“These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.” Exodus 32:4

This is Thanksgiving week in the USA. A thought crossed my mind yesterday, “What if this really was a week of thanksgiving?” Imagine if this week a massive shout of praise went up to God? Imagine if all believers in the US worshipped God with something “extra” this week. Imagine if songs of thanksgiving filled every heart this week. “I’m forever grateful…”

My mind also went to the senseless chatter about turkeys that one sees on TV and hears on the radio…how we make the trivial important and trivialize the important. Imagine—just imagine—if we focused doubly on God and not on millions of little roasted turkeys. Imagine if all the chatter about a stuffed, dead bird was replaced by conversation about an overflowing, alive, all-powerful, wonder-working, awesome God!

It is not a big mental leap to go from golden turkeys to golden calves. I am not suggesting in any way that there is any correlation between a calf and a turkey. But the nation of Israel quickly forgot God, made an idol, and claimed it was this man-made thing that had brought them out of Egypt. Almost unbelievable! But Exodus 32 reminds us how we are prone to direct our affections toward the wrong place. We are just returning from another “Venture season” where the rēp teams have gone out and seen God do miraculous things with businesses in Africa and Southeast Asia and India. It is also a season when everyday businesspeople discover that God uses their engineering, marketing, finance and management skills to build His kingdom. That should be enough to keep us from getting de-focused. Exodus 32, however, follows a miraculous display of God’s splendor, the giving of the Ten Commandments, and an Old Testament businessman being filled with the Spirit. “I have chosen Bezalel…and have filled him with the Spirit of God, with skill, ability, and knowledge of all kinds of crafts…” Exodus 31:3 So these things are not an antidote to spiritual meandering. When God does not show up according to our schedule it is easy to make our own gods in His place. Even when we have witnessed the miraculous and our gifts have been used by God, we can still get sidetracked. Signs and wonders become sins and wanders.

When we enter his gates with thanksgiving, this week, when we enter his courts with praise, we honor God and protect our hearts. When we make lists of things that we are thankful for and read them back to God, then we protect our affections. When we make proclamation about the kindness and goodness and faithfulness of God, then we remember He is our source. When we acknowledge that it was His hand that formed our nation, then we affirm that “in God we trust” and not in politicians or those running Wall Street. When we celebrate family and enjoy good fellowship and remember our God, then heaven takes note and the angels join in our celebration.

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving.

“…who turned the rock into a pool”  Psalm 114:8

Do you have any circumstances in your life that seem to be impossible? Are there people that make your life hard? Do you live in a nation where the government is opposed to your way of life? Take courage from this tremendous truth: the presence of God turns the impossible into provision.

What would be a less likely source of water than a rock? My humanist friends will be saying, ‘You see, the water was there all the time, and the rock simply obscured it, so Moses probably carried a crowbar, and shifted it to get the water.’

Tremble, O earth, at the presence of the Lord,

at the presence of the God of Jacob,

who turned the rock into a pool,

the hard rock into springs of water.

The nature of things changes in the presence of God. Rocks can become not just liquefied, but a pool, a spring for the refreshing of a nation.

God still changes rocks into water. If you are like me, you will admit that there are aspects of your life that somehow have not turned from rock to river. There are aspects of my life that are far from flowing, more stagnant than spring.

There are believers in Jesus who are as hard as rock. They are in God’s river, but they are bouncing along the bottom, still getting their rough edges knocked off them. They are moving in the same direction as God, but with lots of resistance. God can turn them into flowing liquid.

Then there are those lodged at the edge of God’s flow; they can tell you all about it, they have comments on those flowing by, but they are going nowhere. They appear to be part of what God is doing, but they are stuck. God has ways and means of getting them flowing, but they must read his ways correctly and pray for a softening of heart otherwise they will misinterpret the pressure to flow as an excuse to stay.

The amazing thing is that God can also touch rocks out in the desert, disconnected from everything he seems to be doing, and turn them into pools. These are leaders or businesses or nations unengaged in God’s purposes. God can crack them open and take what they thought was for them, and transform it into a spring of water for the refreshing of others. They can go from fortress to flow in under 60 seconds if…

What changes us from hard to soft, from stuck to going, from foolish to flowing?

“the presence of the God of Jacob”

If we are experiencing the presence of God we are less likely to become river rock—smooth, well rounded, moving a little, but still rock. If we are experiencing the presence of God we are less likely to become stuck spectators with religious opinions on the flow of God, but no personal experience of his power. If we are inviting God’s presence into our work and business, we will become focused on maximizing flow-through; we will be cognizant that blessings banked tend to become rocks on the bank. Calcified blessings are precursors to hardened hearts. If God’s presence is invited into a nation, it can become the lender, and not the borrower, the blesser and not the beggar, a flowing water instead of a backwater. What’s it going to be: rock or river?

Tremble, O earth, at the presence of the Lord,

at the presence of the God of Jacob,

who turned the rock into a pool,

the hard rock into springs of water.

A single lady, who was hurt by experiences that she thought were unjust, asked me to pray for her. She had anger genuinely felt, and it seemed there was nowhere to direct it but up. Behind the pain was an assumption that God is untouched by pain.

Genesis 6 says, “The Lord was grieved … and His heart was filled with pain.” God’s pain often seems to stem from perfect love offered to man yet discarded like litter. “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing.”

When our hearts are broken, they can be a microcosm of God’s broken heart. Love unreturned; opportunities given, and wasted; wooing that is spurned; diligent efforts for someone else’s good, merely ignored; offers of intimacy, left on the table — these can either cloud our horizon, or be a window through which we see the heart of God. The choice is ours.

Are you a mother, a dad, a pastor, a child, a teacher with a broken heart? Not every case of heart-pain is a reflection of God’s pain. But the common pain of love left hanging is the pain shared with our Infinite Father: “The Lord was grieved … and His heart was filled with pain.”

by Brett Johnson

9/10/01

Ref: Genesis 6:6

Matthew 23:37

Psalm 34 says this:

I will…
- extol the Lord at all times
- boast in the Lord
- glorify the Lord
- seek the Lord
- exalt his name with others
- look to the Lord
- fear the Lord
- not speak evil
- tell the truth
- taste and see… experience God
- take refuge in God
- call to the Lord

He will…
- answer me
- deliver me from all my fears
- make me radiant
- save me from all my troubles
- send angels to encamp around me
- provide so that I lack nothing
- pay attention to my cry
- keep an eye on me
- be close when my heart is broken
- save me when my spirit is crushed
- deliver me from all my troubles
- protect all my bones
- condemn my enemies
- not condemn me

by Brett Johnson

9/3/01

Ref:  Psalm 34

“The blessing of the Lord brings wealth, and he adds no trouble to it.”

How often we suspect that God’s blessing is meted out by the thimbleful. Or if we do think large and expect big blessings, we have at the back of our mind that there may be a catch, a sting in the tail. To avoid this trap, we need to go back to the nature of the One who promises. “If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts, how much more…”

Ask God for His blessing this week, remembering that the extent of His giving is a reflection of His person and not our worth. “The Lord’s blessing is our greatest wealth; all our work adds nothing to it.”

by Brett Johnson

1/29/01

Ref:  Matthew 7:11; Proverbs 10:22