healthy supplements

Adding supplements to our diets has become common.  Multivitamins, herbs, fish oil, antioxidants are household names in many varieties as folks seek to complement their food with missing ingredients to boost health and prevent major maladies.  I take a few of these myself and hope to extend healthy living for as long as possible!  Yesterday I noticed a passage in Peter's second letter that discussed the supplements that God wants us to take to reinforce our spiritual health as believers in Him and His Son:

2 Peter 1:5-7 In view of all this, make every effort to respond to God's promises.  Supplement your faith with a generous provision of moral excellence, and moral excellence with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with patient endurance, and patient endurance with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love for everyone.The more you grow like this, the more productive and useful you will be in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

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And there is a great promise attached to taking these supplements:

2 Peter 1:10b-11 ...Do these things, and you will never fall away.  Then God will give you a grand entrance into the eternal Kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

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blessings as you take your daily supplements!

Rob Smith

grow throughout life

Fish and trees grow throughout their lives.  Trees top off in height at some point but continue to add rings around their trunks (some of us can relate to that analogy!).  But nothing limits a fish from continuing to grow proportionately in size for as long as it swims!  Of course, we humans do stop growing (apart from weight gain) and after we reach adulthood and as we move into senior citizen status we actually can shrink a bit!  But this is just the physical dimension.  We are also spiritual beings and the Lord has fashioned us to continue growing in that dimension for as long as we live (even if we can no longer swim!).  The apostle Peter talked about the excitement of this spiritual growth in his letters:

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2 Peter 1:3 By his divine power, God has given us everything we need for living a godly life.  We have received all of this by coming to know him, the one who called us to himself by means of his marvelous glory and excellence.

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2 Peter 1:2 May God give you more and more grace and peace as you grow in your knowledge of God and Jesus our Lord.

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blessings to the spiritual fish!

Rob Smith

ambition and submission

One more observation from the great book of Daniel: In some ways this story seems to compare the ambition of man with the submission man can have to God.  Man focuses on conquering other men and building empires in Daniel.  We see the fall of Jerusalem and the rise and fall of Babylon, the rise of Persia and the foretelling of Greece and Rome (including the manner of their conquests and the fact of their collapse).  Jerusalem was restored and the people of Israel continue today but the other empires are long gone.  In the person of Daniel we see one who was a prisoner of men, one of the conquered captives taken from Jerusalem.  Daniel did not have empire building on earth as an ambition.  His one focus was to be submitted to God and then God completed His purpose for Daniel, including a big impact on the kings he served from both Babylon and Persia.  This underscores a key thought.  We can choose to build temporary empires of our own ambition that will eventually crumble or be conquered or fade when we depart this life.....or we can choose to bow before the living God, as Daniel did, and find the purpose He has for us in building the one Kingdom that will continue forever.

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Daniel 2:21 He (God) controls the course of world events; he removes kings and sets up other kings.  He gives wisdom to the wise and knowledge to the scholars.

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blessings,

Rob Smith

squirrel nest

My boss planted several maple trees for shade outside our office windows ten years ago when we moved into the building.  Those trees now have grown up to not only provide shade, they also furnish a home for a squirrel family.  I was looking at the squirrel nest yesterday, now clearly exposed nestled within the bare trunk and branches.  The squirrels had used intelligence to pick a spot where the trunk had divided into three main vertical segments to form a natural "basket" that could be filled with sticks and leaves.  The nest was high off the ground for protection from potential enemies below.  The nest was large, perhaps two feed wide and 18 inches deep.  And the construction was sound, maintaining integrity despite strong winds and precipitation.  Where did the obvious intelligence and design capability come from to fashion such a squirrel sanctuary?  Instinct, you may say.  Genetic transmission from earlier squirrel generations, you may say.  Perhaps...but regardless the mechanism for passing on the capability, there is an evidence of ability that seems to far transcend the potential most of us would ascribe to a small, furry creature.  I believe that the One who designed the squirrel also provided the intelligence it would need to thrive.  He has done this for countless species of creatures, from microbes to mastodons...and can be relied on to also do so for Man!

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Genesis 1:21 So God created great sea creatures and every living thing that scurries and swarms in the water, and every sort of bird-each producing offspring of the same kind.  And God saw that it was good.

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blessings,

Rob Smith

time travel

Reading Daniel took us to the time about half a millenium before the arrival of Jesus, when the Babylonians were the greatest empire on earth.  Reading authentic history does that...allow us to time travel back to places in the past.  Reading Daniel also allowed us to time travel to other points in history, including the future and the times of the end.  Daniel contains prophecies of the empires of Greece and Alexander the Great, of rulers who succeeded Alexander and of the Roman Empire...all of which were fulfilled hundreds of years after Daniel's life.  His prophecies precisely identified when Jesus would begin His ministry and when He would be crucified.  And there are exciting prophecies that closely parallel those of the New Testament book of Revelation describing the powerful events and personalities of a future time when Christ will come again and reign on Earth.  Besides the awesomeness of considering what is yet to come, we are amazed and humbled to realize that God really is in control of Earth and there is a plan for the planet that has been unfolding since before Creation and will consummate at some point in the future.  It is also humbling to realize that each of us has been assigned a narrow strip of time to walk this Earth and be part of that plan.  It is clear from Daniel that when all of the nations and empires have run their course only one kingdom will rule over all...the Kingdom of God.

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Interestingly, now is the time for all of us in our narrow strip of time to declare our citizenship in that coming Kingdom.  It is clear that those who have put their trust in the Lord and His Son, Jesus, during their lives...like Daniel...will part of that Kingdom.  We travel through time briefly during our stay on earth, but we each have the potential to continue with Him forever!

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Daniel 7:18 But in the end, the holy people of the Most High will be given the kingdom, and they will rule forever and ever.

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blessings,

Rob Smith

one man

We have been reading through the book of Daniel in the Mini Bible College the past few Sundays.  What a remarkable character he was!  Taken captive as a teenager, he spent his entire adult life in a foreign land, directly serving the kings of Babylon and Mede-Persia and yet remaining absolutely true to his God, the god of Israel.  He was taken captive because Jerusalem had been conquered by Babylon and eventually most of the people of Judah were dragged off to captivity, far from their home.  For the next 70 years, just as the Lord had prophesied through Jeremiah, the people of Jerusalem were captive in Babylon.  Daniel uncompromisingly continued to trust in the Lord and refused to cease praying to God, enduring the lion's den which was intended as punishment for those prayers.  The Lord gave Daniel the ability to interpret the king's dreams and the king elevated Daniel to a place of great authority in Babylon.  Daniel interceded for his people, offering prayers of confession on their behalf for past sins.  When the lives of he and his friends were on the line he showed total trust in the Lord and was confident that all would be well as long as he was right with his God.  As a result of his faith, Daniel was used by God to impact the foreign kings he served.  At least one actually became a believer in God and left his false gods behind.  The Lord loved Daniel and chose him to be the one through whom He would reveal awesome prophecies about the future, including the future empires of Greece and Rome and the specific number of years until the Messiah (Jesus) would come and then would die for our sin.  He also revealed much about the last days of earth that rings true to the prophecies of John in Revelation.

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This is the impact of one person, who absolutely trusted in God while living in a foreign place, surrounded by foreign culture and false gods.  Consider the impact your life might have in the place you live, surrounded by the contemporary false gods of our time.  We are not captive to our culture if we trust in God and we can be used of him to impact that culture, just as Daniel did!

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Daniel 9:23 "[Daniel,] the moment you began praying, a command was given.  And now I am here to tell you what it was, for you are very precious to God."  (the angel Gabriel comes to Daniel to reveal prophecy)

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blessings,

Rob Smith