As I’ve written before, I am using the Discipleship Journal Bible Reading Plan this year – it’s the best system I know of for actually getting through the whole Bible in a year. But there is an unlimited number of other plans and ways to read the Bible.

Some folks like to read the Psalms and Proverbs in a month, for example, or every month. My wife, June, was just asking about how we used to do that so I thought the answer would be worth sharing.

Proverbs is a no-brainer. There are 31 of them, so if you read the chapter in Proverbs corresponding to the day of the month, you’re in business.

One could read the Psalms consecutively: there are 150 psalms, and with 30 days in the month, that’s five psalms a day – 1 – 5, 6 – 10, and so on. But the late Jim Downing, “Navigator #6,” who passed away in 2018 at the age of 104 1/2, had another plan, which I really like. It goes like this:

• On day 1, read Psalm 1, 31, 61, 91, 121
• On day 2, read Psalm 2, 32, 62, 92, 122
• That’s not rocket science, and you’ll know which Psalms to read fairly easily. Just start with the day of the month for the first reading. Then add 30, for the next four readings.
• You might know that Psalm 119 has 176 verses! No problem…it’s divided into 22 sections of 8 verses each, so the first 22 days of the month, add a section of Psalm 119.

There’s your plan. Tomorrow is the first of March (maybe today if you’re in the habit of reading this the morning after it’s published!). If you don’t have a regular plan, give this one a try.

And when he sits on the throne of his kingdom, he shall write for himself in a book a copy of this law, approved by the Levitical priests. And it shall be with him, and he shall read in it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the LORD his God by keeping all the words of this law and these statutes, and doing them, that his heart may not be lifted up above his brothers, and that he may not turn aside from the commandment, either to the right hand or to the left, so that he may continue long in his kingdom, he and his children, in Israel. (Deuteronomy 17.18 – 20, ESV)

Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; but his delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers. (Psalm 1.1 – 3, ESV)

I’m tempted to not write about an obvious but difficult lesson from Leviticus 9 and 10. It supports what Annie Dillard said about the church, about which I wrote a year ago:

On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return. ― Annie Dillard, “An Expedition to the Pole” from Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982)

You don’t believe her? Neither did Nadab and Abihu:

Then Aaron lifted up his hands toward the people and blessed them, and he came down from offering the sin offering and the burnt offering and the peace offerings. And Moses and Aaron went into the tent of meeting, and when they came out they blessed the people, and the glory of the LORD appeared to all the people. And fire came out from before the LORD and consumed the burnt offering and the pieces of fat on the altar, and when all the people saw it, they shouted and fell on their faces. Now Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, each took his censer and put fire in it and laid incense on it and offered unauthorized fire before the LORD, which he had not commanded them. And fire came out from before the LORD and consumed them, and they died before the LORD. (Leviticus 9.22 – 10.2, ESV, emphasis mine)

Same fire, same language: “And fire came out from before the Lord and consumed the burnt offering…And fire came out from before the Lord and consumed Nadab and Abihu.”

Consumed. That’s what fire does. In the one case, it was a sign of blessing and acceptance. The fire consumed the burnt offering. In the other case, it was judgment. There were apparently different degrees of error and punishment. At the end of Leviticus 10, Aaron and his surviving sons didn’t eat the sin offering, and that was excused. But offering unauthorized fire was not excused.

For our God is a consuming fire. (Hebrews. 12.29, ESV)

Holy and awesome is his name! The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom (Psalm 111.9, 10, ESV)

I’m memorizing verses from Hide This in Your Heart, a book written as a follow-up to Michael Frost’s Surprise the World, which recommends five missional activities for believers under the acronym BELLS:

• Blessing people, both inside and outside the church
• Eating together, by sharing meals with believers and nonbelievers alike
• Listening to the guidance and direction of the Holy Spirit as we engage with those around us
• Learning Christ as our leader and model for making disciples
• Seeing ourselves as Sent by God to anywhere life takes us

Hide This In Your Heart has a list of 40 verses supporting the BELLS topics. It’s been a good exercise, and I’m beginning the second set. I found this verse intriguing. It’s under the heading Eat: sub-topic, Welcome Refugees and Immigrants:

He executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing. Love the sojourner, therefore, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt. (Deuteronomy 10.18, 19, ESV)

My question was, How does God love the sojourner, giving him food and clothing?

I may have found a partial answer in my reading of Leviticus. In the middle of chapter 23, a list of the annual feasts with detailed instructions on how to keep them, we have this directive which has nothing to do with the feasts:

“And when you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap your field right up to its edge, nor shall you gather the gleanings after your harvest. You shall leave them for the poor and for the sojourner: I am the LORD your God.” (Leviticus 23.22, ESV)

For a culture like ours that values efficiency, this is provocative. Be deliberately sloppy so that the poor and the sojourner can eat. God gives the sojourner food (Deuteronomy 10.18) through this command to his people.

How do we live out Leviticus 23.22 since most of us aren’t farmers? Maybe a practical application is giving money to the poor. I don’t need to argue, “I must steward my money carefully. Every dollar counts!” No, it doesn’t. Be a little wasteful. I don’t think we need to give to known scammers, but when we see someone in need, maybe we should give and not claim, as the Pharisees did, that the money was earmarked for something else. (See Matthew 15.1 – 9)

By contrast a pastor friend of mine, when encouraging people to give to the church, used to say, “And we won’t waste one red cent.” Yes, we will! But a little waste is OK.

For there will never cease to be poor in the land. Therefore I command you, “You shall open wide your hand to your brother, to the needy and to the poor, in your land.” (Deuteronomy 15.11, ESV)

But if anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him? Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth. (1 John 3.17, 18, ESV – another verse from the BELLS collection!)

Yesterday we were in awe of NASA’s JPL landing a rover on Mars. It’s incredible.

In the linked “landing a rover” video above, an engineer said something like,

This is what we do. We band together to make things happen. If we could do this as a country with our other challenges, think what we could do! – JPL Engineer

He’s right. Smart people, working together toward a goal can often reach that goal or make significant progress. I wrote a while back about how the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have helped make significant progress on sanitation.

So we can “dare mighty things” and succeed. God said as much in Genesis 11.6 when the people were building the Tower of Babel.

And the LORD said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. (Genesis 11.6, ESV)

The problem is that sometimes the mighty things turn out badly. The Internet, for example, has been a great force for good…and also evil with readily available pornography and gambling, not to speak of the social media platforms for outrage and fake news.

For a humorous look at the potential evil in social media on the Internet, check out this insightful Pearls before Swine comic from February 7.

Sometimes it’s difficult to tell what the net impact of a new technology will be. For example, the 2017 Dare Mighty Things Conference contained talks on potentially positive things like Mars exploration and mobile devices. But a program director for CRISPR, the gene-editing technology was there, too. And many medical ethicists are really concerned about the unintended consequences of that.

I’m quickly getting beyond the scope of a hastily written daily blog. So let’s just call it a caution. Dare Mighty Things? Yes, absolutely. A lot of good for the Kingdom and for people has been done by those who did. But let’s be careful what we dare…we might succeed!

For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. (Ephesians 2.10, ESV)

7 Like warriors they charge;
like soldiers they scale the wall.
They march each on his way;
they do not swerve from their paths.
8 They do not jostle one another;
each marches in his path;
they burst through the weapons
and are not halted. (Joel 2.7, 8, ESV) – from my blog, Life Lessons from Locusts, February 14, 2019

After this Absalom got himself a chariot and horses, and fifty men to run before him. And Absalom used to rise early and stand beside the way of the gate. And when any man had a dispute to come before the king for judgment, Absalom would call to him and say, “From what city are you?” And when he said, “Your servant is of such and such a tribe in Israel,” Absalom would say to him, “See, your claims are good and right, but there is no man designated by the king to hear you.” Then Absalom would say, “Oh that I were judge in the land! Then every man with a dispute or cause might come to me, and I would give him justice.” And whenever a man came near to pay homage to him, he would put out his hand and take hold of him and kiss him. Thus Absalom did to all of Israel who came to the king for judgment. So Absalom stole the hearts of the men of Israel. (2 Samuel 15.1 – 6, ESV)

Did you see that NASA landed another rover on Mars last week? It’s a technological marvel – impossibility might be a better word. The more you know about orbital mechanics, the mathematics of space flight, the more improbable such a feat is. While I was watching some of the coverage from the NASA-TV web site, a large sign in the lobby of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) caught my eye:

Dare Mighty Things

I thought, “That will preach!” It’s from a speech by Teddy Roosevelt and it’s the motto of the JPL:

Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure … than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.  – Theodore Roosevelt speech (“The Strenuous Life”), April 10, 1899, Chicago.

Someone had an idea and thousands, maybe tens of thousands of engineers, mathematicians, and others came together to make it happen. Today, the rover Perseverance sits on Mars and is transmitting pictures! Here’s a short video summarizing the mission. The video following is the longer version of the landing. Here is the first color photo transmitted from Perseverance:

I found it refreshing to see people who actually had a concrete, measurable goal, one they could fail at. People with a can-do spirit. Much better than theory, constant criticizing, etc. Much better than what we usually seem to have: decisions made for political and faddish reasons rather than scientific reasons. And, of course, the idea that people who “dare mighty things” sometimes succeed. It’s very inspiring. There’s also a flip side which I’ll explore briefly tomorrow.

In the meantime, what mighty things ought we to be daring?

I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. (Matthew 16.18, ESV)

But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth. (Acts 1.8, ESV)

Do we have the same attitude as the disciples before the feeding of the 5,000?

They answered, “But all we have is five barley loaves and two fish.” (Matthew 14.17, TPT)

The “all we have is…” attitude can be discouraging and blind us to good things we already have that Jesus wants to use. There was a large downtown church, which had a two-story parking lot structure. One Sunday a particularly dour parking usher woefully said to me as I arrived for a worship service, “All we have is parking up top.” He could have said, “Welcome! There’s plenty of parking on level 2!”

Jesus’ response to the disciples says it all:

They answered, “But all we have is five barley loaves and two fish.” “Let me have them,” Jesus replied.(Matthew 14.17, 18, TPT)

In other words, “I can work with that! For that matter, I can work with you!” Henri Nouwen challenges the “all we have is…” attitude with respect to our own sin:

God’s mercy is greater than our sins. There is an awareness of sin that does not lead to God but rather to self-preoccupation. Our temptation is to be so impressed by our sins and failings and so overwhelmed by our lack of generosity that we get stuck in a paralyzing guilt. It is the guilt that says: “I am too sinful to deserve God’s mercy.” It is the guilt that leads to introspection instead of directing our eyes to God. It is the guilt that has become an idol and therefore a form of pride. – From Show Me the Way by Henri Nouwen, Ash Wednesday meditation.

For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. (Ephesians 2.10, NIV)

I’m so grateful to Christ Jesus for making me adequate to do this work. He went out on a limb, you know, in trusting me with this ministry. The only credentials I brought to it were invective and witch hunts and arrogance. But I was treated mercifully because I didn’t know what I was doing—didn’t know Who I was doing it against! Grace mixed with faith and love poured over me and into me. And all because of Jesus. (1 Timothy 1.12 – 14, MSG)

My friend Jim Singleton, while he was in the process of helping lead the formation of the Evangelical Covenant Order of Presbyterians (ECO) in response to increasing issues with the Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA), told me something like this:

Some churches and individuals now clamoring for the new denomination and separation from the PCUSA are not going to know what to do when ECO is formed. ECO will be expecting churches to be making disciples and living out Kingdom principles in their neighborhoods. Some churches have defined themselves by what they are against. They’ve made a career out of fighting the PCUSA. Now what are they going to do?

I’m beginning to ask the same kind of question for a post-COVID world. Are we going to find something to talk about besides:

• Have you been vaccinated yet?
• When will government loosen up and reopen the economy? 
• When will you go back to church?
• Etc.

It seems that a lot our conversations are revolving around COVID. I get it, but I’m hoping we haven’t forgotten how to focus on other important things as well.

So then, forsake your worries! Why would you say, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ For that is what the unbelievers chase after. Doesn’t your heavenly Father already know the things your bodies require? So above all, constantly chase after the realm of God’s kingdom and the righteousness that proceeds from him. Then all these less important things will be given to you abundantly. (Matthew 6.31 – 33, TPT, emphasis mine)

I read Psalm 32 right after I had lunch with a new friend, Dr. Maceo Smith, who moved here from the Dallas area about a year ago. Maceo had a career in sales and has been a lay minister for many years. At lunch he said that tries to live Psalm 32.8:

I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will counsel you with my eye upon you. (Psalm 32.8, ESV)

Maceo said, “If God is guiding you, you’ll be:

• In the right place
• At the right time
• Doing the right thing
• With the right people.” 

He applied that positively to sharing the gospel with our server whom he assumed had been brought to him by God for that purpose. He also said it keeps him out of trouble – as a large black man, Maceo said he’s been stopped by the police one time in 20 years and that was for a broken taillight. It was a quick and pleasant conversation, he said. Following God’s guidance, he doesn’t find himself in the wrong place at the wrong time doing the wrong thing with the wrong people!

⁸  Let me hear in the morning of your steadfast love, for in you I trust. Make me know the way I should go, for to you I lift up my soul.
⁹  Deliver me from my enemies, O LORD! I have fled to you for refuge.
¹⁰  Teach me to do your will, for you are my God! Let your good Spirit lead me on level ground! (Psalm 143.8 – 10, ESV)

⁸  Good and upright is the LORD; therefore he instructs sinners in the way.
⁹  He leads the humble in what is right, and teaches the humble his way.
¹⁰  All the paths of the LORD are steadfast love and faithfulness, for those who keep his covenant and his testimonies. (Psalm 25.8 – 10, ESV)

I think this will be the last meditation on God co-laboring with his servants like Moses, who God ordered to use his staff to perform miracles including the plagues in Egypt, parting the Red Sea, and extracting water from a rock. The staff in Moses’ hand, with God’s power behind it, was worth something. The staff itself was worth nothing.

The same point is made by one of the truly funny stories in the Bible:

Then some of the itinerant Jewish exorcists took it upon themselves to call the name of the Lord Jesus over those who had evil spirits, saying, “We exorcise you by the Jesus whom Paul preaches.” Also there were seven sons of Sceva, a Jewish chief priest, who did so. And the evil spirit answered and said, “Jesus I know, and Paul I know; but who are you?” Then the man in whom the evil spirit was leaped on them, overpowered them, and prevailed against them, so that they fled out of that house naked and wounded. (Acts 19.13 – 16, NKJV, emphasis mine)

It’s not the words. It’s the person who speaks the words!

Then the apostles laid their hands on them and they did receive the Holy Spirit. When Simon saw that the apostles by merely laying on hands conferred the Spirit, he pulled out his money, excited, and said, “Sell me your secret! Show me how you did that! How much do you want? Name your price!” Peter said, “To hell with your money! And you along with it. Why, that’s unthinkable—trying to buy God’s gift! You’ll never be part of what God is doing by striking bargains and offering bribes. (Acts 8.17 – 21, MSG)

I’m sure everyone in the country has a cold-weather adventure story from earlier this week. Here’s ours: when we went to bed, it was minus 17 degrees at our house, according to my temperature-reporting watch:

It actually hit minus 18 (for the record) around midnight. We woke up to frozen pipes in our kitchen because the kitchen was built with a 3-foot overhang, Now what to do? I hoped the sun might warm things up, but it only got to 25 degrees on Monday.

At 4p, I took the dog out and encountered our neighbor John walking his two little dogs. While the dogs were visiting I mentioned my frozen pipe issue. John replied:

No problem. I have a portable propane heater. When we get back to the house, I’ll pick it up and come over.

I didn’t even know there were portable propane heaters! John uses it for his hunting trips. Anyway, it took less than half an hour to set it up and thaw the pipes. John just sat on the ground under the overhang and waited while I kept checking the flow. First the hot, then the cold, done.

Bless you, John. And thank you, Lord, for grace and good neighbors.

“Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?” The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.” (Luke 10.36, 37, NIV)

Enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praise! Give thanks to him; bless his name! (Psalm 100.4, ESV)