Stevemidkiff's Blog

Don’t get sidetracked… Proverbs 4.27 (NLT)

Jesus will carry our burdens as we follow Him

In a good life there is a careful foot. We are careful where we put each foot print

Proverbs 4:26–27

SOLOMON ADVISED A PLANNED WALK:

He wrote:

Ponder the path of your feet & let all your ways be established

SOLOMON ADVISED A PREFECT WALK:

Turn not to the right hand nor to the left

SOLOMON ADVISED A PROTECTED WALK:

Remove your foot from evil

There are some places to which we should not go

There are some doorways we should never darken.

Look at the steps of Abraham & Lot.

On that eventful day when Abraham suggested to Lot that they part company
because of the squabbling of their herdsmen over available pasture

both men made a choice.

Genesis 13 records their decisions:

Lot … pitched his tent Gen. 13:12

Abram removed his tent” Gen. 13:18

There in a nutshell is the difference between Abraham
(who became the friend of God & the father of all believers)

and Lot
(the great Old Testament prototype of the backslider).

Lot’s feet took him pell-mell down to Sodom, where he lost family, faith & his fortune

He almost lost his soul.

Abraham’s feet took him over the hills & far away.
He couldn’t wait to put distance between himself & the filthy city of the plains.

No one could be in that part of the world for any length of time & not know of
the compromised moral depravity of Sodom’s reputation as the capital of
decadent debauchery in the world.

Abraham didn’t want to be around when God poured out the red-hot lava
of His wrath against that vile lifestyle. We all need to be careful where we
place our feet.

I miss Buddy Midkiff. He was my closest friend for 61 years.

On Nov. 15 2011 he left to spend eternity with Jesus.

If he was still hanging out with us he would be 80 today.

If he was still here he would have called me at least once

every day in this past week,

If he was still here he would have called me at least once

every day over the past month.

If he was still here he would have called me at least once

every day over the past year.

In fact, if he was still here, for the last 9 years we would have

visited every day & usually many times a day.

That was the closeness of our bond

There wouldn’t be a problem or challenge that I was having

that he wouldn’t know about.

There wouldn’t be an issue that I needed fixed in my life that

he wouldn’t want to be 100% involved in helping me fix it.

Every sentence I’ve ever written on my blog, on FB or on Twitter

and even before these other media sources existed.

Any composition I sent him by email he valued.

Buddy made me feel admired no matter what written expression

I made.

He would print everything out with his printer, each formulation

of words I construed together.

Year after year wherever & whenever I put pen to paper & scrawled

out some jangled structure of words to babble, chatter & jabber on

about in my constant monotonous manner.

He always treasured it & put it in his file.

He was my closest friend & companion for 61 years & the loss I’ve

felt over the past 9 years is impossible to express.

My heart grieves his loss to my life.

No one could ever come close to putting me on such a pedestal of

care over each concern I had or feeling & expression I combined as

He did. He made me feel as if he searched out every articulation of

my soul.

He was my brother & closest companion.

He was the shepherd of shepherds to me

He was the pastor of pastors to me

He was my truest friend

He was a living example of Jesus in my life.

A man who has friends must himself be friendly,

But there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.

Proverbs 18:24

A friend loves at all times & a brother is born for adversity.

Proverbs 17:17

Friends come & friends go, but a true friend sticks by you like family.

Friends love through all kinds of weather & families stick together in

all kinds of trouble.

In life we have various acquaintances, we have family members,

we have what we think are even friends & close companions.

But, unfortunately, they are often a bogus mirage.

It’s heart rending to discover the pretentiousness of who we

thought we could trust & confide in.

The shock & ruin caused by imitation people & their vacuous

involvements in our lives is a tragedy

What we thought was there never existed. We are nothing to them in reality.

But Buddy was solid, dependable, trustworthy & faithful.

Yet, I have Jesus.

He’s even closer in his unfathomable love & compassionate nearness.

He is closer then a brother

Jesus is that amazing Someone who is intriguing in His intimate

involvements in me

He chronicles every thought I’ve ever had.

He records my every feeling.

He archives every word I utter.

He is the lover of my soul.

How precious also are Your thoughts to me,

O God! How vast is the sum of them!

Psalms 139:17

Your eyes saw my unformed body when You designed

me in my mother’s womb

all my days were written in Your book & ordained for me

before one of them came to be.

Psalms 139:16

How precious is Your loving devotion, O God,

that we take refuge in the shadow of Your wings.

Psalm 36:7

Many, O LORD our God, are Your wonderful works

which You have done & Your thoughts about us:

they cannot be reckoned up in order to You:

if we would declare & speak of them,

they are more than can be numbered.

Psalm 40:5

How excellent is thy lovingkindness, O God!

therefore we put our trust under the shadow of Your wings.

Psalm 36:7

Jesus holds us so close. Jesus holds everything in us & from us so tight

He stores every tear we shed in His eternal bottles

Psalms 56:8

For our LORD has heard the voice of our weeping

Psalm 6:8

He never tells us to dry it up. Every drop of tear he stores

Each of our hurts He values

Whether they are tears of joy, tears of sorrow, or tears of pain or lament

not one teardrop is lost to our God

How can we not have the deepest love for him & confide our all to Him

“In the multitude of our thoughts within us Your comforts delight our soul.”

The word for “thoughts” is rendered “doubts” in the margin of the Revised Version.

Another authority suggests the rendering “wandering thoughts.”

The psalmist was troubled by distracting thoughts.

We do not have to go far from our own prayer chambers to realize what

wandering thoughts can do for us. Sometimes we find it almost impossible

to concentrate in prayer, even when we desperately need to pray.

The psalmist found comfort in the fact that God Himself understands & consoles.

That is why in the New Testament we have been given an other Comforter.

He is our Paraclete, the One called alongside to help, the One who,

“helps our infirmities.”

The word used is the same word that Martha used when she asked the

Lord to tell Mary to come & help her in the kitchen.

It was practical, immediate, down-to-earth help she wanted.

That is the kind of help God gives us.

We rest in Him!!!

Don’t acquiesce to social pressure

Don’t reinvent Jesus

Don’t attempt to fit popular notions

of the kind of Christ people want.

Jesus is notoriously uncooperative

with all attempts to repackage & market Him.

Let’s instead worship & serve the Son of God

Don’t attempt to redefine Him,

Just faithfully represent Him in all His fullness

to our needy world.

adapted from Randy Alcorn

Whoso digs a pit will fall therein:

They that roll a stone, it will return upon them

Proverbs 26:27

Malice backfires;

spite boomerangs

Liars hate their victims

flatterers sabotage trust

The antichrist himself takes over the Jewish temple.

2 Thessalonians 2:4 tells us that

he “opposeth & exalts himself above all

that is called God, or that is worshipped;

so that he as God sits in the temple of God,

showing himself that he is God.

New edicts are issued from the temple.

For example Revelation 13:16–17 tells us

that the false prophet “causes all,
both small & great, rich & poor, free & bond,
to receive a mark in their right hand,
or in their foreheads:

And that no man might buy or sell,
save he that had the mark,
or the name of the beast,
or the number of his name.

Spiritually enlightened people recognize

the ominous portent of the hour

they flee to the mountains

Matthew 24:15–22

God however is still very much in control.
He has set a time limit of 1,290 days on
the activities of the Satanic trinity

Daniel 7:25; 12:6–12

So the age of terror lasts that long

then retribution comes.

Christ returns & seizes the antichrist & the false prophet;

He hurls them headlong into the lake of fire

Revelation 19:19–21

Satan is incarcerated in the abyss
for a thousand years & afterward is
flung into the lake of fire where he
joins his fellow conspirators

Revelation 20:1–10

If there is only one thing we learn from the book of Revelation, it is this:

God is still on the throne!

Like the person in Proverbs 26:27,

the false prophet digs a pit & falls in it;

the antichrist rolls a stone & it hits his own head.

As Longfellow phrased the old adage,

The mills of God grind slowly,
yet they grind exceeding small

How do we find happiness in our life?

We have to constantly work at the art to be content

We Appreciate the small stuff.

We are blessed more than we realize.

Samuel Rutherford wrote:

“They lose nothing who gain Christ.”

“While others are congratulating themselves,

I have to lie humbly at the foot of Christ’s cross

I there marvel that I am saved at all –

Spurgeon

“Physician of our sin-sick soul,

To thee we bring our case;

Our raging malady control,

And heal us by thy grace.

Pity the anguish we endure,

See how we mourn & pine;

For never can we hope a cure

From any hand but thine. Lord,

We are sick, regard our cry,

And set our spirit free:

Say, canst thou let a sinner die,

Who longs to live to thee?”

John Newton

Between 250 and 270 A.D. a terrible plague, believed to be measles or smallpox,
devastated the Roman Empire.
At the height of what came to be known as the Plague of Cyprian,
after the bishop St. Cyprian who chronicled what was happening,
5,000 people died every day in Rome alone.

The plague coincided with the first empire-wide persecution of Believers
under the emperor Decius.
Not surprisingly, Decius & other enemies of the Church blamed Jesus followers
for the plague.
That claim was, however, undermined by two inconvenient facts:
Christians died from the plague like everybody else & unlike everybody else,
they cared for the victims of the plague, including their pagan neighbors.

This wasn’t new—Christians had done the same thing during the
Antonine Plague a century earlier.
As Rodney Stark wrote in
“The Rise of Christianity,”
Christians stayed in the afflicted cities when pagan leaders, including physicians, fled.

Candida Moss, a professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Notre Dame,
notes that an “epidemic that seemed like the end of the world actually promoted
the spread of Christianity.”
By their actions in the face of possible death, Christians showed their neighbors
that “Christianity is worth dying for.”

This witness came to mind after listening to a recent story on National Public Radio’s
“All Things Considered.”
Host Robert Siegel interviewed Stephen Rowden, who volunteered for
Doctors Without Borders in Monrovia, Liberia.

Rowden’s grim task was to manage the teams that collected the bodies of Ebola victims.
Rowden & his team retrieved 10-to-25 bodies a day.
Since close contact with the victims is the chief means by which the usually-deadly
virus is spread, Rowden & his team members lived with the risk of becoming
victims themselves.

What’s more, living in the midst of this death & suffering took its toll.
Rowden recalled entering a house and finding the body of a four-year-old
victim who had been abandoned by her family.
With the typical English understatement, he told Siegel, “I found that a very sad case.”

Rowden’s experience prompted Siegel to ask him if he was a religious man,
to which Rowden replied, “I am. Yes, I’m a practicing Christian.”
When Siegel then asked whether what he saw tested his faith,
Rowden said that “No, I got great strength from my faith & the support of my family.”

Nearly eighteen centuries after the Plague of Cyprian, Christianity still prompts people
to run towards the plague when virtually everyone else is running away.

Now as then, this power confounds & confuses Christianity’s critics.
A recent article in Slate acknowledged that many of the people fighting the
Ebola epidemic in West Africa were missionaries.

The writer, Brian Palmer, admitted that he “[didn’t] feel good about
missionary medicine, even though [he couldn’t] fully articulate why.”
He knew that he shouldn’t feel this way but he did.

Ross Douthat of the New York Times suspects that Palmer’s misgivings
have something to do with the fact that the selflessness of the missionaries
“unsettles” his “secular and scientistic worldview.”
In that worldview,
“helping people is what governments & secular groups are supposed to do.”

But that’s not how it works. Palmer, like the emperor Julian the Apostate
in the late fourth century, is seeing that
“the impious Galilaeans support not only their own poor but ours as well.”

It’s enough to unsettle anyone’s worldview.

Eric Metaxas

The Lord Jesus is our very life,
The Holy Spirit dwells within our spirit to manifest Jesus

To us
In us
Through us

To work out all that is in Him & to reproduce Him in us.

We must remember that there is something in the sight of God
that is higher than work.

There is Christ-likeness.

That is our Father’s purpose,

That is His work

ANDREW MURRAY

We belong to another sphere altogether.

We have died & our life is “hidden with Christ in God.”

We are like a tree that has its roots in heaven & its branches down here.

No doubt our branches are blown & ripped by the atmosphere here,

but nothing can touch the roots up there.

Planted inside, they flourish outside.

J. B. STONEY

To abide in heaven in the Lord Jesus is our place.

Our faith is exercised here & the suffering here may be prolonged & continued;

but we abide there & while abiding we engage ourselves

with everything connected with our Father & with reference

to the place He has set us in.

In that blessed region where He has placed us,

and where He alone can keep us & where we are simply dependent on Him,

it is His interests alone which engage us & it is that we communicate to others

JOHN DARBY

It is amazing grace to actually comprehend that all that comes into our life

is meant to conform us to the image of God’s Son.

The highest thought which God has about us & that which His heart is set on,

is our union with Christ.

Christ is our life. We seek Him where He sits at God’s right hand

He is our risen man & we’re united to Him.

We set our affections on Him above all others