FBC Daily Devotional – June 16, 2021

Faith Baptist Church

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00:06

Well, good Wednesday to you. We are halfway through the week already, and I hope your week's going well, getting a lot accomplished.

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And I hope you're able to get outside as much as possible in these summer months.

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We have these long days this time of the year, and it's so wonderful to be able to enjoy them.

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You know, you go, like tonight, we'll have midweek service at 7 o 'clock. By the time we're done at 8 o 'clock, it's still nice and light outside.

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You can still enjoy another hour of outdoors at that time. I hope you're taking advantage of that.

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Good for us to get that fresh air and the vitamin D of the sunshine. So anyway, well, we read today in Luke chapter 6, and there's a couple of things that we read.

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One we read about Jesus. That's a little bit of a rebuke to me. And another one that Jesus says that is a different kind of rebuke.

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So one of the things Jesus did is, we read of it in verse 12, the beginning of our reading passage for today.

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It says this, Wow, that devotional life of Jesus is quite a rebuke to me.

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I mean, I can't remember the last time, well,

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I can't remember I ever did, honestly, spend an entire night in prayer. There have been plenty of nights where I didn't sleep well, and my sleep was interrupted, and prayer time took up that interruption of being awake in the middle of the night.

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There have been some relatively sleepless nights, but I can't recall that there was ever a time when

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I just didn't go to sleep at all, and all I did was pray. Now, I'm not mentioning that and using

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Jesus' example here as a way of guilting us into something. I don't want to give the impression that I'm saying, hey, you know, we need to do this.

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You need to do this. You should take a night a week or a night a month and just spend the whole night in prayer. No, I don't think so.

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I think what's going on here is Jesus has a sense of burden, a heavy sense of burden, because what's going to happen the next day is he's going to call the disciples to him, and he's going to choose the 12 that are going to be with him, and 11 of whom are going to be the apostles, and one of whom is going to be the betrayer.

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And there's a lot of weight being placed on those 12 individuals.

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In fact, millennia of future history depends upon these 11, 12 individuals.

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And so Jesus, I think, is weighed down. He's very burdened about this, and so he spends the night in prayer.

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So the rebuke to me is how much of my praying is because I'm really burdened about what

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I'm praying for, or am I doing it because I should be? You know what

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I'm saying? How many times do you get a prayer request and you say, oh, I should pray for them, and yet not be really burdened about it?

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You see, that's what I'm getting at. Jesus is really burdened, and that burden that he feels and he senses, the weighs upon his shoulders, compels him to pray diligently, earnestly, and he ends up spending the whole night doing it.

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Well, that's one thing that challenges me, is my prayer life, my devotional life. The other thing that challenges me is what

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Jesus says in verses 22 and 3. So let me ask you this, and work toward it.

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How are you responding toward the increasing level of animosity and hostility that's expressed toward,

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I mean, Bible -believing Christians, the kind of Christians that would be listening to a devotional like this?

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How are you responding to it these days? I ask myself that question.

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Do I respond to it with anger, frustration, wringing of the hands, worrying?

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Do I reciprocate the anger with anger, the hostility with hostility?

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Do I express vitriol? How am I doing with that? How are you doing with it?

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Well, here's the thing Jesus says in verses 22 and 3. He says, blessed are you, speaking to his disciples, blessed are you when men hate you and when they exclude you.

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You think about how the true biblical Christian is hated by so many today.

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Because a biblical Christian cannot endorse same -sex marriage, all the transgenderism, abortion on demand, and all that kind of stuff.

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And we're hated for that. We're hated for that. And he says, blessed are you when they exclude you and they revile you and cast out your name as evil.

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And all this stuff is going on about biblical

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Christianity today, biblical Christians. Jesus says, blessed are you when that's happening for the

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Son of Man's sake, for Jesus' sake. And then he goes on to say, rejoice in that day and leap for joy.

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He doesn't say respond in kind, respond with hostility, be vengeful, and none of that.

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He doesn't say any of that. He doesn't say blast them with some kind of a meme. He doesn't say, you know, see if you can find the most caustic or sarcastic remark to make on Facebook about their stuff.

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No. He says, rejoice in that day and leap for joy.

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Are you kidding? Then he goes on to say, because great indeed is your reward in heaven.

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For like manner their fathers did to the prophets. He says, you endure this kind of stuff.

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You're suffering for the sake of Christ, for the name of Christ. Rejoice if you're suffering in that way because there's a reward in heaven for you in enduring such a thing.

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Leap for joy. Leap for joy. So next time you get somebody on Facebook blast you for being such a nutty conservative that believes that same -sex marriage is sin and all that kind of stuff,

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I'm not even sure that that's a good place to be expressing those kinds of things.

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But nevertheless, if that happens to you, just respond and say, thank you. Thank you.

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That makes me feel good that you would treat me that way. All right. Well, I hope that challenges you.

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It does me. So Father in heaven, I pray that this twofold challenge from the life of Jesus would work in our hearts.

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Cause us to pause and consider what are we burdened about? And does that burden translate into prayer?

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And then Father, how do we handle? Are we handling the hostility and the animosity expressed toward Christians today?

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Are we handling it right? Handling it well? Are we rejoicing about it? Give us that grace we pray in Jesus name.

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Amen. All right. Have a good rest of your Wednesday and trust you'll have a good hump day.