Stake Your Hope… 

There are those we perceive the nature of men is inherently good and getting better.

And, there are those who believe men are by nature corrupt in need of a Savior.  

The latter leads to salvation, the former to devastation. 

If the nature of man is good, then evil has no meaning and men need no redeeming.  

A strong wind is enticing men to the lie that we have somehow moved past a need for the biblical Jesus. 

We are offered hope in man’s best efforts and told to change our narrow thinking.  To enter this new age of possibility, we need only to discard our rigidity.  

“You are not a sinner in need of a savior.”

I’ve seen where this road ends.

“There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death.”

As for me, I say you can keep your possibility.  I’ll stake my hope in the certainty… of an empty tomb and a Risen Savior.

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UNC meets weekly at the Atlanta Bread Company in Cumming GA. Each Friday, the morning’s opening talk is posted to the blog. Don’t forget, you can easily subscribe to our RSS feed.

Also, you can subscribe to our Podcast in iTunes. Start iTunes, enter the iTunes Store, and search for “UNC Friday Morning”.

“May the favor of the Lord our God rest upon us…yes, establish the works of our hands.”

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UNC meets weekly at the Atlanta Bread Company in Cumming GA. Each Friday, the morning’s opening talk is posted to the blog. Don’t forget, you can easily subscribe to our RSS feed.

Also, you can subscribe to our Podcast in iTunes. Start iTunes, enter the iTunes Store, and search for “UNC Friday Morning”.

“Establish the work of our hands for us—yes, establish the work of our hands.”
Psalm 90:17

1. Read the verse out loud. What stands out to you?

6. How are you investing your days in things that last?

We all want to count for something. Even though the title of this post relates to one of my favorite bands from Down Under, the song that comes to mind with this topic is “Time” by Pink Floyd. Every time I hear the line of the lyrics that goes, “And then one day you find ten years has got behind you, no one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun… The time is gone, the song is over, thought I’d something more to say,” I start thinking how much I don’t want that for my life. But how do I ensure that? How do I make my life matter? That’s where this morning at UNC and the verse centered, and here’s the discussion we had at our table:

1. What stood out in the verse to us was that only God can truly ensure that the work we do will be established. Also, that it appears to be a plea for significance. As men, especially as we near our mid-life, we want what we do to count for something, that it’s not all wasted effort. Considering that Moses wrote this verse, it really makes you wonder how he could ask such a request… I mean, he only liberated the Israelites from slavery, delivered the Ten Commandments to them and led them to the cusp of the Promised Land. Yet still, like all of us, he knew that without God behind our efforts, it’s all for naught.

2. One of us wanted to be a farmer, growing up near his grandparent’s farm. Another dreamed of being a movie director. Body builder and comic book makers were also mentioned. I always wanted to play centerfield in the Big Leagues. It’s safe to say neither of us fully realized these dreams. But hey, there’s still time, right?

3. The question that was asked back was what is the definition of “achieve”? Does God want us to be so successful, making millions of dollars and have everything we touch turn to gold? Hmmm… where we landed was that what God wants us to achieve is probably quite different from what we want. As fathers, we all have kids, and want our kids to succeed. Sure, it’d be great for them to achieve success in this world (maybe even become a Major Leaguer one day), but what we really want for them is to “achieve” godliness and grow into adults who walk with the Lord. We all felt that our Heavenly Father put that in our hearts as parents, because regardless of our material success, it’s the same thing He wants for us.

Also, someone mentioned that “achieving” may just be part of the process, and not the end result. If we do things the way God wants us to, it may not net the big bounty by earthly standards in the end. But if we followed the path He set before us, then we have “achieved” according to Him.

4. It’s human nature for us to “direct” our hands to the areas where we can contribute and get successful results. But as believers, we must be in tune with God’s Spirit by digging into His Word, praying, communing with other believers and seeing where He leads—by doing that, we will be able to understand where we should point our hands.

5. The most obvious one to us as fathers was our children—they are our legacy, and can be more than just a testimony of us passing along our gene pool. They can also be a legacy of our faith that God allowed us to pour into their lives and cultivate into a fully committed follower of Christ. Other suggestions were serving others in some capacity through volunteering at church or with ministries, helping others, and investing in the lives of other kids or unbelievers through gifts, works, etc.

6. We ran out of time to fully answer this question, but by doing the things mentioned in #4 and #5, it will allow us to invest our days in the things that last.

Click the ‘play’ button below to listen.

(If you cannot see the audio controls below, click the title of this post to refresh. Flash Player is required, click here to download.)

UNC meets weekly at the Atlanta Bread Company in Cumming GA. Each Friday, the morning’s opening talk is posted to the blog. Don’t forget, you can easily subscribe to our RSS feed.

Also, you can subscribe to our Podcast in iTunes. Start iTunes, enter the iTunes Store, and search for “UNC Friday Morning”.

“Establish the works of our hands for us - yes, establish the works of our hands.”

Moses drug up this prayer from the basement of his being.

You know basement. It’s where stuff sits, sometimes for decades, taking up space and collecting dust in a place called the heart.

The stuff in the basement is the stuff you couldn’t bring yourself to throw away. It’s too much a part of you. You’re attached to it. You remember a day when the stuff in the basement displayed prominently. Before you moved it to the margins in favor of some other thing. The reason you haven’t tossed the stuff that’s in the basement is because you’re hoping its glory days will return and you’ll find use for it again.

“Hmm… save that for the kids, for when they start their new homes.”

Dreams are like the stuff that’s in your basement. Some of them will never go away. But, then, neither do you dare place them where others can see. They might seem a bit out of date. They might clash with the rest of the décor.

“I’m going to change the world…”
“I’m going to be the best dad ever…”
“I promise to love and to cherish….”

If you dig deep enough, you’ll find these dreams have a connecting point. They were birthed in that center place where only you and God can go.

“Establish the works of our hands for us – yes, establish the works of our hands.”

Moses was a man like us. He had dreams. Like us, his dreams began to fade from view. At the time Moses offered to God what we now call Psalm 90, he most likely knew that he would never enter the Promised Land.

Moses knew his days were short and his opportunities were few. And yet… he desired that the works of his hands sustain past his days.

There are two ways you can respond to the realization of waning days: You can scramble to build a legacy - do a bunch of stuff you think men will remember. Or, you can hand your works to God.

Those things we do inside our days will last if they are things important to God.

Moses’ prayer was not that the vanity of men be sustained, but that the glory of God be revealed.

“You turn men back to dust… teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”
Psalm 90:3, 12

1. Read the verse. What stands out to you?

6. List some things that are important to god. How did you come to your answers?

When’s the last time you considered how much sand you had left in the hourglass of life? For me, the only times I quantify the amount of time remaining is 1) When I wake up multiple times in the middle of the night, and with each opening of my eyes, I stare at the clock and say, “If I can just fall back asleep, I’ve got X number of hours of sleep before my alarm goes off, 2) When I’m on a deadline and I’ve procrastinated until the ninth inning to get it started and I continually count down, “OK, I’ve got X number of hours left until I have to turn this in… so I’ve got plenty of time—I think I’ll get something to eat and watch this movie before I get started, and 3) When the Dolphins a nursing a one-point lead in the fourth quarter and they need the clock to wind down quickly before their AFC East rival can score.

I have to say numbering time in those ways won’t really give me a heart of wisdom. But by realizing all our days are numbered, and that we must make the most of them by investing in the important things before turning back to dust—that will give us a wise heart. Here’s what we chewed on at our table:

1. This is one those verses that puts the (in)signficance of our lives in full view. We are nothing but dust (Bill and Ted once put it quite so eloquently). We’re flesh and bone now, but one day, we’ll be nothing but the ground from which we were once formed. And it’s God that turns us back–He determines our days. The first part of the verse is really nothing but a humility statement. The other thing that stood out at our table was that despite being only dust, we’re also sons of God, and that’s all that really matters in life. When we realize that, and that our days of walking the earth to live in such a way that reflects that fact are numbered, it makes us wise.

2. Spend time with our wives, take a nap, write something, watch Sportscenter or a movie, pursue big visionary ideas, get back in shape, go to Home Depot and open a new account with no payments and no interest until 2011 to buy a new riding lawn mower… those were all things we preferred to do…

3. …But our demands prevented us otherwise. We had loans to close, deadlines to meet, computers that need fixing, sales to make, ditches to be dug. One guy brought up that we’re always trading something for something else when it comes to time, whether it’s a demand for a preference or vice versa.

Another guy brought up the point of how do you define what a demand is–we decided it was something that causes us to feel like there’s an obligation. He also pointed out that what we might see as a demand or distraction, God can use it as an opportunity for us.

4. Faith, family, friends is where we pretty much landed. Work was also mentioned. No one mentioned their golf game, believe it or not.

5. You point your time towards important things by looking through the lens of being a steward of the time God gave you and using it with Him in mind, whatever that might be.

6. One guy had a great equation by determining things that are important to God… You take a demand, run it through a wisdom filter and out of that will come Truth which will propel you to an action.

“…that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”

“For a thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night.”
Psalm 90:4

Time flies when you’re having fun… or when you’re God. Actually, time doesn’t apply to Him—He’s beyond it’s bookends, seeing as He was, is and is to come. But not us. We’re stuck in it. And there’s only so much allotted on our behalf, which means we’ve got only so many opportunities associated with it. That perspective evolves over time even more. We think we’ve got all the time in the world to get something done in our youth, then as we get older, we try to cram as much as we can into the window that closes inch-by-inch with each day.

That’s the perspective we took while diving into the opportunity of answering the following questions:

1. Read the verse out loud. What stands out to you?
Just how irrelevant time is to God… a few quick hours, and it’s over. If you think about it from that perspective, Jesus has only been away from earth for two days now.

Things seem like forever–especially when you were young. Remember how long summer break used to last in elementary school? Or waiting to get back test results. Or getting to work while stuck in traffic. But in reality, through the eyes of God, those moments are nothing but a blink.

2. Describe a time when you took advantage of a great opportunity?
My answer was asking my wife to marry me before I started losing my hair. For another guy, it was unloading his beater of a car onto his brother at a small profit. Another guy shared how his wife had a job opportunity that brought them to Atlanta, and opened incredible doors beyond their professional careers. There were also examples given of times when we could share our testimonies to others.

3. What does an opportunity look like to you?
It’s a chance to advance something… whether it’s your career, your portfolio, your personal or spiritual life, or even your appetite, such as getting a free taco from Taco Bell during one of those “If Someone Hits a Home Run in the 5th Inning We Feed America” campaigns. Most importantly, though, an opportunity is a chance to advance the Kingdom.

4. How do you determine the value of an opportunity?
Our answers on this one shifted a bit, basically due to the question of whose perspective is involved. For the most part, the value is determined by what’s at stake, and what you have to gain from the opportunity. The greater the potential for payday, the more valuable that opportunity becomes. Perspecitve applies to an even greater degree here too when you factor in a worldly vs. eternal perspective. When an opportunity can have eternal significance, it becomes invaluable—there is no worth high enough that can be applied to something so weighty.

5. Is it possible that you miss opportunities because you are not seeing the whole picture?
Yes. And all the time. Someone brought up the Good Samaritan. Two religious figures passed by, focused completely on themselves and didn’t take advantage of the opportunity God provided to serve Him. When the focus is on us, rather than on God, it’s not only possible we will miss opportunities because we are not seeing the whole, eternal picture; it’s highly probable.

6. If time is short and opportunities are few, how do you know where to invest your time?
In things that have eternal significance. Being all dads, we talked about how much this applies to spending time and investing in our kids. Doing so builds bridges into their adulthood, and can even carry on into future generations. It means praying for opportunities to serve God and looking for where He can use you on a consistent basis as His spirit leads. It means turning off the ball game more often and tuning into His Word (unless it’s the Dolphins playing). It means bringing more purpose to your relationships at work beyond a bottom line. It means making your calendar not be about what’s in the mirror, but rather what’s beyond the reflection.

OK, I’m running out of time and missing opportunities—catch you next week.