Insightful Musings on the New Testamentby
Ray Sparre, NU class of '67
Ray has a wealth of experience as a Husband, Father, Pastor, Missionary, and student of the Word. He believes and practices his faith where the rubber meets the road. You'll find his writings to be practical, insightful, and grounded in a truly Christ-centered world view.
Below are links to a printable daily Bible reading guide which Ray is following, and an archive of all his daily devotional writings for 2010.
| Daily Reading Guide | 2010 Devotion Archives |
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23 Dec 10
Good morning to you, dear people.
I’m getting this off earlier than normal. When your eyes pop open at 3am and your thinker kicks in, you can get a lot done between 3 and 6am. It’s good to be early this morning for more reasons than one—I need to get cutting some vinyl graphics to apply to a big Freightliner truck that a fellow is supposed to have here about 10am.
Wow! 23rd of December? At least we’re not too bound by a lot of the tradition attached to Christmas…which helps to reduce the stress of it all. To be sure we will have a good meaningful small-size Christmas…with a measure of sadness mixed in with the over-arching joy.
May your day before the day before Christmas be blessed.
Love, Dad/Ray
23 December 2010
Passage: Revelation 15
Focus: “Just and true are your ways.” Revelation 15:3.
We earthlings sure live with a lot of temptation to critique The Almighty—to pass judgment on THE JUDGE. But our limited range of awareness, perspective, and capacity simply do not provide us with all the answers we crave. And the dangerous tendency is to conclude that The Almighty is not really as almighty as our traditional Bible theology declares. After all, this is not fair, and that’s not fair…etc. How could a good God allow such unfairness to exist?
This scene in Revelation 15 actually goes a long way in supporting my personal faith. For if I can believe that this setting is true, where faithful believers are gathered in a heavenly celebration having been killed by tribulation persecutions (which doesn’t seem very fair), then I have to also believe that what they are saying in song is true…that the Lord God Almighty is beyond fair in all His ways. If so, they have to be seeing with a whole lot more clarity than I have right now. The end of their brief song declares that “your righteous acts have been revealed” (v. 4). The Almighty obviously withholds that full revelation for then—not now.
This is not a unique theme within heaven’s songs and testimonies. Looking over into chapter 16 I notice that a major angel affirms, “You are just in these judgments, you who are and who were, the Holy One” (16:5). Even the altar in this divine drama is given a voice and states, “Yes, Lord God Almighty, true and just are your judgments” (16:7).
I’m thinking that if I fail to bolster and maintain my faith foundations with this kind of information and reasoning, I can too easily yield to the kind of temptation I mention in my lead sentence. And that is both dangerous and not fair—it’s not really fair for limited knowledge to think it can adequately contend with Infinite Knowledge.
“Pride goes before destruction and haughtiness before a fall. Better poor and humble than proud and rich.” -- Proverbs 16:18-19