Ronald Reagan was well known for his quips and one-liners. One of my favorites is, “Sometimes in this administration, it seems like the right hand doesn’t know what the far right hand is doing.” He also had a famous political maxim: “Trust, but verify.” Its primary application was to arms limitation treaties, but it is also sound wisdom in dealing with other people. “Yes,” we say, “I will trust you, but I’ll also be checking up on you to make sure you keep your word.”

But what about in our relationship with God? Should we trust him only when we can verify that he will indeed give us the desires of our heart? Here is the crucial difference between trusting God and trusting other people. With God it’s not “Trust but verify,” but rather, “Trust to verify.” The wonderful promises in Psalm 37 add up to this: God will always give us our heart’s desire. Sometimes that promise will come literally true for us in earthly terms. At other times it will seem like it doesn’t. But all of us who “take delight in the Lord” will discover that one day our deepest desires will be satisfied, even if we didn’t truly know what they were. The lesson for us is that it is the very act of trusting God that provides indisputable (and indescribable) verification of his promises in our hearts.

Prayer:
Lord, so confirm your grace in our hearts that we may trust you this day and every day.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed by the Nazis on April 9, 1945, at the Flossenberg concentration camp, just days before it was liberated by the Allies. At his memorial service in London later that year the sermon was based on the text, “We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you” (2 Chron. 20:12). This verse was chosen because Bonhoeffer himself had preached a sermon on it in London in 1933 in the early days of the Nazis’ rise to power, before the full extent of the darkness and horror that would engulf Europe was known.

We often come to times in our lives when we don’t know what to do. One thing we can do then is to keep our eyes upon the Lord and trust him. Throughout the Psalms we are admonished to wait patiently for the Lord. The New Testament also insists on the importance of the spiritual discipline of faithful waiting. Paul’s prayer for the Corinthians is that they not be lacking in any spiritual gift as they “wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Cor. 1:7). In a society of instant communication and instant gratification waiting may not come easily to us. But here is the promise from God’s word: “They who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint” (Isa. 40:31).

Prayer:
I wait for you, Lord, and in your word I hope.

One of the most staggering claims in the Bible is that the God who created the universe knows and cares for each of us individually. How can this be? Billions of people, past and present; all the good, all the evil; all the suffering, all the happiness—the imagination reels at the thought that the infinite, eternal, omnipotent God could know us by name and plan out every day of our lives.

Our experience sometimes makes it seem as if God is indifferent to us and to our prayers. We do our best to trust in him, determined to believe and persevere. We summon all our faith and still suffer disappointment and loss. To paraphrase the poet Gerard Manly Hopkins, we wonder how things would be any worse if God were our enemy instead of our friend.

As Christians we should be cautious about resorting to pious platitudes about the will of God too quickly. Too often we are like students who get the right answer to the problem, but only by looking it up in the back of the book without working it out for themselves. Jesus assured us that God does know and care for us personally, that in fact the very hairs of our head are numbered. Perhaps because such knowledge is “too wonderful for us” (v. 6), one of the ways we learn it is by patient endurance when prayers are not answered and by trusting God when he seems absent.

Prayer:
Lord, help me trust you for all the details of this day.

“The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lies comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him” (Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov). Confession: I lie to myself every day, glossing over my pride, selfishness, and indifference. I rationalize and excuse conduct I’m quick to condemn in others. Left unchecked, these tendencies would result in a grotesque gap between how I see myself and how I really am.

According to the Christian mystic Thomas Merton, the first step in finding God is to discover the truth about ourselves, regardless of how painful that may prove to be. Given our capacity for self-deception, we do not have the resources within us to discover this truth on our own. Only God can reveal our true nature and condition to us; only by humility and prayer can we accept the truth he reveals.

Churchill quipped that many who stumble upon the truth pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing has happened. Christians need a different approach. We know we don’t have to ignore or deny the deformity of our nature because it is this very nature that becomes renewed in Christ. When we humbly strive to unite our hearts to fear God and walk in his truth, we find the Lord faithful and willing to forgive, “and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9).

Prayer:
Lord, unite my heart to walk in your truth today.

If life is suffering, as M. Scott Peck said in The Road Less Travelled, and if Christians are not exempt, as we know from Jesus himself and from our own experience, then how can we account for those who seem to enjoy God’s special favor? A lot of people have puzzled over the question, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” But we might just as easily ask, “Why do good things happen to some people who trust God and not to others who trust him just as much?”

The person who wrote Psalm 92 testified that he enjoyed such special favor from God, and he seems to attribute it to personal righteousness. “The righteous flourish like the palm tree . . . they flourish in the courts of our God” (vv. 12-13). But other psalms remind us that the wicked sometimes flourish, at least for a while (Ps. 73), and the righteous sometimes suffer, at least for a while (Ps. 22).

Our tendency is to look at our immediate circumstances and see nothing beyond them. God, whose thoughts are “very deep,” sees from the advantage of eternity and through the lens of the ultimate provision he has made for us in Christ, “in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Col. 2:3). So temporary circumstances can be misleading. We cannot peer into the mysterious depths of the eternal counsel of God, but we can say with the apostle Paul, “I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content” (Phil. 4:11).

Prayer:
Help me to learn the secret of true contentment.

According to the twentieth-century physicist Niels Bohr, there are two kinds of truth: small truths and great truths. The opposite of a small truth is falsehood. The opposite of a great truth is another great truth.

There is a great truth taught in Psalm 91. It is the startling claim that no evil will befall those who put their trust in God because God will use his angels to protect them. Over against this great truth is the opposite great truth that Jesus Christ, who supremely trusted in God, was subject to the greatest suffering and the most monstrous evil imaginable. His followers, he made it clear, could expect the same.

How to reconcile these two great truths? Perhaps a way to understand this paradox lies in the temptation story as it is told in Luke 4. In Luke’s narrative the supreme temptation is for Jesus to prove he is God by jumping off the pinnacle of the temple, because, as the devil says (quoting Psalm 91:11), “He will command his angels concerning you to guard you.” Jesus replies, “You shall not tempt the Lord your God.” If we are tempted to think we’re specially favored, and that the assurances of Psalm 91 mean we will not have to endure difficulties and even suffering, it becomes just that: a temptation. At this point we can resolve the apparent contradiction between these two great truths by simply trusting God as Jesus did.

Prayer:
Lord, I believe that whatever happens, you guard me in all my ways.

We were on vacation and had been traveling for a number of weeks. Everyone—I, my wife, and our three young daughters—was tired. We were ready for the feel of our own beds, the sights and sounds of our hometown, the familiar routines of life. Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, we were ready to chant, “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home.”

In this the last chapter of the Bible, John is trying to describe God’s good future of shalom. There is a renewed heaven and earth. The holy city descends and heaven and earth are one. God pitches his tent with us mortals and wipes every tear from our eyes. And the One seated on the great throne declares that he is making all things new (not all new things).

And note this: there are rivers and trees, and the leaves of the tree of life, with twelve kinds of fruit, are for the healing of the nations. No more trees used to make battering rams to lay siege to medieval cities. No more trees felled to make masts for colonial slave ships. No more trees pulped to make propaganda to fuel the fires of ethnic cleansing. These trees are for healing. This is a vision of shalom. There’s no place like home.

Prayer:
Good and loving God, giver of life and restorer of all things, may we rest in the promise of the resurrection and the renewal of heaven and earth.

Many Christians in America seem to think that when Jesus comes again the earth will be destroyed. After true believers are raptured off the planet, they believe, the earth will be burned up to nothing. “This world is not my home, I’m just a passin’ through.” But is this view of the future found in Scripture? It may be popular, but is it true?

A closer look reveals that this escapist theology is not biblical. For example, God’s good future presented to us in the last chapters of Revelation is a vision of the redemption of the earth. Creation is purified and renewed, not destroyed. The holy city, the new Jerusalem, comes down to earth; we don’t go up to it. God is making all things new, not all new things. In the Greek used throughout these verses, new means “renewed” (kainos) not “absolutely new” (neos). Renewal, repair, restoration. This vision from John is earthy and earthly. This is our home planet, and God’s home is among humans on a heavenly earth.

Eschatology shapes our ethics—what we believe about the future shapes how we act in the present. So if the Bible’s final vision is true, then we must strive to take care of our home planet. We are God’s earthkeepers. May we with humility do what we are called to do.

Prayer:
God the great recycler and restorer, give us the courage and the wisdom to be faithful earthkeepers on this our home planet.

Years ago I worked with Habitat for Humanity. I recall one house project in which I was asked to shingle the roof. It was hard work. Years later I worked with others in my church to tear down much of the interior of a building we were later to refurbish. It, too, was hard work, but much easier than building something from scratch.

In this text Peter uses a building metaphor to help us understand the gospel. Come to Jesus, the living stone who, though rejected by mortals, was chosen by God. As if you, too, were living stones, gathered and set in place by God, “let yourselves be built into a spiritual house,” so as to become “a holy priesthood.” The pronouns here are plural and the verb (“let yourselves be built”) is a passive imperative. In other words, this is a corporate (not individual) endeavor, and being built into a spiritual house is not something we can do, but something we must allow God to do with us.

In addition, holy does not mean morally perfect but rather set apart for service to God. So becoming a holy priesthood means that collectively as followers of Jesus we are called to be the means by which God is present on earth. We are a channel of grace, a living sacrament, a house used by the Holy Spirit.

Prayer:
Living Christ, build us into a spiritual house dedicated to being a means of grace.

We have in this chapter the narration of a great cloud of witnesses (12:1)—Abel and Noah, Abraham and Sarah, Jacob and Joseph, Moses and Rahab, Gideon and David, the known Hebrew prophets, and the nameless faithful over the centuries. These all were strangers and foreigners on the earth, seeking a homeland. They were seeking not the land they had left but a better place, a taste of heaven, a place to call home. They were seeking a city whose architect and builder is God (v. 10 NRSV).

What is this city like? We get glimpses of it throughout the Bible, perhaps never more eye-popping than in Revelation. A city of beauty and delight. A city of rivers and trees. A city where all kinds of people are at home. A city of shalom.

The point here, though, is that these witnesses never reached that city. They died without having received what they were promised. They remained sojourners seeking a homeland. Hence the commendation for their faith, their trust in the promise-making and promise-keeping God.

We have the advantage of looking to Jesus, “the pioneer and perfecter of our faith” (12:2 NRSV). But we, too, still live by faith, not (yet) by sight. We, too, are sojourners seeking the city of God. We, too, long for that home of shalom.

Prayer:
God of promises made and promises kept, give us a vision of your city of shalom that we may have faith to trust you in all things.

The apostle Paul speaks of redemption in terms of home construction. We are all members of the household of God. And this expansive house has as its firm foundation the good work of the apostles and prophets, with none other than Jesus Christ as the cornerstone, the stone without which no sound building can be built.

Furthermore, in Christ the beams and timbers, the bricks and mortar, are all carefully joined into a single building set apart for service to God. This house, this one body of Jews and gentiles alike, is the home of God—the place where God is present and people meet God. In Trinitarian fashion, Paul speaks of Christ as the one in whom all (gentiles and Jews) are built together through the Spirit into a dwelling place of God. The church constitutes the home of God, a home in which the humanly constructed barriers of race and ethnicity, age and gender, are reconstructed.

So homebreakers become homemakers because Christ is our peace. Aliens become citizens because of what Christ has done on the cross. The despairing become filled with hope because they are in Christ. We all are full members of the household of God.

Prayer:
God of grace, help us to acknowledge that we all are members of your one household of faith.

Many years ago I led wilderness backpacking and canoeing trips professionally. I still teach a college course in the Adirondacks of upstate New York during which for eight days ten college students and three other instructors and I camp in the wilderness. Some of us sleep in hammocks and others sleep in tents. The tents are lightweight backpacking tents and just large enough for two or four people. Needless to say, you get to know your tentmates quite well: who snores, who goes to sleep easily, who likes to talk. In those quiet conversations, you learn of each others’ hopes and fears, dreams and anxieties. Tenting breeds familiarity.

This famous text in John’s Gospel is all about tenting. In Greek verse 14 says that the Word (logos) became flesh (sarx) and tented (eskenosin) among us. God in Christ pitched his tent among us and lived with us on our terms, fully human except for sin as the ancient creeds put it. For a time God lived among us, and so God knows what it means to be human from the inside. As some early Christian writers state, there is nothing that we experience that God in Christ has not experienced. God knows us and the human condition because he tented among us.

Prayer:
Loving God, who in Christ pitched your tent among us, remind us that you know us intimately and that there is nothing we experience that you do not know firsthand.

The shame of it all. The entire household was shamed by the request made by this impertinent younger son. He couldn’t wait until his father was dead to ask for his inheritance? This was a way of saying “Father, I wish you were dead.”

Instead of punishing the punk, the father gave him what he wanted. And off the boy went, only to squander his inheritance among the unclean gentiles. When his money was gone he pawned his outer coat, family ring, and shoes for something to eat. Then he did something no self-respecting Jewish boy would do—he took a job working with pigs. When he was absolutely famished, he even longed to eat pig slop. He was off the bottom of the Jewish social ladder.

He finally came to himself and resolved to go home. But how could he pay his debts, restore his honor, be accepted? As he approached his hometown he could not believe his eyes. His father, against all custom, was coming to him. And his father was running, a most undignified thing for him to do. Before the boy could take it all in, his father engulfed him in his arms and kissed him. Home at last in the embrace of grace from the homemaking Father.

Prayer:
God of compassion, help us to swallow our pride and allow you to receive us into your loving embrace.

Much depends on dinner. Matthew tells the story of an opulent feast of death in the palace of Herod. An over-the-top birthday party for the king, with perhaps too much rich food, too much wine, and bit of an erotic dance by the king’s daughter. Before you know it, things get out of hand, rash promises are made, and John the Baptist’s decapitated head is on a platter along with the dessert offerings.

In contrast to this feast, Matthew tells a story of a radically different kind of meal. The contrast to Herod’s decadent birthday bash is a messianic party in the desert. Jesus is in the wilderness, and the people are hungry. What will they eat? Where will they eat it? How will food be provided? Jesus tells the crowds to get ready for a picnic in the wilderness, and then five loaves and two fish miraculously feed five thousand people, and there are twelve baskets of food left over.

Food in the wilderness? Twelve baskets left over? Could this be a sign of a new exodus? Could those twelve baskets suggest a restoration of the twelve tribes of Israel? Is this a party to celebrate the rebirth of Israel? Could Jesus be the long-awaited Messiah, a new Moses leading his people home?

Prayer:
God of promise and provision, help us to see your Son Jesus for who he is and to celebrate the homecoming feast of the resurrection.

I vividly remember as a kid playing baseball across the street from my house. We weren’t actually in the street, but occasionally a foul ball would take us out onto the street. Perhaps you remember something similar—the neighborhood boys and girls playing in the streets, or maybe in your backyard or at the local playground. Lots of chatter and laughter and banter. Unselfconscious and unstructured (by parents) activity. Except for an occasional scraped knee or tussle after a ball, a happy time of joy-filled play.

In this rather obscure text, the prophet Zechariah describes the return of God to Jerusalem. Jerusalem will be a place of hospitality, where old men and old women sit in the streets, sipping their lemonade and telling stories of delicious Thanksgiving dinners and of big fish that got away. And where boys and girls will play kickball and chess and capture the flag. All will be well. Jerusalem, finally, a place of shalom.

Though this seems impossible to us, the prophet says, it is not impossible for God. For God is faithful and righteous. Because of God’s character, we can lean into this stunning and play-filled vision of God’s good future—this reminder that after exile there is homecoming.

Prayer:
God of new beginnings, of homecoming after exile, give us hope that we will play in the streets of your kingdom coming.