The Warrior’s Psalm

Bob Boardman was a member of the U.S. First Marine Division fighting in the Pacific during World War II.

Serving as part of a tank crew on the Pacific island of Peleliu, he found dread a constant companion.

“It was a fearful place,” he says. “The island was a big coral rock, and the Japanese were hidden away in five hundred coral caves, both natural and man-made. We had to rout out the enemy cave by cave.”

When he had a spare moment, Boardman consoled himself by reading the small Bible he had been given. As he made his way through the Psalms, he found solace in one particular passage that spoke to his fears.

It was Psalm 18, and an introductory note indicated the conditions under which it was written: “David sang to the LORD the words of this song when the LORD delivered him from the hand of all his enemies and from the hand of Saul.”

Boardman called David’s words his constant refuge on Peleliu. Daily he faced the challenge of placing his ultimate faith in God, his Rock, rather than being intimidated by the rock caves in which danger dwelt.

He still refers to the passage as “the warrior’s psalm” and turns to it often, both when he is speaking to the public and when he seeks reassurance of God’s presence in his life.

The opening lines of the psalm reveal that David was familiar with the fears that beset soldiers. But mixed with his fears were notes of hope and confidence in God, his Redeemer:

Centuries before modern warfare turned Asia and Europe into killing grounds, David’s psalm conveyed the horrors of war: “The earth trembled and quaked, / and the foundations of the mountains shook” (v. 7).

It’s been said that war is hell, but Boardman’s experience during World War II demonstrated to him that even in the chaos and carnage of warfare, those who trust God can experience a foretaste of heaven: “He reached down from on high and took hold of me; he drew me out of deep waters. He rescued me from my powerful enemy” (vv. 16-17).

For Bob Boardman and many others who’ve seen the cruel face of war, the assurance of God’s presence has been a powerful spiritual lifeline.

Father, in the midst of life’s turmoil and strife, help me place my trust in you.

Developing A Long View

The beauty of our world is tainted by the ugliness we see all around us. Headlines shout the carnage that man thrusts upon man. Several years ago Steve and I visited Israel.

We traveled to Tiberius, on the Sea of Galilee, and spent several days touring that area.

It was beautiful and peaceful—except for the reminder of trouble when we saw machine-gun-toting soldiers standing on street corners.

We also visited Jerusalem, staying in a lovely hotel within walking distance of many sites. The city bustled with activity as Jewish and Arab people came.

One night we walked the streets of a local shopping area and watched Jewish teenagers hanging out in a pizza shop and coffeehouses, much the same way kids all over the world congregate with friends.

A few months later, we learned that a suicide bomber blew apart the pizza shop in that area. We had been right there. Those laughing youths we saw might have been in the midst of the terror.

Then on September 11, 2001, terror hit America, sending waves of concern across a land that such attacks had not touched.

Battles rage. Cities are destroyed. People kill each other and do much of the terror in the name of God, or a god.

Where is our hope?

This verse from Revelation tells us. It declares that God himself will make everything new. “He will wipe every tear from their eyes.

We are now living under the old order. Satan infiltrates our world. Sin works its destruction. God is available to any who earnestly seek him, but many do not.

But we have a wonderful promise when the end of this world as we know it comes about. God will make everything fresh, untouched by sin, perfect.

I think that God gave this message to John and commanded him to write it down so that we would not lose hope.

When we become discouraged or afraid, we can fix our eyes ahead—develop a long view—and see that evil will not win out in the end.

God will one day unleash his power on all of the world and he will emerge the victor. In that, we can have great hope.

Knowing that evil’s power is limited, we can look past the present with all its harrowing images of oppression, war, and evil men.

We can place our hope in the promises of God, grieve for the troubles of the moment but raise our eyes and our hearts to the reality of an awesome God who will work all things to his good.

Father, our world seems so much more dangerous than it did a few years ago. Our eyes have witnessed the horror that man can do to man.

Please help us to keep hope alive by looking beyond the devastation to you. Thank you for your promises and the future we have waiting for us.

Making The Most Of Your Opportunities

Have you ever been to a store or post office where customers take a number and wait in a long line until the number is called?

One cold and snowy December day, I journeyed to a local post office carrying a mound of boxes full of Christmas presents for faraway family and friends.

Entering the crowded waiting room, I struggled with my boxes and extended a hand to grab a number from the dispenser near the front door. I pulled number 94.

The sign above the counter, where four busy employees were moving as fast as they could, said the latest number called was 52.

Usually, when I go to the post office, I take something to read with me just in case.

This time I had forgotten, which was too bad, because I probably could have read significant portions of Tolstoy’s mammoth War and Peace.

The milling crowd of customers moved with geologic slowness. After I had been waiting for half an hour, the sign above the counter said “Now Serving: 74.”

By the time the workers were up to the mideighties, I felt like I was in a slow-motion daze. Then the next thing I knew, I looked up and the sign said 96.

After waiting for more than an hour, I had missed my turn.

During my long wait, I wondered if the scene I saw at the post office was anything like what God must deal with on a daily basis as he tries to answer the prayers of millions of people around the world.

But God isn’t like a harried postal worker. God is omnipresent (he is everywhere at once).

God is omniscient (he knows everything including all the prayer requests people make even before they pray). God is omnipotent (he is all-powerful).

Still, Isaiah suggests there are times when we can’t find God, as if like a busy postal worker he had hung up his “Out to lunch” sign.

But God isn’t ever unavailable. Isaiah’s book repeatedly shows that God makes himself available to us, even when we don’t take advantage of the opportunity.

God isn’t out to lunch, but there are plenty of times when we are. Perhaps we become too overwhelmed with the cares of daily life.

Or perhaps we become so busy that we don’t take thirty seconds to listen to God’s still, small voice speaking in our hearts.

God is always here, even if our own attitudes and behavior make him seem a million miles away He is always calling our “number.”

Father, thank you for being there for me. Help me not to take you for granted.

Sins As Scarlet

The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery.

In the Law, Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him.

But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. When they kept on questioning him, he . . . said to them, “If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.” . . . Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are they?

Has no one condemned you?”

It’s a scandalous story set in seventeenth-century Boston. A married woman named Hester Prynne has an adulterous affair with a young pastor named Arthur Dimmesdale.

Author Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter shows us how the religious leaders of Boston dealt with adulterers. In the case of Hester Prynne, they made her wear the red letter A on her clothing.

No one discovers Dimmesdale’s complicity until later in the story, so he doesn’t have to wear a symbol that others could see. Still, his guilt and shame haunted him in other ways.

In this fascinating scene from John’s Gospel, a small letter A is not enough to publicly condemn a sinner for her sexual misdeeds.

You’ve got to hand it to the Pharisees. They were tough on sin— at least some sins, and at least those sins that were committed by others.

In this case, the target was an easy one: a woman who had been caught in adultery.

The stage was set for another in the ongoing series of encounters between Jesus and the religious leaders of his day.

As usual, Jesus rose to the challenge, telling the Pharisees they could go ahead and stone the woman. But Jesus wanted the first stone to be thrown by a man who had never sinned.

All the righteous indignation and mob emotion that had been growing to a fevered pitch was now punctured by one simple statement.

Once the Pharisees had been dealt with, Jesus turned to the woman, who probably still wore the look of one facing execution.

Jesus was well aware of her sins, but he looked beyond these infractions to her heart, which was hungry for salvation. He forgave the woman, commanding her to sin no more.

In our day, sexual sins continue to arouse the anger of men concerned about righteousness and obedience to God’s law.

That’s all well and good, but in pursuing righteousness, we also need to remember grace and forgiveness, or else we will wind up as self-deceived as the Pharisees.

Father, I thank you for the gift of your forgiveness. Help me to receive it for my own sins and to extend it to others when they need it, too.

When Being Good Good Enough

Jeremiah, the so-called weeping prophet, here delivered one of the downbeat lessons for which he was so famous.

While some prophets repeatedly told people about the many good tidings God had in store for them, Jeremiah’s messages to the residents of Jerusalem were more depressing.

His usual point was this: “People, you have really messed things up this time, and you better get right with God. Now!”

One of the themes of Jeremiah’s book is sin, a subject that wasn’t any more popular in his day than it is in ours.

Jeremiah preached to people who believed themselves to be God’s chosen people. Their spiritual pride blinded them to their sin.

Centuries later, people remain blind to sin. Today a “therapeutic” gospel says people are really good at heart if they can bring their many psychoses and addictions under control.

That, combined with a billion advertising messages that preach some variation of the message “You deserve a break today,” has led many to believe that they’re really not so bad after all.

Some people even reject the very idea that there is no such thing as absolute good or evil.

The concept of sin is seen as even more problematic. Others accept notions of good and evil but try to explain away their guilt and shame by pinning it on others.

Instead of accepting blame for their misdeeds, they attribute their acts to abusive parents (“I wouldn’t be so selfish if my daddy had loved me”), insensitive spiritual leaders (“I’m just trying to recover the sense of self-esteem that was beaten out of me by Sister Margaret in the fifth grade”)

or complaints about economic injustice that would make Robin Hood blush (“Yes, I downloaded dozens of copyrighted songs from the Internet without paying for them, but the music industry is a huge international conglomerate that charges too much for CDs and will never miss a few dollars here and there”).

Jeremiah would disagree. Called by God to convey God’s message to a wayward world, Jeremiah preached a hard-edged message of repentance.

People are sin-sick, he said, and the only thing that can help them is God’s loving grace.

Although he lived long ago, Jeremiah had a very contemporary approach to getting his message across.

British author Steve Turner, who writes about art, says Jeremiah was one of the first conceptual artists because he regularly staged dramatic presentations to drive home his points.

“Jeremiah hid his underwear in a crevice until it rotted and then displayed it as an illustration of how God saw Israel’s pride,” wrote Turner in his 2001 book, Imagine: A Vision for Christians in the Arts.

Centuries after Jeremiah, Jesus preached a message of love and grace, but his sermons didn’t neglect the important subjects of human sin and pride. More recently, writer Frederick Buechner described sin as a destructive centrifugal force:

When at work in human life, it tends to push everything out toward the periphery.

Bits and pieces go flying off until only the core is left. Eventually, bits and pieces of the core go flying off until nothing is left. “The wages of sin is death” is St. Paul’s way of saying the same thing.1

Buechner concluded his miniessay on sin by saying: “More even than hunger, poverty, or disease, [sin] is what Jesus said he came to save the world from.”2

“The heart is deceitful,” said Jeremiah. And the more we try to argue with him, the more we reveal the truth of what he said.

Father, help me to see my sinful condition as clearly as you do. And please cleanse and purify my twisted little heart.

Use Me

I Wish I could have been there to see Mary’s face the day the angel came to her and announced that she would be giving birth to the Son of God.

Did she wonder if she was losing her mind? Did she think some mischievous neighborhood children were playing a trick on her?

Like many faithful Jews, Mary had been eagerly waiting for the long-promised Messiah.

But the angel’s announcement that her womb would be the channel the Son of God would use to come into the world must have been shocking.

The first question Mary had concerned logistics. “How will this be, since I am a virgin?” The angel explained that “the Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you” (Luke 1:34-35).

Though confusing, this answer was good enough for Mary. “I am the Lord’s servant,” she answered. “May it be to me as you have said.”

I bet angels wish more human beings were as cooperative as Mary. The Bible is full of stories of people who resisted the call of God in their lives.

Mary’s willingness to submit to God’s will shows why Christians throughout the ages have had a special respect for her.

The most famous disobedient Bible character is Jonah, who turned his back on God’s call and suffered the consequences.

But Jonah isn’t alone. Old Testament figures like Moses, David, and Solomon resisted God’s demands and saw their leadership ability severely hampered.

In the Gospels, the disciples repeatedly failed to live up to Jesus’ expectations. And in Acts chapter five a couple named Ananias and Sapphira tried to cheat the church.

The couple had pledged to share all their worldly wealth with the Christian church that arose in Jerusalem after the resurrection of Christ.

But after they received a windfall from a real estate deal they tried to hide their earnings from their fellow believers. Both Ananias and Sapphira “fell down and died” after their disobedience was revealed.

Mary’s case is an unusual one. It’s not every day that God wants a human being to give birth to his Son. But her attitude is an example for us all.

What might God want to do through you? And what will your response be when his angels come knocking at your door?

Maybe there’s a sad and lonely person in your town whom God would like to reach, but he wants to reach him through you. Maybe there’s a widow weeping over her loss, and God wants to comfort her through you.

Maybe there’s a local soup kitchen that needs another pair of hands to prepare warm meals for cold and hungry people.

Maybe there’s a Sunday school class that needs a teacher, or a nursery that needs another person to attend to toddlers.

You may never know all the fulfillment God has in store for you unless you open your heart as Mary did and submit to his higher purposes for your life.

God will not call on you to give birth to the Messiah, but you might just be the warm heart and tangible physical presence God needs to express his love to someone who could use it right now.

Your deeds may not be recorded in the Bible or read by millions of people for thousands of years. But God will know what you’ve done, and that will be more than enough.

God, use me for your purposes. Show me what you want me to do.

Remembering What God Has Done

The children of Israel once again crossed through waters God parted as the Jordan River opened before them. As soon as all had safely passed, the waters of the Jordan returned to flood stage.

Joshua had commanded one man from each of the twelve tribes to take a stone from the riverbed and bring it with him as he came out of the water.

They carried the stones to Gilgal on the eastern border of Jericho, where Joshua erected the stones in a memorial.

He told the Israelites to teach their descendants that this pile of ordinary river stones symbolized God’s faithfulness as the people had crossed the Jordan, just as he had demonstrated his faithfulness when they had crossed the Red Sea.

Why is it important to preserve a record of God’s dealings with us? I think we need reminders of the unchanging faithfulness of God as we live in a world that is ever-changing.

As we read the Bible it reminds us of just how omnipotent God is. His hand stretches back through all of history and forward into all of the future.

But sometimes we forget. Or our stories of God’s faithfulness lose their focus as one generation retells them to the next.

When we go through long periods of time when God seems distant, doubts can disrupt our faith, and we may wonder how we felt when God’s power was evident.

Just as the twelve stones from the river Jordan aided the Israelites’ memories, the memorials we make enliven our memories.

One of the ways that I am trying to preserve family memories that are laced with touches from God’s hand is to make creative photo albums.

I am not a “crafty” person, but I have found great fulfillment in turning a collection of photos into a storybook that not only displays pictures but records what is happening during family times together.

I am hopeful that generations from now my descendants will look through these books and see the evidence of a family who loved God and lived in ways that acknowledged his presence in their lives.

Memorials can be journals or collections of writings or artwork— any number of things that express the reality of the presence of God in the life of an individual or family.

Whatever they are, they can be like the twelve smooth stones from the Jordan that bring us back to a time of experiencing the power of God in our lives.

Father, thank you for the ways that memories of your working in our lives can encourage us in the present moment. Help us to preserve them for future generations.

The Greatest Thing

Musicians such as country star Alan Jackson and rocker Bruce Springsteen wrote songs about the grief and sorrow the terrorist attacks on New York’s World Trade Center caused.

Jackson’s Drive album featured the song “Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)?” Springsteen’s album, The Rising, a recording permeated with Christian themes, included a song called “Into the Fire,” which praised the bravery and sacrifice of those people who went into the World Trade Center buildings to save others.

Both songs quote 1 Corinthians 13, which is probably one of the most moving and famous passages of the entire Bible.

Paul wrote 1 Corinthians around A.D. 56. It was one of his many letters to the new Christian congregations that had sprung up in the decades since the death and resurrection of Jesus.

If there is such a thing as a perfect church, it doesn’t appear in the pages of the New Testament.

Sure, the Book of Acts records the dedication of early believers and the many powerful miracles they performed.

But within a few years, infighting and arguments over tiny details of faith and practice tore apart these once-dynamic congregations.

In 1 Corinthians, Paul lectured the believers in Corinth about their sexual immorality (including adultery and incest), their arguments over whether or not Christians could eat meat sacrificed to pagan gods, and the fighting that erupted over one of the most important Christian rituals—the Lord’s Supper.

As if these problems weren’t bad enough, Christians were also getting upset with each other about the use of such spiritual gifts as prophecy and speaking in tongues, which were common at the time.

They wanted to know which gifts were most important (and perhaps, which Christians were most important, too).

Paul tried to defuse their childish competitiveness.

“Love is patient,” he continued, spelling out the key characteristics of this most important virtue. “Love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud” (v. 4).

Paul even argued that love was more important than faith and hope, two virtues that the Bible celebrates throughout its pages.

If it were not for faith, we would not be able to believe in God and see his work in our lives. If it were not for hope, we would be unable to apply this life-transforming faith to the challenges of daily life.

Even still, it is love that knits the whole package together in a way that is pleasing to God and helpful to others.

God, help me to realize that you care about not only what I do, but why I do it.

The Seasons Of Life

UR daughter Lisa, her husband, Chadd, their four boys, and Maggie, their Newfoundland, have been living with us for several months.

The boys, Justin, Alex, Brady, and Dylan, are eight, five, three, and eighteen months old.

Chadd and Lisa are building a new house that will be ready in early November, and they have sold their previous home. So, their interim housing is with Nana and Papa.

Steve and I have had some years of grandparenting experience and love the total of seven little ones with whom God has blessed us.

We have watched the grandchildren grow and their parents teach and train them.

Now our experience has moved from numerous visits during the year to living together for eight of us.

We are getting an up-close and firsthand look at life with young children again.

Steve and I marvel. Our grandsons are wonderful to be around, well- behaved and loving. And they are very busy.

We become women just watching them tumble through a day Their energy seems limitless and their basic needs consume the better part of our daughter’s day.

I’d love to be more helpful to Lisa. In fact, when the first grandchild was born I imagined that I could handle as many babies as arrived, for any amount of time, no matter the number of their activities.

I even thought about getting a van so I could have all of them with me at once.

I have found this to be a fantasy. And I am shocked. I never expected to be too tired to do anything that I wanted to do. I scoffed at the idea of aging in a way that would limit my activities.

But I have found the truth of Ecclesiastes 3:1 not only to be true but to be freeing.

How wonderful of God to give us this verse and the ones that follow to free us from the guilt that seems to accom¬pany some changes in our lives.

I had a season of motherhood when I was the age of my daughters, and it was wonderful.

When I look back on those years I am amazed at my own life and how God provided all that I needed for that season.

Seasons allow us to experience God in the differing dimensions of our lives in ways that reveal his wisdom.

Because we live in a fallen world, we will age and eventually go to be with him.

That process is gradual for most of us and requires merely that we learn to live and enjoy life at a pace that matches our physical aging.

This isn’t bad news. Eternity is ahead, and God carries us all the way through on our journey there.

Father, thank you for the changing seasons of life and for your presence throughout all of our days, here and in eternity.

Inner Beauty In An Age Of Outer Image

Open up a magazine, turn on the TV, watch a movie, or glance up at a highway billboard and you will be getting much more than a carefully crafted message designed to sell you the latest high-priced consumer products.

You will also be getting a not-so-subtle message about what the ideal woman looks like.

You know the type. She is tall and slender, with curvaceous hips and ample breasts. Her skin is as smooth as porcelain. She has brilliant white teeth, which shine from between lush, lipsticked lips.

Her flowing hair cascades over her majestic shoulders. She is decked out in designer duds that look as though they might require an army of maids to keep cleaned and pressed.

And she’s about twenty-five years old. This ideal woman beckons to us from commercials for toothpaste, shampoo, and all the products that promise to help us have a happier, less harried life.

Dressed up in spotless clothes and high heels, she tries to sell us jewelry or refrigerators.

Or dressed down in a bikini or sexy slacks, she tries to sell us automobiles or beer.

But no matter what she’s selling us today, this ideal woman is also promoting the so-called “good life,” which is guaranteed to be ours if we buy all the right products.

Ads help sell products, but they also serve as a constant reminder to women of all ages that they just don’t measure up to society’s lofty standard.

For young girls, this destructive message can lead not only to desperate efforts to buy all the right clothes but also to more disturbing behaviors such as eating disorders and depression.

Who knows what Peter would have thought of our high-gloss, high-pressure ads? He certainly had a different ideal of womanhood.

“Your beauty should not come from outward adornment,” he wrote, but from “your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight.”

Peter wasn’t one who insisted that women remain quiet unless spoken to. His letters counseled men and women to treat one another with love and respect.

But such respect doesn’t come from the outer image. Outward adornments are little more than window dressing. It’s the internal characteristics that make us who we really are.

People have tried to outdo each other ever since primitive human tribes made the first bearskin robes. Christians of Peter’s day had the same problem, even before advertising helped increase desire and spending.

Incessant advertising certainly makes it more difficult to follow Peter’s sage advice.

Every day each one of us is bombarded by TV commercials, ads in magazines and newspapers, billboards that line our roads and highways, and flashing come-ons that confront us every time we surf the Internet.

Designed to prey on our weaknesses and vulnerabilities, these advertising messages do more than sell us products.

They attempt to sell us an entire worldview that claims we are what we wear and what we look like.

In these ever-present sales pitches, the people who drive the right cars, buy the right clothes, and use the right shampoo and makeup invariably find love and happiness, while those who use Brand X are left high and dry.

Surrounded as we are by such a chorus of consumer messages, it may be hard for us to hear Peter’s simple truth that it’s what’s inside that matters most.

But Peter’s message may be just the advice we need to survive in our outward-oriented culture.

Father, help me focus my energy on inner beauty. Make my soul a beautiful thing that radiates your grace and love outward to those with whom I come in contact.