Read Matthew 27

“Then, behold, the veil of the temple was torn in
two from top to bottom.”
(Matthew 27:51)

Thoughts… There is a high likelihood that you will pass by this curtain-tearing incident too quickly in light of all of the other amazing details of the crucifixion. If you do, you will miss one of the most significant events in the history of God’s dealing with mankind.

A little background information on the curtain may help. Kimberly Southwall writes,

“The temple had two important rooms in it. One was called the Holy Place, and the other was called the Most Holy Place. A curtain separated the Holy Place from the Most Holy Place. (Exodus 26:31-33) The Most Holy Place represented the presence of God Himself. Because of that, the Most Holy Place was so special that God only allowed a priest to enter into it one time each year. No one else was ever allowed inside that room. The priest entered the Most Holy Place once a year to take the blood from a sacrificed animal to sprinkle inside to atone or try to make up for the peoples’ sins during that past year. For many years, this was the only way God’s people could hope to atone for their sins. But even this way wasn’t really good enough. That’s why God sent His only Son, Jesus, to die and atone for everyone’s sins, once and for all.

Keep in mind that this curtain was not like the ones in your home. To begin with, only the High Priest could get near it; and then only once a year. Not only that, it would have been impossibly tall to rip from the top to the bottom without a ladder. Moreover, it was so thick that, ladder or not, no human hand could ever have torn it in two.

So what is going on here? At the moment Jesus died to atone for our sins, it is as if God reached down from the unseen realm where he dwells, grabbed the curtain with both hands, ripping it with a vengeance, and thus opening up a new way for you and me into his very presence.

How awesome is that! No longer do we need to come to God through an ineffective system of religious laws, procedural sacrifices, or by a high priest. We can now boldly, confidently, and regularly come right into the very presence of God himself to obtain what we need.

The writer of Hebrews describes it this way,

“Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain, that is, his body, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near to God with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful.” (Hebrews 10:19-23)

The writer puts it similarly in Hebrews 4:16, “Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need.”

Now, aren’t you glad God ripped the curtain? I sure am. Next time you read Matthew 27, pause at verse 51 for a little while.

And while you’re at it, be a little bold before God in your prayers!

Prayer… Lord God, thank you for this “new and living way” you have opened up from me into your presence. By Christ’s sacrifice, you have given me the right and the privilege to come right before your throne to obtain mercy and find grace. So I ask you Lord, in light of that, by your mercy, cleanse me from my unrighteousness, and by your grace, pour out all of heaven’s blessings upon me this day. In Jesus’ name I pray.

One More Thing… “This is the mystery of the riches of divine grace for sinners, for by a wonderful exchange our sins are now not ours but Christ’s, and Christ’s righteousness is not Christ’s, but ours.” —Martin Luther

Read Matthew 26

Jesus went a little farther and fell on His face, and prayed,
saying, “O My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass
from Me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will.”
(Matthew 26:39)

Thoughts… Where is the greatest place in the world to be? In the very center of God’s will, that’s where!

And when we can learn to not only pray, but earnestly desire God’s will for our lives—unpleasant and undesired circumstances notwithstanding—then we will have discovered what Jesus knew all along when he prayed that prayer: The Divine “eye” of the Satanic storm.

Jesus desired his Father’s will more than anything else—even life itself. He knew his purpose in life was to fulfill God’s will, which was to redeem a lost world by his sacrificial death. He entrusted his own personal preferences to the One who not only works out all things for His own glory, but for the good of His children as well. (Romans 8:28)

That’s why Jesus, “the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.” Jesus knew that the path to the crown was by way of the cross.

So what about you? Have you come to that place where you can subjugate your own preferences to the will of God? When you can so entrust your life to the Father’s perfect plan, no matter what that means, you will have discovered, as Jesus did, the best place in the world to be.

Hebrews 12:1-3 reminds us,

“Therefore we also, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses [Jesus and other who heroically fulfilled God’s will], let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which so easily ensnares us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. For consider Him who endured such hostility from sinners against Himself, lest you become weary and discouraged in your souls.”

Are you struggling with God’s will? Does it seem a little too much to handle? Consider Jesus! Endure your cross now; afterwards comes the crown!

Before he was martyred by the Naizis, German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in a letter from prison, “Much that worries us beforehand can afterwards, quite unexpectedly, have a happy and simple solution… Things really are in a better hand than ours.”

That’s why you can pray, “Father, not my will, but Yours be done!” Your life—unpleasant and undesired circumstances notwithstanding—is in better hands than yours.

And after your cross, if you endure by doing the will of the Father, comes the crown.

Prayer… Father, not my will, but yours be done!

One More Thing… “God knows our situation; He will not judge us as if we had no difficulties to overcome. What matters is the sincerity and perseverance of our will to overcome them.” —C.S. Lewis

Read Matthew 25

“The kingdom of heaven is like a man traveling to a far country,
who called his own servants and delivered his goods to
them. To one he gave five talents, to another two,
and to another one, to each according to his
own ability; and immediately he went on a
journey … But he who had received
one went and dug in the ground,
and hid his lord’s money.”
(Matthew 25:14-15,18)

Thoughts… You probably know this Parable of the Talents well. Each of the servants was given talents (a sum of money) according to his ability, with the expectation that they would use them produce something of benefit for the master.

The first two did—and were reward handsomely; the third didn’t—and was rebuked harshly. And in fact, the talent was taken from the latter and given to the first servant, since he had proven to the master that he could increase exponentially whatever was placed in his care.

Now I have no way to prove this theologically, but I have a strong suspicion about this third servant. I don’t think the master would have excoriated him if trying had at least preceded his failure. I think it was because he didn’t try that the master’s anger was unleashed upon him. He played it safe. He feared failing, so he didn’t risk anything.

This one-talent servant simply took what he had been given, protected it, and turned it back over to the master in the same condition in which he had received it. And the master blew a gasket!

This gracious but just master had entrusted something special to the servant and the servant did nothing to expand it. Now here is a crucial part of this story: The master had given his servant the talent according to his ability (verse 15). In other words, the master knew, even though it was small, there was production potential in this servant.

But the servant wasted it! He let a golden opportunity slip by, and paid a heavy price for it. He didn’t damage the talent; he didn’t lose it; he preserved it—thinking he was doing the master a favor. However, the master found that kind of fear-based, lazy-hearted stewardship odious.

You, too, have been given a talent—probably more: talents in the literal sense of the word, and talents in the sense of kingdom potential and kingdom opportunities. You have been given them according to your ability—not anyone else’s. You won’t be judged against either another’s potential or their production. Your only benchmark is your own faithfulness. As Charles Robinson pointed out, “The reward of being ‘faithful over a few things’ is just the same as being ‘faithful over many things’ ; for the emphasis falls upon the same word; it is the ‘faithful’ who will enter ‘into the joy of their Lord.’”

It matters not if you have five, three or one talent potential. What matters is what you do with what you have been given. You have been given your talents with the expectation that you will leverage your abilities to increase those talents and enlarge the kingdom for the real Master’s sake.

The whole point of this story is this: Don’t waste your opportunities. Don’t let the possibility of failure paralyze you into inaction. If there is any regret at the end of your faith journey, it won’t be that you tried and failed. It will be that you didn’t try.

Risk a little. Even if you fall flat on your face, the fact that your heart was pure and your motive was to increase your Master’s kingdom will bring you to the joyful place of hearing him say to you on that glorious day,

“Well done, good and faithful servant; you have been faithful over
a few things, I will make you ruler over many things.
Enter into the joy of your lord.”
(Verse 23)

Prayer… Father, thank you for entrusting me with kingdom potential. I will do my best to expand your kingdom and bring greater glory to your name.

One More Thing… “Do you seek any further reward beyond that of having pleased God? In truth, you know not how great a good it is to please Him.” —John Chrysostom

Read Matthew 24

“Watch therefore, for you do not know what
hour your Lord is coming.”
(Matthew 24:42)

Thoughts… Thirty years ago, singer-songwriter Barry McGuire sang a song called, “Eve of Destruction.” Today, a lot of people think McGuire was dead on—that we are on the eve of destruction! Given conditions around the world, can Planet Earth as we know it continue much longer? Can the human race survive? Are we living in the end times?

Wars, rumors of war, global warming, the real possibility of pandemic, drug-resistant disease, hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, the inexorable march toward a one-world government, the increase of evil, the rising tide of Islam, instability and unpredictability in the Middle East, escalating hostility toward Israel, increasing intolerance of Christianity, and the alarming surge of rage and violence that is being directed at believers!

Sounds like a page right out of the Bible, doesn’t it? The fact is, 2,000 years ago Jesus predicted these very things here in Matthew 24 when he said, “So you also, when you see all these things, know that it is near—at the doors!” (v. 33)

For very good reason, interest in the end times is at an all-time high! Just look at the unbelievable success of the wildly popular “Left Behind” series—100 million copies sold. People want to know the future! And that’s not bad since we’re going to spend a long time there!

History is hurtling toward a conclusion—one that God has already ordained and foretold in the Bible. It could be soon—it could be today, or tonight, or this week, or it could be another thousand years from now. But no matter when, as the Bible says, God is not slow in fulfilling his Word—Jesus is coming back!

So what are you to do in response to that? Jesus twice said, “Watch and be ready for my coming.” (Verses 42,44) Jesus didn’t talk about the future just to get a crowd or to fill his disciples’ brains with prophetic minutiae. His purpose wasn’t to get them so hyped and overly focused on the second coming that they dropped everything to wait for his return. It wasn’t to make them so heavenly minded they were no earthly good.

Here’s the deal: Jesus’ prophetic sermon wasn’t meant just to clue us in, but to clean us up! He said these things to provoke us to purity! The Apostle John, who knew a fair amount about the end times—he wrote Revelations after all—spoke of our hope in Christ return this way:

“This hope makes us keep ourselves holy, just as Christ is holy.”
(I John 3:3, CEV)

So the question of when and the details of how that so many people are focused on, though interesting, are not nearly important as this one overriding issue: Are you watching, and are you ready?

Prayer… Father, as I await the return of your Son, give me a pure heart and an active faith.

One More Thing… “It is vain to be always looking toward the future and never acting toward it.” —John Frederick Boyes

Read Matthew 23

“Therefore whatever [the Pharisees and scribes] tell you to
observe, that observe and do, but do not do according
to their works; for they say, and do not do.”
(Matthew 23:3)

Thoughts… Let’s be perfectly clear about this: Sin is sin, and no matter what level of sin it is, it is always offensive to a holy God. Sin corrupts; it corrodes the soul; it prevents the blessings of God and if not dealt with, and for the unbeliever, will cause the offer of eternal life to be forfeited.

Having said that, have you noticed how Jesus seems to rail against one particular sin more than others? Jesus doesn’t’ beat up on prostitutes and thieves and good old run of the mill garden variety sinners like he does religious hypocrites. Just read through this chapter and you will see what I mean.

Hypocrisy is intolerable to God; religious hypocrisy is especially repugnant. It is the worst indictment the Divine could lay against you. To say one thing and to do another; to believe one way and live a different way; to teach people one thing and to personally practice another in the name of Christ will arouse God’s disdain like no other.

Why? Hypocrisy is the height of deceitfulness. It layers the heart act by act with calluses that will eventually prevent the Holy Spirit from doing his work: Convicting us of sin. It lures gullible followers into the same destructive patterns of incongruent beliefs. And perhaps worst of all, it hardens those who are turned off by the religious hypocrisy they witness among God’s so-called people from ever wanting to have anything to do with Jesus Christ.

How many times have you heard an angry, hardened unbeliever say, “If that’s what Christianity is all about, I want nothing to do with it!”? How sad! It may be that the hypocrisy they’re reacting to will close the door of their heart for all eternity to God’s offer of salvation.

The challenge with hypocrisy is that is so hard to spot in your own life. Again, it is so effectively evil because of its power of deception and the hardening of the heart that it wreaks. However, if you are willing to lie very still on the Great Surgeon’s table and allow the Holy Spirit to apply the scalpel to your heart, I am confident that he will expose and excise any hypocrisy that has taken up residence.

Are you courageous enough to allow him to do some spiritual surgery on you today?

Prayer… Holy Spirit, I open my heart to you. Please expose any hidden and unknown sin. Remove anything in me that could destroy my relationship with the God I love.

One More Thing… “Hypocrisy desires to seem good rather than to be so; honesty desires to be good rather than seem so.” —Arthur Warwick

Read Matthew 22

“Many are called, but few are chosen.”
(Matthew 22:14)

Thoughts… I am always amazed at people’s reaction to the tragic and untimely death of a pop culture icon. And it seems like we’ve had more than our fair share of them over the past few years: Heath Ledger, Anna Nicole Smith, gansta rapper Notorious B.I.G., and the list goes on.

Adoring fans assume that no matter what kind of life they led and what kind of perversity contributed to their death, these stars get a free and easy pass to heaven. How often have you heard a heartbroken fan trying to find some comfort in their favorite celebrity’s death say something like this: “I’ll sure miss ‘so and so’, but I know they’re in a much better place. I’ll bet they’re smiling down on us right now.”

Of course, death is tragic, whether it’s a celebrity or not. And of course, God loves famous people just as he loves loves not so famous people, and has made room for all in his eternal kingdom. But no one gets a free and easy pass to heaven—unless, that is, they go through Jesus. He is the only free and easy way to the Father. (John 14:6)

“Many are called, but few are chosen.” Those sobering words appear at the very end of the Parable of the Banquet, and if you read that entire parable (Matthew 22:1-14), you find that Jesus is not painting the picture of a narrow, exclusive God. Quite the opposite—he invites pretty much everybody to the party.

The problem is, most reject the invitation. They want to come to it when they are good and ready. They don’t want to change into proper banquet attire. In the words of that famous theologian Frank Sinatra, the vast majority of people want to do it “my way.” But it doesn’t work that way. Only a few get chosen, not because of the exclusivity of God, but because of the resistance of those who demand entrance into the banquet on their terms.

Let’s be very clear about this: God is not willing that any should perish; He desires that all should come to repentance. (II Peter 3:9) But we don’t get to tell God how we are going to get into his heaven. We can only get there on his terms.

And his terms are very clear: Complete and total surrender to Jesus Christ as Savior AND Lord. We must receive him as the only one who can save us from our sins, and we must crown him as the Lord and Ruler of our lives–which means every dimension of our being. It is on those terms that we are given the free and easy pass to heaven.

Many get invited, but only the few who come on God’s terms will get in on the party that will never end.

Prayer… God, I am so grateful that I have been invited to the party. I gladly accept!

One More Thing… “None shall be saved by Christ but those only who work out their own salvation while God is working in them by His truth and His Holy Spirit. We cannot do without God; and God will not do without us.” —Matthew Henry

Read Matthew 21

Then Jesus went into the temple of God and drove out all those
who bought and sold in the temple, and overturned the tables
of the money changers and the seats of those who sold
doves. And He said to them, “It is written, ‘My
house shall be called a house of prayer,’ but
you have made it a ‘den of thieves.’”
(Matthew 21:12-13)

Thoughts… This passage may blow your image of Jesus as the “Gentle Shepherd” right out of the water. I hope so! There were times that Jesus was good and angry—and not to be so would have been un-God like.

To be sure, Jesus loved people, and that love especially came through in his compassion for the poor, widows and orphans, the sick and infirmed, and those who were held captive to sin by Satan. He was a man of love and peace who called people to a lifestyle of love and peace.

But Jesus was no pushover. He had a large capacity for anger—righteous indignation—as we see here in this encounter with the moneychangers at the temple. Jesus didn’t go around trying to pick fights, but when he saw injustice, it really ticked him off.

What pushed his button in particular was seeing how religious authorities would turn what should have been the worship of God into a way to manipulate people for their own purposes. It bothered him greatly when spiritual directors stood in the way of the kindness of God reaching people in need, and when religious systems abused and enslaved people instead of ushering them into the abundance of God.

J. I. Packer, in his book, Your Father Loves You, writes of the many times Jesus’ anger flared at this sort of thing:

Jesus went into the synagogue on the Sabbath and saw a man with a crippled hand. He knew that the Pharisees were watching to see what he would do, and he felt angry that they were only out to put him in the wrong. They did not care a scrap for the handicapped man, nor did they want to see the power and love of God brought to bear on him. There were other instances where Jesus showed anger or sternness. He “sternly charged” the leper whom he had healed not to tell anyone about it (Mark 1:43) because he foresaw the problems of being pursued by a huge crowd of thoughtless people who were interested only in seeing miracles and not in his teaching. But the leper disobeyed and so made things very hard for Jesus. Jesus showed anger again when the disciples tried to send away the mothers and their children (Mark 10:13-16). He was indignant and distressed at the way the disciples were thwarting his loving purposes and giving the impression that he did not have time for ordinary people. He showed anger once more when he drove “out those who sold and those who bought in the temple” (Mark 11:15-17). God’s house of prayer was being made into a den of thieves and God was not being glorified—hence Jesus’ angry words and deeds. Commenting on this, Warfield wrote: “A man who cannot be angry, cannot be merciful.” The person who cannot be angry at things which thwart God’s purposes and God’s love toward people is living too far away from his fellow men ever to feel anything positive towards them. Finally, at Lazarus’ grave Jesus showed not just sympathy and deep distress for the mourners (John 11:33-35), but also a sense of angry outrage at the monstrosity of death in God’s world. This is the meaning of “deeply moved” in John 11:38.

Any form of spiritual manipulation, control, abuse or neglect that prevents the goodness of God from reaching people, no matter what form it takes, or who is perpetrating it, doesn’t make Jesus very happy. Not then…and not now.

Religious leaders, televangelists, youth directors, or anyone who has spiritual influence over others, and uses that influence for their own financial gain, or to gain name recognition, or for sexual gratification, or simply to feed their own hunger for power, or who deliberately prevents the abundance of God he would pour out on his children will sooner or later have to stand before a just Jesus who is perfectly capable of anger. One day there will be an accounting for the mismanagement of spiritual authority—and it won’t be pretty.

Jesus, the Gentle Shepherd, the Prince of Peace, got good and angry over a few things. Maybe it is high time Christ’s followers got a little fed up with sin and injustice as well.

So if it is called for, go ahead and get angry. Just make sure you are good—literally—and angry.

Prayer… Lord Jesus, I want to have a heart like yours. Cause me to laugh over the things that make you laugh, weep over what breaks your heart, even to get angry over the kind of things that upset you. Teach me to see the world as you see it, respond to situations as you would, and live as you would live if you were in my place.

One More Thing… “Anger is a divinely implanted emotion. Closely allied to our instinct for right, it is designed to be used for constructive spiritual purposes. The person who cannot feel anger at evil is a person who lacks enthusiasm for good. If you cannot hate wrong, it’s very questionable whether you really love righteousness.” —David Seamands