“If a man has a hundred sheep and one of them gets lost, what will he do? Won’t he leave the ninety-nine others in the wilderness and go to search for the one that is lost until he finds it?” (Luke 15:4 NLT)

We forget that God is crazy about His people. Our human tendency is to presume our worldview upon others, and that just doesn’t work for God. He’s not annoyed with people. He isn’t disinterested or put out or quick to give up. He’s crazy about His sheep! So much so that He’ll put the other ninety-nine in the wilderness to go after the one.

Did you catch that? He’ll leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness while He hunts down the one, I’ve probably read this story, the prodigal son parable, a hundred times in the past twenty-five years and I never before noticed that He sends the ninety-nine to the wilderness when it comes time for a rescue mission. I checked five translations, they all say the same thing.

He’ll allow hardship, discomfort, even physical death to come into our lives if it affords Him the opportunity to grab on to that last, lost one.

God isn’t afraid to leverage our one life here to bring another sheep There. The question is, are we? What is that lost sheep worth to us? What wilderness might we endure on their behalf? How solid is our faith in forever? Because if it’s not, we’ll be unwilling to suffer selflessly today.

“Yet what we suffer now is nothing compared to the glory he will reveal to us later.” (Romans 8:18 NLT)

Lord, help us. We have such a tendency to be selfish, short-sighted sheep. Forgive us. We don’t want to be the older son in the prodigal story. We want to gain and maintain the heart of the Father: ever-searching the skyline for signs of the wayward son, willing to run in their direction, ready to forgive and welcome back into the fold. Lord, we are willing to suffer if it means bringing another lost sheep Home. Help us suffer well. Let us see Your sons and daughters return to You. Amen.

“Sing praises to God, our strength. Sing to the God of Jacob. Sing! Beat the tambourine. Play the sweet lyre and the harp. Blow the ram’s horn at new moon, and again at full moon to call a festival! For this is required by the decrees of Israel; it is a regulation of the God of Jacob.” (Psalms 81:1-4 NLT)

Why would God make worship a requirement for His people?

He knew that we need worship to remind us that the world is bigger than ‘me.’ He knew that sin had left a terrible scar on the earth and that life would be hard and we would be dependent on our good God. He knew that we would get busy and distracted, even distraught when left to our own devices, so He built worship into the rhythms of our calendar to bring our hearts home from before they got too far off the beaten path. He asked that we set aside one day a week to honor Him and make room for rest.

Gone are the days where every believer attends church every Sunday. In fact, recent Pew Research studies tell us that today’s typical congregant calls themselves a ‘regular attender’ if they attend just two Sunday’s a month. We are losing our regular rhythms of worship. What are we gaining?

The truth is that God knows our need to worship. Do we know it? Can we feel how our soul has been scrubbed clean when we’ve spent time in His presence? Can we tell hw our perspective has been righted when we’ve calibrated it to His Word? Can we measure the sense belonging we gain when we gather with other believers?

We might be tempted to ask, what gives God the right to make demands on our time?

“He made it a law for Israel when he attacked Egypt to set us free,” (Psalms 81:5a NLT)

God earned the right to our worship when He set us free from sin. If that was all that He ever did, it would be more than enough to spend the rest of our days in praise. In my experience, however, salvation was only the starting blocks of His blessing. In the vein of Fredrick Lehman’s lyrics; I haven’t enough ink or parchment to properly document His ongoing favor.

Our God is faithful. Are we?

“I heard an unknown voice say, ““Now I will take the load from your shoulders; I will free your hands from their heavy tasks. You cried to me in trouble, and I saved you;” (Psalms 81:5b-7a NLT)

God doesn’t require our worship because He’s an egomaniac who needs to be constantly told how awesome He is. He requires our worship because we need to regularly remember that He is, in fact, awesome! He’s got us and in the end, it’s all going to be alright.

Worship is the sacred space where God lightens our load. When we go there often, we learn to live disentangled from the world. We learn to live with eternity ever in our sights.

Lord, thank You for requiring our worship. It is a necessary calibration point for our every day lives. Thank You for lightening our loads when we come into Your presence and praise You. It is a joy to belong and to be loved. May we spend our lives adoring You. Amen.

“Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.” (Psalm‬ ‭42:11‬ ‭NIV‬‬)

I have long believed that we sing our way out of the dark. Sometimes, we need to sing the song more than once. The Sons of Koran repeat the chorus of their maskil (poem of insight) and so might we.

My own dark tunnel is finally finding some light. Though outdoors, spring isn’t quite cooperating, the inner chambers of my heart are fully thawed and the sun is breaking through the clouds in my countenance. The season is changing and so have I.

There have been several songs played on repeat throughout this long winter. ‘Do It Again’ is an anthem of waiting and over and over it has strengthened my heart. Through no string-tugging of my own, our worship team at church is learning it for next week’s fortieth anniversary service. Last night, they practiced and the chorus wafted like sweet promises into our evening Bible Study.

“I’ve seen You move, come move the mountains. And I believe, I’ll see You do it again. You made a way, where there was no way. And I believe, I’ll see You do it again.”

Sometimes we’ve got to sing the song over and over again. Sometimes we sing it stubborn against the darkness. Sometimes we sing, newly strengthened, on the other side of victory. It doesn’t seem to matter where we sing, as long as we keep singing. Keep trusting. Keep reminding ourselves over and over of the promises until we believe them with every fiber of our being.

And then we keep on singing so we can convince someone else.

“I will sing to the Lord all my life; I will sing praise to my God as long as I live.” (‭‭Psalm‬ ‭104:33‬ ‭NIV‬‬)

Lord, give us the strength to keep singing in the dark. Set a chorus in our souls and put it on repeat as we claw our way out. Keep us singing when the storm clouds clear. Let our song convince another of Your story. Amen.

We’ve been reading along in Psalms as a church family this year. Dr. George Wood is taking us on a journey and today we dismantled Psalm 41. In the midst of the reading, I realized with a start how much effort David spends on what other people think of him. And I also realized how unproductive that was for him.

Consider it. Quickly glance through the Psalms and count up the ‘enemy’ phrases you see. David is entirely distracted by the opinions of others. I’m not picking on him, for heaven’s sake, I am him. It’s just a whole lot easier to identify the dis-health of it in someone else’s story.

It seems to me that David shares three kinds of thoughts throughout the Psalms; his thoughts about himself or others, his thoughts about God, and God’s thoughts toward him. Two of these are productive. The God thoughts are life preservers; buoyant rings of hope in the storms of life for David and for us. The concerns about the perceptions of others are constantly distracting and disrupting the God thoughts.

True to life, isn’t it? The opinions of others get in the way of the one opinion that’s truly important.

“Am I now trying to win the approval of human beings, or of God? Or am I trying to please people? If I were still trying to please people, I would not be a servant of Christ.” (Galatians 1:10 NIV)

Over the years I have struggled to memorize this verse because the language is strange. It’s a verbal tug of war; please man, please God, please man, please God. Eventually, Apostle Paul, fellow recovering people pleaser, comes to the correct and concise conclusion that we either please God or others. We cannot please both. Pleasing God is the identifying mark of a disciple. 

We can’t afford to miss this. Living for divine approval alone is essential. The approval of man is an ever-moving target that will continually trip us up and even maim. The fear of the Lord is straight forward, unchanging for 6,000 years. We are to seek Him and obey His Word.

“Praise the Lord. Blessed are those who fear the Lord, who find great delight in his commands.” (Psalm 112:1 NIV)

Lord, help us permanently divorce the opinions of others and put all our stock in the perfect opinion of our Heavenly Father. We want to be confident of Your approval and indifferent to the esteem of others. Only You can retrain our thinking. Lord, let us live for You alone. Amen.