Month: January 2017

Would You Lay Down Your Life For Your Spouse?

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When asked, “What would you be willing to do for your spouse?” most of us are quick to profess how we would lay down our life for our spouse. We would step in front of a gunman’s bullet. We would shield them from the blast of a terrorist’s pipe bomb. We would put ourselves between them and an angry herd of parent eating toddlers. (Ok, maybe not that last one.)

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Genesis 17 – Going Under the Knife

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Would you join a club that required you to have surgery on an extremely private and intimate part of your body? Probably not. Yet this is exactly what God required of Abram in Genesis chapter 17.
God comes to Abram when he is ninety-nine years old and promises to change everything about his life. God tells Abram He will:
  • Give him and his ninety-year-old wife a biological child.
  • Produce generations of kings and nations from that child.
  • Change his name to Abraham (father of a multitude.)
  • Give him and his descendants the land through which they’ve traveled.
But God asks Abraham, and all the males in his household, to go under the knife and be circumcised! This command sounds strange to modern ears, but God wants to mark Abraham and his people as intimately and undeniably associated with Him. God calls it, “My covenant in your flesh.” (Genesis 17:13)
God is still calling us to follow Him. He is still promising to multiply our numbers and claim the spaces in which we travel for His own. He still wants to change us…not in name but in character.
And God still calls us to be circumcised, but not in our flesh. Instead, God wants to circumcise our heart. (Romans 2:28-29). He wants to put our hearts under the knife of His Holy Spirit, so it can be transformed and identified as belonging exclusively to Him.
Is there a part of your heart that still needs to be transformed by the scalpel of God’s Spirit?
Bret Legg is the Teaching and Counseling Pastor at Warren Baptist Church in Augusta, GA.

What Does a Ham Have to Do With Marriage?

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At the beginning of every year, we look at things we can do to make the new year better. But when it comes to marriage, what you do now will not only effect the new year, but generations to come.

There’s a story about a young wife who always cut off the end of the ham before she baked it. When her husband asked why she did this, she responded, “I don’t know. My mom always did it.” This made the husband curious, so he went to his mother-in-law and asked her why she cut off the end of a ham before baking it. His mother-in-law replied, “I don’t know. It’s something my mother always did when baking a ham.” The mystery went unresolved for some time, until one day the young couple were visiting the wife’s grandmother.

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Genesis 16 – Can I Help?

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Ever have a problem you felt God was not handling, or at least not handling quickly enough? When this happens, we often try to do something logical or reasonable to help the situation along.
This is what Sarai tried to do in Genesis chapter 16. She and her husband Abram were childless and well past child-conceiving age. It made logical sense to Sarai that, if they were going to have a child, they would need to do that through a surrogate. So Sarai offered her female servant to Abram and encouraged him to have a child through her.
But this seemingly “logical” act created a deep animosity that has continued to be adversarial thousands of years later. Just look at the current state of Israeli/Palestinian relations.
When we try to make something happen on our own wisdom and power (apart from the guidance and direction of God,) we wind up making things more complicated and consequential than God ever intended. God will continue to move forward with His plan, but now there’s increased complication, aggravation, or heartache that we have to live with…all brought on by our own attempts to “help.”
As hard as it may be, we must learn to trust and submit to God’s sovereignty and timing in our situations. Unless He has directed us, we must resist the urge to try to help Him do things quicker or better.
Despite how it looks, God really does see what’s going on. He really does hear our fears and frustrations. He really does care about what we’re going through. He’s “got this.” The question is…do we trust Him.
Bret Legg is the Teaching and Counseling Pastor at Warren Baptist Church in Augusta, GA.