Daily Devotional – Sept 17, 2020

Faith Baptist Church

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September 17, 2020

A brief bit of encouragement for your day from God’s Word

Daily Devotional – Sept 18, 2020

00:02: Well, good Thursday afternoon to you, morning, depending on when you're watching this devotional.
00:08: I hope you're having a good week, got a good night of rest, and you're taking on your day well.
00:14: You may be watching this late in the day and winding your day down. Whatever the case, I trust you're knowing
00:21: God's blessing on this Thursday. Well, the summer before my senior year of high school,
00:29: I got a job working in the restaurant at the
00:34: Holiday Inn in Oakbrook, Illinois. I worked the 3 to 11 shift six days a week.
00:42: And my job was basically I was an assistant to the cook, the main cook. And we were the only two guys that worked the dinner shift.
00:52: Well, by that time, I had plenty of experience grilling steaks. And it didn't matter how thick they were, didn't matter the cut, ribeye,
01:01: New York strip, sirloin, whatever. I could grill those things or I could broil them anywhere from rare to well done.
01:11: I've been doing that for a couple of years. And because I worked a couple of years in a restaurant environment,
01:17: I was a quick learner in this new restaurant, new kitchen, new menu, and different things to put together.
01:26: But I was kind of a quick learner in it all.
01:33: A variety of recipes to learn, sandwiches to make, how they were made, and so on and so forth.
01:39: The biggest challenge, of course, was different things doing on the grill or the stove that I'd never done before.
01:49: So I had to be alert, pay attention, and learning all
01:55: I could. Well, just how well and how much I learned was very quickly put to the test.
02:02: Very abruptly, I should say, put to the test. Came to work one afternoon, got there a little before three o 'clock, punched in, walk out there on the floor in the kitchen.
02:13: And the regular cook, I'm looking around, I'm like, well, you know, where is this guy? What's going on?
02:19: He's not there. And 315, still not there.
02:24: 330, still not there. Orders, some late afternoon, early dinner orders start coming in and the regular cook isn't there.
02:33: Well, then I find out that the real cook, the real cook, wasn't coming in at all.
02:39: In fact, he quit. He quit and he didn't let anybody know. Well, of course, you know,
02:45: Murphy's law, the day before was very slow, but not this day, business picked up.
02:51: A lot of people came to the restaurant for dinner. So the dinner orders for dinner off the dinner menu were coming in.
02:59: Well, one of the real waitresses must have realized that I was in over my head.
03:06: So she must've gone and gotten a hold of Mr. Gunderson, the hotel's assistant manager, who was also the restaurant manager.
03:14: And he was a pretty well -trained chef himself. Well, when he came back to the kitchen, I'm scrambling around juggling several orders.
03:23: And one of the orders that I was working on was a pan fried trout almondine.
03:30: Now I'd watched that process of pan frying a trout almondine a few times.
03:37: I mean, weren't too many calls for it, but I'd seen it done before. And it was a pretty simple process.
03:44: I thought you get a little frying pan and you scoop a scoop of oil in the frying pan.
03:50: You turn the flame on, get that pan cook, you know, the oil heating up, get it good and hot.
03:57: In the meantime, you take the trout and it was one with a head on it, you know, it was a gutted trout, butterfly it open, dip it in some milk and then in the flour, you know, so you get it breaded on both sides.
04:14: And when the oil is nice and hot, take a handful of sliced, thin sliced almonds, pop them in the oil.
04:25: So they start browning up and then you put the trout in and let it cook for a couple of minutes.
04:33: Then you flip the trout another couple of minutes until it's golden brown and voila, delish.
04:42: Except, Mr. Gunderson came in and he could smell that something wasn't quite right.
04:48: He went to the stove and he saw this fish frying in the pan. He lifted it up to smell it and exclaimed, ah, bacon grease, where did you get that?
05:01: And I pointed to one of the two containers next to the stove top and he just threw the fish in the trash, got a fresh frying pan, calmly, calmly took a scoop of oil from the other container, put it in the pan and simply said, you need to use this oil for pan frying, not the bacon grease.
05:26: Well, all I'd seen the cook do is take a pan or take a scoop of oil and put it in the pan.
05:32: I didn't realize there were two different kinds of oil in those containers. Well, for the next 20 or 30 minutes or so,
05:40: Mr. Gunderson helped me out, helped me get out all the orders and everything calmed down. And before he left the kitchen that evening, he said,
05:49: Brian, you're doing a good job. Thanks for sticking with it. Wow.
05:55: Tell you the truth, when he threw out that trout in the trash,
06:00: I thought maybe I'd be looking for another job. But I thought of that night's experience of my bosses coming alongside of me and actually siding with me in the fiasco instead of kicking me out because of it.
06:16: I thought of that because of a line in Dane Ortlund's book, Gentle and Lowly. He writes this.
06:23: He says, Christ sides with you against your sin, not against you because of your sin.
06:32: Let me read that for you again. Christ sides with you against your sin, not against you because of your sin.
06:44: Do you get that distinction? Does that fly in the face of what you might naturally think that Christ is siding against me because of my sin?
07:02: He says, Christ sides with you against your sin, not against you because of your sin.
07:09: He goes on to explain. He said, quote, if you are part of Christ's own body, your sin evokes his deepest heart, his compassion and pity.
07:21: He takes part with you. That is, he's on your side. He hates sin, to be sure, even more vehemently than Mr.
07:31: Gunderson hated the trout fried in bacon grease. He hates sin, to be sure, but he loves you.
07:40: Now, to illustrate what he means, Mr. Ortlund uses two illustrations. One of them, he encourages us to think of a father's attitude toward a disease that is threatening the life of his child.
07:54: Now, he loves the child. He's for the child. He's not going to turn his back on the child.
08:02: He's not going to despise the child. He's not going to work against the child because the child is diseased.
08:08: He's going to hate the disease, to be sure, but he loves the child and he is for the child.
08:17: But then secondly, Ortlund refers to Hosea 11 and what the Lord says to his people, to his children, in verses seven to nine.
08:28: Listen to what the Lord said. He said, My people are bent on turning away from me, and though they call out to the
08:35: Most High, he shall not raise them up at all. But then he says this, How can
08:41: I give you up, O Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel? How can
08:47: I make you like Adma? How can I treat you like Zeboim? My heart recoils within me.
08:55: My compassion grows warm and tender. I will not execute my burning anger.
09:03: I will not again destroy Ephraim, for I am God and not a man, the
09:08: Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath. The essence of this passage is simply this.
09:17: It is in consideration of his people's sins that God's heart goes out to them in compassion.
09:27: Certainly this is an inferior comparison, but think of it like this. Mr. Gunderson, when he walked back into that kitchen and saw my struggles and my weaknesses and my failings and even my ruining of a very expensive dish, when he walked back there and he saw all of this, his heart went out in compassion toward me because I'd ruined an expensive dish.
09:56: Ortland concludes like this. He says, The sins of those who belong to God open the floodgates of his heart of compassion for us.
10:06: The dam breaks. It is not our loveliness that wins his love. It is our unloveliness.
10:15: Speaking of those who are Christ's, those who belong to God, those who are his children, those who are his children, he is for them and against their sin.
10:31: He is not against you because of your sin. Let's keep that in mind.
10:37: Maybe today your heart is burdened down and wearied because of sin. Maybe it's something you've said, something you've thought, something you've done, and you're wondering, is now
10:52: God utterly against me? No. He is for you against your sin.
11:00: Our Father and our God, we thank you that you are for us. We thank you that you're for your children, for those who know
11:09: Christ as their Savior. Those sin weighs us down and burdens us and often leaves us wondering and feeling like maybe you're just utterly against us.
11:21: May we be reminded that no, the heart of a father goes out in love for his child and lows the disease.
11:31: I pray that we would remember that and be encouraged by it. We ask it in Jesus' name. Amen. All right.
11:39: Well, have a good rest of your day, however much of it is left, and may God bless you on this