Oh dear! I am ever slow this morning. Time moves on without me as the devotional should be going out and I'm just getting started on it. Many others will find it tough to get going this morning as we come out of a nice three-day weekend. The good news is that another one looms at the end of this week! The Christmas-New Year's holidays can kind of spoil us with extra time off. Back in the day, I often took the whole week, sometimes even two weeks, off from work around this time. The problem with all of that time off was of course, going back. Sooner or later, we gotta get back to work, even us writers.
With my slow start today, many of you will have already gone to work to face the e-mail pile, which is our time's equivalent of the old in-box. We even call it the in-box in our e-mail programs, just to give us a link to the olden times of 1980 or so. If you are old enough to remember the ubiquitous interoffice envelopes, some places still use them, you will be able to think back to the piles of tan-colored envelopes waiting your attention on a morning such as this. To help prioritize, some even came in red or orange to call attention to themselves as important or from a company VIP. Other envelopes might be marked "urgent" or "rush" to help set them off from the general mob of envelope traffic.
On a morning like this one, you might feel a certain dismay at the size of the workload awaiting your attention. Did all those urgent matters really come up over the holiday weekend? Did someone sneak in this weekend and add to my workload? The sad part these days is that someone probably did work over the holiday weekend, probably quite a few someones. Work should be rewarding and enjoyable, but is there ever enough reward or fun to be had when so many have to work so much? And then we also have those who cannot find work these days. Some doom criers are saying to look for a decade of high unemployment; others say that the recovery has already begun. Who do we believe? How did this world get so messed up in the first place?
Well, we have to go way back to the time when a certain man and woman, the first of their kind actually, fell for a con and decided that God didn't really have their best interests in mind when he said to stay away from one particular tree. From then on we were doomed to a life of toil. However, God did provide some hope to go with that toil. He would send a savior to us at the proper time. Only one problem with that. The rebellion against God was so great that it would take two trips for the savior to get everything back to where he wanted it. Jesus made the first trip to earth to redeem us from sin. The toil and sweat wouldn't end with that trip though. That part may have disappointed those waiting for Messiah as much as anything else. Some went so far as to say, "you ain't really Messiah" and executed the best hope of the world.
Jesus accomplished his mission on the earth over the best efforts of the world and its prince to destroy him. One of those efforts, one that seems very odd indeed, is when the people tried to take Jesus by force and make him king. How do you force someone to be king? Isn't that kind of upside down? If you do manage to force someone to be king; wouldn't that person then command you to do some things that you might not like? What if the person won't stay on the throne? Do you then tie your "king" to the throne and force him to stay there? I'm being a little humorous here, but the Bible does record that the people wanted to force Jesus to be king. We find it hard to understand now, but if Jesus had waited until a few years ago to come to the earth, would we have done any better? Would the headlines have read, "Jesus wins presidency in greatest landslide in voting history! Wins popular vote by 200 million to 1! Claim that he isn't running for office rejected by Supreme Court!" That may seem far-fetched to us, but the equivalent did happen. Jesus had to hide himself and escape from the crowd wanting to make him king.
Do we still try to make Jesus king as we want him to be king instead of accepting him as King? In looking for the reasons we have all this work to do, I had to wonder if greed and coveting isn't much of the reason we are so overworked. We see some ministers on the telly telling us how God will bless us with piles of loot, and we work overtime to try to make it come true. I realize those same ministers would deny telling anyone that God will make them rich, but at the same time I have seen those shows and it is easy to see how someone might leap to that conclusion. We always seem to want to add something to "Trust in God"; usually it's a "for" we like to add, as in: trust in God for a big house, or trust in God for lots of loot to spend. How about this one: trust in God for contentment!
One thing I can see today is that I don't have all the answers. I trust in God to guide me in writing this devotional, and it's taking just short of forever this morning. There may be an unwritten devotional writers rule that says never admit that you don't know something, but today I'll have to humble myself and make that admission: I don't know everything. We strive to learn in this life, but we must trust in God for his wisdom and knowledge. Yes, we do trust in God for a great many "for's", but sometimes we also try to force the issue. Jesus will be the King of kings in God's own time. You and I may not die rich in loot, but we will live in Him!
Praise God for the day!
Bucky
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