Jesus on his part did not entrust himself to them, because he knew all people and needed no one to bear witness about man, for he himself knew what was in man. —John 2:24-25

How much of the pain and heartache in your life, in your ministry, is the result of expecting people to do what only God can do? As Oswald Chambers noted, “If our trust is placed in human beings, we will end up despairing of everyone.”

You can watch the full message here.

“I will bless the Lord at all times; his praise shall continually be in my mouth. My soul makes its boast in the Lord; let the humble hear and be glad. Oh, magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt his name together! I sought the Lord, and he answered me and delivered me from all my fears.” —Psalm 34:1-4

Do you want to be able to say, “God delivered me from all my fears”? When God is magnified, fear vanishes.

Do you remember as a kid playing with a magnifying glass? Does the magnifying glass make things bigger? No, it just makes things look bigger in my eyes. When God is magnified—when we sing, “Be magnified, O Lord,” we don’t make God bigger; we recognize Him better for what He really is through that focus. When God is magnified, fear leaves the building.

Fear and a right view of God cannot co-exist. If my heart is filled with fear, I am not rightly estimating God in His capacities and interest and His care in my life. Go ahead and say it out loud:  “When God is magnified fear is gone.”

In 2 Chronicles 20:1-30, there’s a classic fear-inducing episode. Judah was being threatened with an impressive force of ‘ites (Moabites, Ammonites, Meunites). These were surrounding nations that decided Judah was easy pickings. They formed a flash-mob and “came against Jehoshaphat” (v.1). Chronicles is famous for big odds: God’s people, few; God’s enemies, many. When God was forgotten, the odds were overwhelmingly bad; when God was magnified, the odds didn’t matter anymore.

Jehoshaphat was a good king; not a great king, just a good one. Not an evil king; just an average, good king. God was judging him. Judah was in the south where Jerusalem is, the smaller portion of the nation of Israel—a divided kingdom. And Jehoshaphat was the fourth king over Judah. This turned out to be his shining moment!

Like David in today’s Psalm, Jehoshaphat “was afraid and set his face to seek the Lord” (v.3). After a fast, the king gathered the people and magnified the Lord. In verses 5-12, Jehoshaphat turned the whole problem over to God. What a great way to end a prayer: “We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on You!” We magnify the Lord so that we can see Him more clearly! We magnify the Lord so that we can admit we bring little to the battle because the battle belongs to the Lord! —James MacDonald

Journal

How will I magnify the Lord in at least three ways today?

In what areas of life would it help for me to pray, “I don’t know what to do, but my eyes are on You, Lord.”

Prayer

When I magnify You, Father, and see You more clearly in Your greatness, everything else shrinks in size to nothing. Instead of being mesmerized by my fears or struggles or challenges, help me to turn my eyes from those and gaze at all that You are. Even when I don’t know what to do, having my eyes on You will make all the difference. You will make a way where I can’t see a way. Be magnified in my life today, O Lord! In Jesus’ name, Amen.

Conversation #3—Wayne Cordeiro & James MacDonald | Mark Driscoll moderating

With the high calling of being a leader in ministry comes the risk of thinking that all things require you. When you do, one of the first fruits that begins to decrease will be your joy. Pastor Wayne Cordeiro shares some good insight from his experience of running on empty.

Watch the trailer or order The Elephant Room on DVD.

This weekend I preached from John 2:13-22, on Christ’s response to the consumer mindset that had taken over the temple. And nothing is more of an axe to the tree of vertical church—of God church, of glory church—than “consumer church.”

There are a lot of points of application on how consumerism has a foothold in the church today that ought to make us righteously angry. Here are two of them: critical non-participants and one-strike-and-you’re-out Christians.

Watch the full message here.

“For long ago I broke your yoke and burst your bonds; but you said, “I will not serve.” Yes, on every high hill and under every green tree you bowed down like a whore. Yet I planted you a choice vine, wholly of pure seed. How then have you turned degenerate and become a wild vine? Though you wash yourself with lye and use much soap, the stain of your guilt is still before me, declares the Lord GOD.” —Jeremiah 2:20-22

I wish I could tell you that people deal with guilt God’s way. The fact is, though, people don’t deal with guilt God’s way. Let’s look at some of the foolish things that people do to try to deal with their guilt. You may find one or more of these is uncomfortably familiar.

One of the foolish tactics is that people try to run from their guilt. That doesn’t work very well. They move to a different city, a different family, or a different job. But guilt tracks your moves. It’s your internal alarm. God gave that to you to help you to alert you to when you’re outside the boundaries. A lot of suffering is coming if you don’t resolve it.

Another “guilt management tool” is the cover up. “Maybe I can hide my guilt.” The problem is that it doesn’t work to cover it up. People try to hide guilt behind frantic activity and particularly religious activity. “I’m going to work at the church and I’m going to serve somehow. I’m going to give more.” Sometimes we even try to cover our guilt by smothering it with more unrighteous living. “I don’t care anymore! I’m just going to keep on sinning!” The people of Jeremiah’s time tried to cover up guilt as they became spiritually bankrupt.

We can also respond to guilt by trying to blame-shift. We’re like, “This is because of you.” But guilt has a way of coming back to us. I chose. And I’m responsible for the actions that I took. No matter how hard I try to put it onto somebody else, it’s coming back to me again.

How about this one? Just deny guilt. “I did nothing wrong. Nothing.” Try that for a while. It goes like this: “I did nothing, nothing, nothing . . . ” But it just doesn’t work. Guilt hangs in there.

God loves you. God made you with an internal alarm and you cannot run from it, cover it, blame-shift it, deny it. If you’re His child, He set you free and He wants to keep you free. Stop wasting guilt and use it as a push back to God.
—James MacDonald

Journal

Which of these tactics am I going to have to eliminate regarding guilt because I now know I’m not fooling anyone—particularly God?

What happens with guilt when I respond to it the wrong way?

Prayer

Father in heaven, I realize these tactics to avoid guilt are almost instinctive with humans—certainly with me. I don’t want to use them, and yet I also know I will need Your Spirit’s help to rein me in or get my attention when I’m about to waste guilt by not making corrections, seeking forgiveness, and repenting before You. I know guilt will be much less of a problem for me if I start letting it do its corrective work in me. I know that will lead to Your blessings, which is what I really want! In Jesus’ name, Amen.

Today I commend to you this guest post from Dr. R.C. Sproul Jr., Teaching Fellow at Ligonier Ministries. I hope you find it helpful and encouraging.

It takes two to tango, and that doesn’t even include the band. Our choices, our behaviors, are rarely as discreet as we think they are. Not only do our decisions bleed into our other decisions, they touch on other people’s lives, more often than not. No man is an island; neither is any man a peninsula.

First, consider gossip. If gossip is spoken in the woods and no one hears, does it still make a mess? Guarding our tongues is important. But we need to guard our ears as well. Without an audience, gossip dies on the vine. It isn’t gossip when I know something you don’t. It isn’t gossip when you find out what I knew first. It’s only gossip when I get to be the one telling you. Ego and pride drive the tongue and open the ear.

The same is true of controversy. In the prototypical schoolyard fight, there is typically the victim, the bully, and the cowards. While we rightly cheer for the victim and hiss at the bully, the cowards, too, deserve our opprobrium. They haven’t even the willingness to risk what the bully has, and worse still, they provide the audience he craves.

The Internet has not helped. Cyber-bullies hide behind proxy servers and false names. Victims slowly learn that fighting back only encourages them. And there is no vice principal patrolling the hallways and breaking things up. Then there are the cowards. They create the page views, and some even input their own comments, usually anonymously, yelling, “Fight, fight,” while they sit three rows back. They create the audience that is the real raison d’être of the controversy (more…)

This year at Harvest we’re walking verse-by-verse through the book of John. Last weekend’s teaching was on Christ’s first public miracle, at the wedding in Cana. And while God does not promise prosperity or healing in every circumstance (2 Corinthians 12:7), He does continue to work miracles today.

All in favor of miracles? Absolutely. Miracles flow from what we have, and they flow through active faith.

You can watch the full message here.

“Then the king commanded Ashpenaz, his chief eunuch, to bring some of the people of Israel, both of the royal family and of the nobility, youths without blemish, of good appearance and skillful in all wisdom, endowed with knowledge, understanding learning, and competent to stand in the king’s palace, and to teach them the literature and language of the Chaldeans. The king assigned them a daily portion of the food that the king ate, and of the wine that he drank. They were to be educated for three years, and at the end of that time they were to stand before the king . . . But Daniel resolved that he would not defile himself with the king’s food, or with the wine that he drank. Therefore he asked the chief of the eunuchs to allow him not to defile himself. And God gave Daniel favor and compassion in the sight of the chief of the eunuchs.” —Daniel 1:3-5, 8-9

When things are going smoothly in your life, you might not find it hard to believe that God is good. But if life takes a bad turn and something devastating happens, you might ask, “How could a good God allow this?” If you know that kind of pain, then you can empathize with Daniel.

Across the pages of Scripture that detail Daniel’s life from teenager to old man, you can write, “Sovereignty at work.” God was directing his life whether he saw it at the time or not.

Do you know his story? One bright day in Jerusalem when Daniel was just a teenager, he was captured as a POW and was ripped away from everything warm and familiar. Daniel’s enemies were working a cruel strategy. They singled out the best young people—the all-American teenagers voted MVP and “Most Likely to Succeed” and brought them to their capital city near modern-day Kuwait. Their plan was to brainwash these kids with their culture and make them leaders. Daniel was given a foreign name, Belteshazzar, forced to learn a new language, and was given a new diet.

Had Daniel decided what God was like by looking at his circumstances, he would have become a disillusioned, confused, angry young man. Kidnapped from his homeland, forced into slavery, most likely castrated to become a eunuch in the palace, Daniel’s eyes were still on God. Don’t gloss over these facts like they’re from some made-for-TV movie. This story is true in every detail. Imagine the suffering connected with his circumstances, yet Daniel went through the fire—successfully. This certainly gives us hope that we can make it through the firestorm, too.

No doubt a situation comes to mind right now from either your past or your present. You may wonder how a God of love could have allowed some painful, wrong injustice. Yet, I would bet on the fact that you’ve not come full circle yet. There will be a day when you will look back and see how God’s sovereign hand was at work. Truth is, He is in the center of the situation that troubles your heart right now. He’s right in the middle of it.

Just because you can’t see Him, doesn’t mean He isn’t there. Look for Him, trust Him—He is at work. —James MacDonald

Journal

What situation comes to mind where I find myself doubting God’s goodness?

When was the last time I made an effort to recognize God’s goodness during a very difficult time in my life?

Prayer

Father, I know You are at work in my life and circumstances even when I don’t see Your hand. I know You are working all things together for good. Help me fix my heart on You no matter how long I must wait to see a bigger picture. I believe You will bring all things around for Your glory. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

Wow. After 2.5 days of pouring into and worshiping with over 2000 pastors and leaders from around the world, we closed out Harvest University 2012. Today, I’m thanking God for the outpouring of His Spirit at this conference that ministered to so many. And I’m even more fired up for His glory, as they return to the fields to which God has called them and seek to apply what they’ve learned.

In the closing message, I decided to focus on the practical—with a “5-4-3-2-1″ message. First 5 things, then 4 things, then 3…and so on.

Here is an excerpt of the first portion, 5 Things Your Pastor Wants You to Know but Can’t Tell You.

The full message also includes:

• 4 Things Good Elders Say Frequently
• 3 Things a Church Needs from Its Pastors
• 2 Good Ways to Process This Conference
• The Single Most Important Thing in Your Church

You can watch that here.

Yesterday kicked off Harvest University, our annual church planting conference. We gathered with a packed house of 2000 pastors and ministry leaders from Harvest Bible Chapels around the world and churches outside our fellowship. Honored to serve with these pastors and leaders for the sake of the Gospel.

Watch this video about Harvest Bible Fellowship, our church planting arm, and how the Lord Jesus is building His church in our day.