When people shrink.

People will make Jesus smaller than He is sometimes. Well meaning people that love you will downsize Him and what He's capable of in your life. They don't mean to, they're not being malicious, it just happens. And it happened in Mark 5.

Jesus was on the way to attend to the daughter of Jairus. She was sick and Jairus had pleaded with Jesus to come see her. On his way, Jesus got stopped by someone in the crowd and was delayed. Here is what happens in verse 35:

While Jesus was still speaking, some men came from the house of Jairus, the synagogue ruler. "Your daughter is dead," they said. "Why bother the teacher any more?"

Do you see how they shrunk Jesus? In that moment, men that had presumably been watching over Jairus’ daughter while he was out recruiting the help of Jesus, came with a message. It was too late. Your daughter is dead. Why keep bothering this teacher.

They shrunk Jesus. They believed the situation had passed His abilities. They believed that the situation had grown larger than He could handle. It was over. How did Christ respond? Here's verse 36:

Ignoring what they said, Jesus told the synagogue ruler, "Don't be afraid; just believe."

Then He went to Jairus house and healed his daughter.

He refused to stay small. He refused to be limited by other people's expectations of what He was capable of and everyday, He asks us to do the same thing.

I don’t know what you’re going through right now, but Jesus is big enough for it. It is not too late. It is never passed His power.

So when someone tries to shrink Jesus, remember to just believe.

Who is carrying your mat?

I’ve written about accountability before but haven’t spent much time on the topic of friendship. Until I read these verses in Mark 2. Here is what 3-4 says:

Some men came, bringing to him (Jesus) a paralytic, carried by four of them. Since they could not get him to Jesus because of the crowd, they made an opening in the roof above Jesus and, after digging through it, lowered the mat the paralyzed man was lying on.

I have to confess I’ve always missed the tenderness and strength of the friendship these four men showed the paralytic on the mat. First of all, they carried their friend to Jesus, with the hope that he would get healed. When they found the way blocked, they didn’t give up. They got on the roof, made an opening, spent an undetermined amount of time digging through it and then lowered him gently into Christ’s presence.

Is there a better picture of friendship than that? Going wildly out of your way to bring someone into Christ’s presence? Doing anything and everything you can, to connect someone hurting with the love of Christ?

Who is carrying your mat? Do you have four friends like that?

And perhaps more importantly, who’s mat are you carrying?

Four words.

I have heard roughly 1 million pastors reference the verse, Philippians 4:6-7, in sermons about worry.

Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

And it makes complete sense, because it's a great verse. I've said that one over and over again through the years as I've wrestled with my own worries.

But I've never heard anyone mention the four words that come before it. I've never heard anyone talk about the incredibly short, but in my mind, incredibly powerful sentence that precedes, "Do not be anxious about anything."

Have you? If you're familiar with that verse and have memorized it before, do you know the way the verse before it concludes? I honestly didn’t until a few weeks ago.

The four words before Philippians 4:6 are "The Lord is near." The verses say, "The Lord is near. Do not be anxious ..." I love that. When we pray that verse out loud when we're under the burden of worry, when the skies are dark and we are so anxious we can barely stand and we cry out to God, I think we should start with "The Lord is near."

We're not praying to a far off God. We're not presenting our requests to a long distance lord. The Lord is near. The Lord is near. That's such a great reminder. Instead of starting with us, "Don't be anxious about anything," what if we started with the Lord? What if we started our pray with, "the lord is near" and ended it in verse 7 with “in Christ Jesus?” What if we had God bookends on that prayer about worry?

Would that change the way we thought about worry? It has for me.

Quiet

Life is loud right now. The average person sees up to 5,000 marketing messages a day. That means that every week, someone is telling you something 35,000 times. Every month, you get offered 150,000 different messages, most of which are trying to sell you something that will improve your life. Every year, more than 1.8 million messages tell you how to be a better you with what they offer. And when we add our own internal soundtracks to that noise, things get really cluttered.

We tell ourselves we're not good enough. Or that we're fantastic. We inflate and deflate our own egos all day long with ideas and words and thoughts that bounce around our hearts and heads. Friends and family, coworkers and television, the internet and radio add to the conversation.

And life feels loud.

That's why I love Zephaniah 3:17:

The LORD your God is with you,
he is mighty to save.
He will take great delight in you,
he will quiet you with his love,
he will rejoice over you with singing.

The whole verse is great, but my favorite part might be the promise that God will "quiet you with his love."

I am in awe that the verse is not written:

God will quiet you by speaking louder than everything else.
God will quiet you with his knowledge
God will quiet you with his disappointment in you for allowing life to get so loud
God will quiet you with his anger.

It's love. God is going to quiet us with his love. And when he does, we'll be able to hear him singing over us.

Life is loud right now, and there are ways I can be deliberate and intentional about making it quieter. But the truth is, what I pray for the most, when things feel loud and out of control, is that God will quiet me with his love.

The gift of rescue.

Have you ever read the book of Jeremiah? I did during the two years I spent doing a one year walk through the Bible, but recently I noticed a word I missed the first time.

In chapter 1:7-8, God is calling Jeremiah and says this to him:

But the LORD said to me, "Do not say, 'I am only a child.' You must go to everyone I send you to and say whatever I command you. Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you and will rescue you," declares the LORD.

The word that stuck out to me was "rescue."

I've always read that verse like this:

"Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you and will help you."

I've always thought that a sign that you are doing God's work, that you have listened to His voice and made the right the decision is that things are peaceful and easy. God is there after all, shouldn’t that verse say, "Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you and will comfort you?"

But it doesn't that, it says "rescue." It reads like God is saying, "Look, you need to go do what I am asking you and it won’t be easy. I'm not calling you to safety and comfort, I'm asking you to go into a situation that's going to be dangerous and difficult. Where I am calling you will be so horrible that it will require rescue, but I will provide it. That's what I am going to give you, rescue. But in order to give you the gift of rescue, I need you to go somewhere that requires it and I'm going to be upfront, that won’t be fun. Because if it was, rescue wouldn’t be necessary and that's the gift I want to give you. So …."

I don't know where you are or what God's doing in your life right now but I do know this, if you want to receive the gift of rescue, which I think is one of God's favorite gifts to give us, you have to go somewhere and do something that requires it.

(If you read this post and think, "but I don't know what my call is!" read something I wrote called "Trying to find a cause." I promise you already have one and it's the most important one you can have.)

Just come.

Somewhere along the way, I stepped away from the original intent of 97secondswithGod which was to express short, honest bursts of faith. And although I can't do the walk through the Bible chapter by chapter, day by day format right now, that doesn't mean I can't share what God is laying on my heart, as He lays it on there.

I don't know the frequency of what I'll write or what it will look like. I think it's going to be random and messy. But I want to share with you and want you to know I appreciate how many of you have expressed your appreciation for this site.

Below is what I wrote in my journal yesterday after reading Matthew 11: 28-30 and how I imagine God speaking that truth into my heart:

28 "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy and my burden is light."

I am not asking you to complete yourself and then come to me. I am asking you to come to me. Broken and burdened, infested with the most hideous lies about me and my nature. Covered in perpetual sin that you just can’t seem to shake. Because I don’t see that. I see Christ. I see the blood of my son all over you.

I know you think you need to work through your doubt before you come to me. But that’s not true. I can’t wait that long for you to come. And how ridiculous is that lie? That you have to figure me out, know me and trust in me without fail before you can come to me and get to know me. I do have gifts for you. Big crazy gifts, but the biggest of all is my presence.

That’s what I am inviting you into. My presence. That’s a gift I am inviting you into. My presence. That’s a gift I am going to give you every second for every hour of every day for the rest of eternity. Come to me. Come be in my presence. It’s so crazy to think you have to perfectly accept that gift before you can stand in that gift. I’m just saying, “Come stand in it. Bask in it.”

Come stand in it filthy and let me cleanse you.

Come stand in it broken and let me heal you.

Come stand in it drunk on doubt and fear and let me renew a spirit of confidence and trust in you.

Just come stand in it.

Come stand in it covered with lies and misconceptions about who I am and who you are and let me reveal the truth.

Come stand in it worried and stressed and trembling and let me cover you with a peace that transcends all understanding.

Come, just come.

Come stand in it with a past you can’t fix and a future you can’t look at without grimacing and I will comfort you in this very moment.

Come.

What happened to 97 seconds?

I love this project. I feel incredibly blessed that people read this site and ask why did it stop. Right now though, in order to be faithful to some other projects God has brought into my path I need to take a sabbatical from 97secondswithgod.com.

Thanks for reading and sharing in this site and the other sites I write. I hope to return when the time is right.

Jon