It's Not Fair!

Devotion for the week...

It has been a busy week, so writing a devotion for today ended up on the back burner. Good thing I have a treasure trove of previously loved devotions to pull from when I need to! Here's one from March 2015. Thankfully I'm no longer working in childcare, but the illustrations from those years still hold true 😊

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If you've been reading my blog for any length of time, then you probably know I spend my days in the company of the four kids I babysit, while my own kids are in school. I have been around little ones for almost 13 years straight, and I have noticed that they really like for things to be fair, especially when it comes to food.

Don't give one child two pieces of a broken cookie and the other child a full cookie unless you're willing to hear, "Why does he get two cookies?" Be sure the pieces of cake you cut look pretty much the same, or there will be complaints about someone getting a bigger piece. And for goodness sake, make sure when you give out a handful of crackers that everyone either has the same number, or they have so many they're not going to bother counting!

They like things to be fair when it comes to taking turns with the best toys too. Everyone needs to have the same number of turns, and for the same amount of time. While I have never actually set a timer to be sure each child gets 5 minutes with the coveted toy, I know mothers who do in order to keep the peace and save their own sanity.

While we as adults know that fair doesn't always mean exactly the same, we like for things to be fair too. We want people to be paid a fair wage, for companies to be fair and honest in their advertising, for sports teams to follow the rules. We want to be given the same opportunities as others, regardless of our race, religion or gender. When these things don't happen, we too are quick to say, "That's not fair!"

Sometimes 'not fair' works in our favour, and then we're not quite so quick to protest the unfairness of the situation. That is certainly the case when it comes to our salvation. Jesus was perfect, completely without sin, and it was He who paid the price for our sins. He had never done anything wrong, and yet He was brutally beaten and murdered.

The Bible says, "For the wages of sin is death," (Romans 6:23). It also says, "The Lord looks down from heaven on the entire human race; he looks to see if anyone is truly wise, if anyone seeks God. But no, all have turned away; all have become corrupt. No one does good, not a single one!" (Psalm 14:2-3). Everyone is turned away from God, everyone is corrupt, and no one does good. That is the natural inclination of every human heart, and for that we all deserve death. That would be the fair outcome of our lives.

But that isn't what we get.

Jesus came for us. He came to rescue us and free us from that death sentence. How? "For God made Christ, who never sinned, to be the offering for our sin, so that we could be made right with God through Christ" (2 Corinthians 5:21). Because Jesus was perfect, He alone was qualified to be the sacrifice that would pay for our sin. He took the sin of the entire world on Himself and paid the penalty of death for it. That's the most unfair transaction ever!

Discipline

Devotion for the week...

Can I share a confession? I find the prophets really hard to read. There's so much doom and destruction, and reading that for chapter after chapter after chapter gets mind-numbing. I think I find the lists in Numbers easier to get through! 

I usually read the Bible straight through (slowly!), a little bit each morning, but sometime last year I was struggling to read Ezekiel, bogged down in the destruction being prophesied, and I finally gave myself permission to leave it and skip ahead. The next morning I flipped to Matthew and breathed a sigh of relief as I started reading. Well, last week I reached the end of Revelation, so I flipped back to the bookmark I had left in Ezekiel and started tackling that again.

Saturday morning I finished off Ezekiel chapter 30 and a couple of verses caught my attention: "When I put my sword in the hand of Babylon’s king and he brings it against the land of Egypt, Egypt will know that I am the Lord. I will scatter the Egyptians among the nations, dispersing them throughout the earth. Then they will know that I am the Lord" (Ezekiel 30:25-26).

What stopped me in my tracks was that God said Egypt would know that He is the Lord when everything goes wrong for them, when they are subject to complete destruction.

We tend to think God is working in our situations when things are getting better, when we see good things happening, and when our prayers are being answered the way we want. Here, though, God is saying He will be working in this situation when nothing is going the way the Egyptians want.

Now, to be fair, this is because the Egyptians are coming under His judgement, so it makes sense that His hand is extended in punishment rather than blessing. What we often don't consider when something is going wrong in our own lives, is that the situation could be God disciplining us, too.

"Have you forgotten the encouraging words God spoke to you as his children? He said,

'My child, don’t make light of the Lord’s discipline,

    and don’t give up when he corrects you.

For the Lord disciplines those he loves,

    and he punishes each one he accepts as his child.'

As you endure this divine discipline, remember that God is treating you as his own children. Who ever heard of a child who is never disciplined by its father?...But God’s discipline is always good for us, so that we might share in his holiness. No discipline is enjoyable while it is happening—it’s painful! But afterward there will be a peaceful harvest of right living for those who are trained in this way." (Hebrews 12:5-7, 10-11).

God doesn't only deal in sunshine and rainbows. Sometimes His hand may be extended towards us in discipline and we won't like it at all. That's not to say that every bad thing that happens to us is discipline from God! When things are going wrong, though, it might be worth considering if there's something in our lives God could be disciplining us for. We'll learn the lesson contained in the discipline a lot faster if we recognize it as His hand working to bring us closer to that peaceful harvest of right living.

Note, I'll be away all this week for my grandmother's funeral, so there will be no devotion next week. I would appreciate your prayers for our family.

The Men Who Brought Her to Jesus

Devotion for the week...

Last week we looked at the story of the woman caught in adultery, found in John, chapter 8. Today I want us to consider the men who dragged her to Jesus in an attempt to trick Him into saying something they could use against Him. This two-part series was originally part of the Moments with Jesus QAL and Devotional Journey. 

We don’t know much about these men, except that they were "the teachers of religious law and the Pharisees" (John 8:30), meaning they held positions of authority in the community, and they were threatened by Jesus' popularity with the people.

From their actions with this unnamed woman, we can deduce a few other things. Since they couldn’t know how Jesus would answer them, they had to have been okay with the possibility that taking her to Him for judgement would mean her death. They didn’t mind shaming her in front of the crowd, either. It’s obvious they had no consideration for her whatsoever, probably because they saw her as 'sinful' which meant she was beneath them.

But then Jesus wrote…something… on the ground, and stood up and told them they could go right ahead and stone her, but "let the one who has never sinned throw the first stone!" (John 8:7).

Can you picture the men shuffling their feet, maybe looking sideways at each other, wondering who would move first? Did any of them dare to pretend they had never sinned? And then "they slipped away one by one, beginning with the oldest, until only Jesus was left in the middle of the crowd with the woman" (John 8:9). I’m guessing the oldest left first because they were better able to see the truth about themselves, or maybe because they didn’t feel the need to pretend they were without sin like the younger ones may have.

When they dragged the woman in front of Jesus, these men were so sure of themselves, so confident they were in the right, and only she was in need of judgement. Whatever Jesus wrote in the dirt, though, it was enough to challenge their view of themselves and their right to judge her. Jesus was gentle even as He corrected them. He could have pointed to each one individually and listed off their sins for everyone to hear, but He didn’t. Instead He wrote something that made them realize the truth on their own.

I don’t want to compare myself to these men at all, and you probably don’t either. I don’t want to even entertain the possibility that I’m like them, but maybe we, too, need a reminder that we aren’t as sinless as we’d like to think we are. 

Thankfully, God is gentle with us, too. He might use something someone says, a song we hear, or a verse that stands out as we read our Bibles, to call us out and remind us that we’re not without sin. That reminder should serve to remind us, too, that we shouldn’t be so quick to judge, and especially to broadcast, the sins of other people.