God

Foreign Gods

~ Heather Davis ~ 4 Comments

The people of Israel again did what was evil in the sight of the LORD and served the Baals and the Ashtaroth, the gods of Syria, the gods of Sidon, the gods of Moab, the gods of the Ammonites, and the gods of the Philistines. And they forsook the LORD and did not serve him.

Judges 10:6

As I read through Joshua and now Judges, I can’t ignore the similarities between ancient Israel and the Christian church of today. Despite repeated promises and emotional swearing of fealty prompted by displays of glory or power, the Nation also repeatedly forgot the Lord.

In Numbers and Deuteronomy, God commanded Israel to drive out all the people in the Land He would give them. However, He also let them know they would fail to do it and that the gods of those nations would become a snare to them.

Then in Joshua, we read here and there of groups of people Israel didn’t quite dislodge. The idea behind today’s verse from Judges 10 is repeated multiple times throughout this book. Basically, the people turned from serving the Lord to serving the gods of the people they had failed to drive out of their land.

Of course, we don’t serve those gods today. We’re far more advanced.

Today, we serve the gods of career and of Netflix, the gods of entertainment and of comfort, and the gods of the people around us – the gods of culturally-defined morality and worldly sexual ethics which have nothing to do with the Lord. Today, we serve the bloated and demanding god of self most of all.

Even the church, though she bears the name of Christ in her Christianity, serves these gods. As Christians, we fail to drive the world out of our sacred places and so we let the world’s gods take over.

We’re afraid to stand out, so we don’t. We don’t really believe that a focus on Scripture alone is enough, so we add entertainment. I have to wonder if those ancient Caananite gods were more entertaining than the scrolls of Moses…

Israel was proud of being a free people, set free from bondage to Egypt. Yet they quickly bound themselves up in sin, ignoring the One who set them free for the pop-culture statues and rituals around them.

We say we believe in Jesus and are thankful for what He did for us, dying to save us from sin. Yet we do not behave like thankful people who have been set free. We continue to act like slaves to sin; saying one thing but doing another.

Oh people, we are no different than our ancient fathers.

Lord, forgive us! Lord save us from our weak wills and from our compromises with sin! Turn our hearts fully to You today. May we be repulsed by the very sins we now embrace, ashamed of the things we once did as we choose to obey, to read Your Word and know You more. Help us to walk in Your ways and enjoy the joy of Your presence now and forevermore, amen.

Semi-Quarantine Musings

~ Heather Davis ~ 2 Comments

This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success. Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be frightened, and do not be dismayed, for the LORD your God is with you wherever you go.

Joshua 1:8-9

This was among the first passages of Scripture I memorized with my kids back in our homeschooling days.

Today after an incredibly appropriate virtual church service, I watched the kids belonging to a friend and her worship team. While I had this captive, non-teenage audience, I had a little Q and A time with them concerning Moses and Joshua. I briefly told them about when Joshua began to lead Israel following Moses’s death, and I tried to quote this memory verse.

It seems Ms. Heather needs to get back into practicing her memory work. The old memory just doesn’t work so well these days.

Anyway, I’m sure the words were comforting to Joshua when the Lord spoke them to him. They can be equally comforting to us today.

Who knows what the future holds? Some schools are closed, some are not. The grocery store shelves are barren of toilet paper and other random items. Major league sports teams have called off upcoming games. People are scared.

But you know what? God saw this coming. As a matter of fact, there’s a bit of ironic proof it you want to go back and click on the link above to hear the message my family listened to this morning!

If we belong to the Lord, there is nothing to fear. This could be a good time – a very good time – for us to lay down all our frantic distractions and listen to Him.

I can’t help but note that when He assured Joshua of His presence before he went in to take the Promised Land, He also reminded the man to continually meditate on the Book of the Law and be careful to do it.

We have that Book of the Law and so much more; we have the full counsel of the Word of God within arm’s reach in paper or in digital form. We even have a luxury Joshua would have lacked – our choice of translation.

Folks, we don’t have to learn ancient Hebrew to read it (although there’s a much greater depth to it in Hebrew than English can fully capture). We don’t even have to read it at all. We can open the Bible app and have a stranger read it to us. We have no real excuses!

Let’s take this time as a gift – an enforced Sabbath for all the decades and decades of Sabbaths we’ve ignored – and spend more time in the Word.

I know this gal is going to spend a bit more time meditating on it than I have in recent years. The shocking failure of my memory today served to bring that neglected area to the forefront of my attention.

I can’t wait to see what else God brings to mind in the days and weeks to come. I’m sure He’ll reveal other areas where I need to be more faithful or where I need to repent and obey.

I don’t think it will be easy. But I know God and whatever He does, I know it will be good.

And I know there’s no reason to be frightened or dismayed, for the Lord my God is with me wherever I go – even if I go nowhere.

If you don’t have that assurance, get into His word and do business with Him today. Why wait? With no sports to distract you and fewer excuses than ever before, take this gift of time and get serious about eternal matters.

I’ll look forward to hearing your stories of how God used the coronavirus pandemic for His glory, whether you choose to share them here or we talk them over in eternity. But don’t delay. Let’s get serious about God and see how seriously good the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob really is.

While you’re meditating on His Word, get outside and explore the world He’s created. You may find some of His fingerprints along the way.

PS – The photo is not a virus, nor is it an alien seed like I told the kids, but it is a fungus. I found it today while walking around my back yard with a one-year-old watching his older friends running and playing. Curious about it? Check out Detective Gluck’s blog post to learn more!

Progressive Thinking

~ Heather Davis ~ 2 Comments

Once upon a time, a cousin and I decided to hike up the unmarked back way of the Chimney Tops in the Smoky Mountains, an off-trail hike that was – and likely still is – illegal.

Long story short: We got lost.

A 90-minute hike morphed into several hours of struggling through dense underbrush on our bellies and the like. For lack of a better idea, we kept climbing until we made it to a summit from which we could see the Chimney Tops in the distance. Relieved, we trekked across the mountaintops until we arrived, bloodied by thorns and mud-caked, at our destination.

We took the trail back down.

Modern society seems to equate the idea of making progress with improvement. However, much like the progress I made by ignoring the rules, we frequently make progress in the wrong direction.

It’s a happy accident the progress my cousin and I made revealed a glimpse of the distinctive bare-stone peak of the Chimney Tops instead of a spectacular view of similar-looking forested hills prevalent in the Great Smoky Mountains. Even happier, our progress delivered us in sight of our goal instead of in between a black bear and her cubs.

The ancient nation of Israel also made progress – 40 years of it round and round and round again until an entire generation died. And they started by progressively ignoring the commands of the Lord.

These two historical journeys spring simultaneously to mind when I hear the term Progressive Christianity. One bit of progress supposedly made by this movement is the bringing up to date of antiquated ideas and mores. It implies an improvement on the original Christianity.

Ironically, the ideals behind Progressive Christianity are not new. They are very old. Older, even, than Christianity. As old as the serpentine question, “Did God really say–?”

Make no mistake: anything – whether person, book, song, ideology, or trinket – calling itself Christian that forgets to insist on Christ as its focus has also forgotten to be Christian.

I’ve read countless “Christian” articles begun more than a few “Christian” books that had far more to do with humanism than with Christ.

Christianity aims to exalt God by belief in Christ’s atoning work – a belief which inevitably results in complete surrender to Him as Lord. In the process, loving thy neighbor and all those other things do happen. But loving God comes first.

For a genuine Christian, neighborly and charitable acts are merely the natural outpouring of a life overflowing with love and adoration for the God Who Saves. Gratitude for being forgiven prompts forgiveness. Awe at being loved despite our wretchedness prompts acts of love and sympathy towards others who are unloved.

The visible work is the building, not the foundation. The foundation is solid, immutable, eternal – the Rock of Ages. Truth is a fixed point, fixed by the One who invented it.

The definitions of right and wrong do not shift simply because we are a little older than we were a week or a decade or a century ago. The progress of time does not shift the foundation of Truth. What’s good yesterday does not become bad tomorrow any more than left becomes right on certain days of the week.

An imbecile habit has arisen in modern controversy of saying that such and such a creed can be held in one age but cannot be held in another. Some dogma, we are told, was credible in the twelfth century, but is not credible in the twentieth. You might as well say that a certain philosophy can be believed on Mondays, but cannot be believed on Tuesdays.

From Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton

Like it or not, truth remains true. The truth of gravity asserts itself with painful clarity when I miss a step walking downstairs even though falling down stairs is something I object to both on an intellectual and visceral level. My preferences and feelings do not cause me to levitate; gravity has its way regardless.

Just so, evil does not become good because time has passed, nor does it become less evil when there is more of it around.

God does not cease being Holy and Sovereign simply because the passage of time and the long miles of the journey have dimmed our understanding of holiness and sovereignty.

He is no less awesome because a fashionably modern fatigue has drained our ability to feel awe.

One cannot start with Truth and make progress unless one proceeds away from it.

When God Speaks

~ Heather Davis ~ 4 Comments

Thus did Moses; as the LORD commanded him, so he did.

Numbers 17:11

One complaint I’ve heard among unbelievers – including yours truly in the years before God got through to my stubborn heart -is that prayer doesn’t “work.”

I confess I only have my own pre-Christ experience to draw from when I’m breaking that phrase apart. However, what I meant at the time (and what I think most unbelievers mean today) is that their prayers do not achieve the results they want.

Of course, if every prayer whispered or shouted resulted in a concrete and predictable outcome, prayer would merely be the coinage for the vending machine on high. But that’s a rant for another day, perhaps.

My prayer habits after nearly two decades of following Christ are markedly different then the demands I haughtily tossed at the Most High back in my arrogant youth. During those days, I evidently thought that I, the creation, had some inalienable right to order my Creator around. Talk about role reversal!

It can be argued that Moses made his share of bold and unseemly comments and requests. Especially for a person who had witnessed several mind-boggling displays of power, the guy had a bit of steel in him when it came to talking with the Lord of Hosts.

If you will treat me like this, kill me at once, if I find favor in your sight, that I may not see my wretchedness.

Numbers 11:15

Read Exodus and Numbers. There are plenty more. The intriguing thing is, despite Moses’s alarming audacity, God grants a great many of his petitions!

For me on this, my anybody’s-guessth time through the Bible, a refrain of sorts has captured my attention. It always begins with, “The Lord spoke to Moses, saying…” and often ends with a variation on, “…Moses did as the Lord commanded him.”

Another way of putting it is the book is full of God’s instruction and Moses’ obedience.

When I think about it in these terms, what I called “prayer” in my unbelieving days – those imperious attempts at imposing my will upon God’s – were highly ignorable. Not because they were bold or demanding, but because there wasn’t a single atom of obedience tied up in them.

Though his start may have been a trifle reluctant, Moses did spend a good portion of his life obeying God. Even then, his disobedience was addressed and dealt with by God. Sin is always serious even if it is seldom.

So when the Lord speaks to us, do we listen and obey? Or are we more apt to filter the words of God, discarding the uncomfortable bits and keeping only the attractive and cozy ones?

If as the Lord commanded does not often appear in the refrain of our lives, why would we expect any of our requests to be granted? And if we aren’t hearing from the Lord at all, we might want to check our obedience and cooperation levels as well.

He is, after all, God. King.Creator. Above all things, He is to be reverenced and obeyed.

Secretarial Duties, Leviticus, NYC, and Sabbath

~ Heather Davis ~ 2 Comments

You shall keep my Sabbaths and reverence my sanctuary: I am the LORD… Consecrate yourselves, therefore, and be holy, for I am the LORD your God. Keep my statutes and do them; I am the LORD who sanctifies you.
(Leviticus 19:30, 20:7-8)

Hi. It’s been a bit since I’ve written, I know. My plan was to pour all my writing effort into a book I need to finish, and so I signed off around the middle of January while in the middle of a blog writing respite.

But of course, my plans and God’s plans differ from time to time. When they do, experience has taught me it’s wiser, safer, and saner to leave my plans where they fall and follow His way.

So the last few weeks, I’ve been filling in for the lady who works the front desk at my girls’ school while she recovered from surgery. This made the first full-time job (outside the home, anyway) since the birth of our now-19-year-old son.

It was terrific fun. I love the kids at the school; loved getting to know them better, loved working with the staff, loved being there.

Still, I’ll be glad to get down to business in March and finish the book. I hope to write some short posts here, too – one a week or so. But today is just a quick check-in; a hello, still alive, before I head up to NYC with the 10th grade class.

I’d like to take this little check-in moment to fill you in on my year so far. Our church is reading through the Bible chronologically this year, and I am loving it. Many days, I’ve both read and listened to the day’s selections – an exercise which seems to press the Word into my conciousness a little more deeply.

While this is not my first time through the Word chronologically, it may as well be. That’s what I love about the Bible. I can read it over and over and over again, and there’s always some new nuance or some truth I’d previously overlooked before to greet me. It has a quality of being at once both comfortably familiar and startlingly novel that I adore.

In the last week or so, two things have been impressed on my mind.

Well, let’s be honest. There have been so many more, but to keep this brief-ish, I’m choosing to focus on two…

Foremost is Sabbath. I hope to write more about this soon, but for now let’s just say I have been astonished at how much coverage Sabbath gets in the first 3 books of the Bible.

By the time you reach the point I’m at now – Numbers 6 – you’ll have read a reference to the Sabbath or the seventh day 79 times. Sabbath is also the only one of the Ten Commandments predating the Mosaic covenant.

Hmm. Maybe it’s important.

The other is a fun fact I learned just this morning. Out of curiosity, I counted and discovered the phrase, “I am the Lord,” is repeated in Leviticus 52 times.

I firmly believe the refrain exists because we need a continual reminder that GOD is God and we are not.

What are the implications of these two small truths? Profound. Enough to prayerfully consider for the next few days.

Lord, change us and teach us that You alone are God. Show us how to live like it each and every day, amen.

Living in the Eye of the Storm: A Migraine Story

~ Heather Davis ~ 6 Comments

Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines, the produce of the olive fail and the fields yield no food, the flock be cut off from the fold and there be no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the LORD; I will take joy in the God of my salvation.

Habakkuk 3:17-18

Hello friends. I’ve been out for a while, and I’m afraid I’ll be out for quite some time to come. Though this may be my last entry to WordPress for many weeks, there’s plenty here to look at. Feel free to browse my archives. Look around. Explore. Even comment – I’ll answer if and when I can.

It’s been quite a few weeks here at the Davis household. This past Saturday saw an epic storm with damaging winds and a deluge which caused flooding on the already-soggy ground.

In apparent sympathy, my body decided an epic migraine was just the thing, and I partially woke in the middle of the night – enough that I was aware of pain but not enough to get up and take the appropriate meds. It wasn’t until around 9 am that I finally had the sense to add a Toradol injection to the triptan and then, ah! Sleep…

Meanwhile, my unexpected nap came in the middle of a remodeling project we began the day after Christmas. Room by room, we moved furniture, ripped out carpet, and laid new flooring upstairs. One room received a total makeover. Another got a fresh coat of paint and a few unexpected repairs. But while I remained down for the count, my house looked like this:

Ah, construction!

We still have bare subfloor in spots.

On the second day of the new decade, my poor daughter totaled a vehicle. Thank the Lord, she was unhurt but we are now down to 2 vehicles, one of which is 15 years old and leaks coolant.

The girls’ school is 30 minutes’ drive south and my husband’s job is 45 minutes’ drive north (on a mythical zero-traffic day), so our time and logistics just got interesting.

On the same day as the truck’s demise, your favorite klutz (that would be yours truly, aka me), tested gravity outside the ginormous leaky vehicle and scored spectacular bruising and scraping on her left arm and ribcage, evidently straining the intercostal muscles on the right in the process.

I’m healing up well but I still can’t sleep on my right side. Which, of course, made the waking-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night migraine thing more festive.

And all that to say… I’m doing fantastic! I’m serious. Really, truly good. I’ve had such joy, such peace, and such … I don’t even know. It’s been a few amazingly wonderful weeks. God is good. It doesn’t matter what is going on around me or even what’s going on with my poor old body. God is Majestic. Awesome. Perfect. Oh, how I love Him!

And He’s done some really great things in the midst of this mess.

  • I’ve been able to confess a parental sin and repent. You see, the teen was driving our second-most-valuable vehicle because I had originally needed the seating capacity of our clunker for cross country season. But when it was over, I pressed the matter a bit then let it slide. My bad. She should have been in the oldest car. Lesson learned.
  • My kids are getting a taste of making do and compromise.
  • The family is practicing humility and love in the midst of all of this.
  • I’m given the opportunity to read through the Bible chronologically once more, but this time with an online discussion group of friends who just can’t get together often because of schedules or distance.

And there’s so much more.

I literally feel as if I’m living in the eye of a storm. The whole world rages and fumes all around me. Destruction and chaos roar past, yet I feel calm. At peace. Joyful.

God has provided in such neat ways. As of Monday, I’ll be working full-time to fill in for the incomparable Ms. J at our school while she has back surgery. It’s temporary, but it will certainly keep me busy for a few weeks. It’s also about the only job I could take with the vehicle situation, so thanks for that, God!!

And I’m still planning on finishing my book. Tennis season starts soon. And spring play practice. The house is a mess. I’m behind on my Greek and need to be in the Word in Hebrew, too. But still I am at peace and full of joy.

You see, this isn’t my home. It’s my appointment – my position, if you will, and I will be the best steward I can of the work God gives me to do, writing, parenting, and all of it.

Ultimately, however, my Home is with Him. Someday He will call me there and I will go with great excitement. Until then, I will continue to serve Him here with near-equal excitement to see His hand at work in the good times and in the bad.

Where He calls, I will go with enthusiasm and good cheer. Even into the midst of the storm.

And he [Jesus] said to them, “Why are you afraid, O you of little faith?” Then he rose and rebuked the winds and the sea, and there was a great calm.

Matthew 8:26

All Things New

~ Heather Davis ~ 8 Comments

The following is the December devotional I wrote for my church family. I wanted to share it with you for Christmas. I’ll be taking a break with my family (and hopefully finishing the first draft of my book) for the next few weeks, so merry Christmas to you and may the Lord draw you closer to Him in the year to come!

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.

2 Corinthians 5:17

As a teenager, I believed I would die at the age of 26. I had no health problems and the number seemed arbitrary, yet the idea remained lodged in my mind.

Then in early adulthood, a series of poor decisions spiraled my life into chaos and the years slid away. My 26th birthday came and went unnoticed, eclipsed by life events more pressing than the passage of another year.

Mere weeks later, I sat on the edge of the bathtub in my apartment staring at a positive pregnancy test. Once I opened the bathroom door, I would have to face the baby’s father, a man I barely knew, and admit our lives were forever changed.

And they were. That year, that pregnancy, marked the beginning of God’s work in my life and heart – a work that took a broken, lost, and angry atheist and transformed her into a passionate lover of God, His Word, and His people.

I was a married homeschool mom of three before the Lord reminded me of my morbid adolescent certainty. Oddly enough, I’d been right. At age 26, I died to myself and begin to live for God. Everything I had been, every goal and ambition, changed radically that year. The old me had passed away; the new had come.

Nearly two decades have passed, and my life before and after Christ are as different as stone and water. To me, 2 Corinthians 5:17 is not just a pretty platitude. It is truth, raw and real.

Perhaps because of this, when I read Luke 2, I do not picture the idealized and brightly colored manger scene often displayed on Christmas cards.

Instead, I visualize sweat on Mary’s brow as she inhales the mingled stink of animal manure and blood. I feel her confusion as she wonders, “Is this how it’s supposed to be, God?” I imagine Joseph struggling to keep animals from jostling the newborn Child as they poke their noses into a trough that should hold their dinner but instead holds this Baby.

And I picture the Babe Himself lying there, straw poking His newborn skin through cloth scraps like a premonition of the nails that will one day pierce His flesh. In my mind’s eye, the shadow of the Cross obscures the Infant’s features.

Do you see it? Embodied in helpless human infancy is THE King of kings. In an unthinkable act of humility and sacrificial love, He willingly lay aside boundless power, confining Himself to the stuff of His own creation.

Learning to walk, to talk, enduring the pain of birth and of human life only to grow into a Man who will take on the sin of the world – and greater pain still – to finally settle the price of redemption for the creatures He loves. For the creatures who even now reject Him.

And someday, that King will return. Someday, He will make ALL things new. To this new creation in Christ, that is the true joy of Christmas!

And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”

And he who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” Also he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.”

Revelation 21:3-5
  • Spend some time reflecting on the implications of the Almighty confining Himself to the form of an infant human being. Is any act of humility He asks of you greater than what He has already done for you?
  • Ask the Lord to show you if you’ve been clinging to any of the “old things” from your pre-Christ life and to help you let them pass away.
  • How can you show your gratitude to God for the gift of new life in Christ He has given you?