Foursquare Gospel Church Igbosere (Chapel of Blessing)

OUR DAILY BREAD August 5, 2018 Sunday HARD MYSTERIES Amy Boucher Pye The Lord is slow to anger but great in power.  Nahum 1:3 Nahum 1:1–7 Psalms 68–69; Romans 8:1–21 As my friend and I went for a walk, we talked about our love for the Bible. She surprised me when she said, “Oh, but I don’t like the Old Testament much. All of that hard stuff and vengeance—give me Jesus!” We might resonate with her words when we read a book like Nahum, perhaps recoiling at a statement such as, “The Lord takes vengeance and is filled with wrath” (Nahum 1:2). And yet the next verse fills us with hope: “The Lord is slow to anger but great in power” (v. 3). When we dig more deeply into the subject of God’s anger, we understand that when He exercises it, He’s most often defending His people or His name. Because of His overflowing love, He seeks justice for wrongs committed and the redemption of those who have turned from Him. We see this not only in the Old Testamen...

OUR DAILY BREAD August 4, 2018 Saturday RADICAL LOVE Jennifer Benson Schuldt When you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind.  Luke 14:13 Luke 14:7–14 Psalms 66–67; Romans 7 Just one week before her scheduled wedding date, Sarah’s engagement ended. Despite her sadness and disappointment, she decided not to waste the food she had purchased for her wedding reception. She did, however, decide to change the celebration plans. She took down the gift table and revamped the guest list, inviting the residents of local homeless shelters to the feast. Jesus upheld this sort of no-strings-attached kindness when speaking to the Pharisees, saying, “When you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed” (Luke 14:13–14). He noted that the blessing would come from God because these guests would not be able to repay the host. Jesus approved of helping people who couldn’t supply charity donations, sparkling conversat...

OUR DAILY BREAD August 3, 2018 Friday TO MY DEAR FRIEND Dave Branon The elder, to my dear friend Gaius, whom I love in the truth.  3 John 1 3 John Psalms 63–65; Romans 6 What the apostle John did for his friend Gaius in the first century is a dying art in the twenty-first century. John wrote him a letter. One writer for the  New York Times,  Catherine Field, said, “Letter-writing is among our most ancient of arts. Think of letters and the mind falls on Paul of Tarsus,” for example. And we can add the apostle John. In his letter to Gaius, John included hopes for good health of body and soul, an encouraging word about Gaius’s faithfulness, and a note about his love for the church. John also spoke of a problem in the church, which he promised to address individually later. And he wrote of the value of doing good things for God’s glory. All in all, it was an encouraging and challenging letter to his friend. Digital communication...

OUR DAILY BREAD August 2, 2018 Thursday HEALING FLOOD Monica Brands He turned the desert into pools of water and the parched ground into flowing springs.  Psalm 107:35 Psalm 107:1–16, 35–36 Psalms 60–62; Romans 5 I’ve always loved a good thunderstorm. As kids, whenever a storm was truly incredible—with booming thunder and buckets of heavy rain pounding down—my siblings and I would make a mad dash around the outside of our house, slipping and sliding along the way. When it was time to go back inside, we were soaked to the bone. It was an exhilarating taste—for just a few minutes—of being immersed in something so powerful we couldn’t quite tell whether we were having fun or terrified. This picture comes to mind when, as in Psalm 107, Scripture compares God’s restoration to a barren wilderness transformed into “pools of water” (v. 35). Because the kind of storm that transforms a desert into an oasis isn’t a gentle shower—it’s a downpour, flooding every crack of parched groun...

OUR DAILY BREAD August 1, 2018 Wednesday LOVE WITHOUT LIMITS David C. McCasland The Lord is good to all; he has compassion on all he has made.  Psalm 145:9 Psalm 145:8–21 Psalms 57–59; Romans 4 A wise friend advised me to avoid using the words “you always” or “you never” in an argument—especially with my family. How easy it is to criticize others around us and to feel unloving toward those we love. But there is never any variation in God’s enduring love for us all. Psalm 145 overflows with the word  all . “The Lord is good to all; he has compassion on all he has made” (v. 9). “The Lord is trustworthy in all he promises and faithful in all he does. The Lord upholds all who fall and lifts up all who are bowed down” (vv. 13–14). “The Lord watches over all who love him” (v. 20). A dozen times in this psalm we are reminded that God’s love is without limit and favoritism. And the New Testament reveals that the greatest expression of it is seen in Jesus ...

OUR DAILY BREAD July 31, 2018 Tuesday SINNERS LIKE US David H. Roper This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.  Luke 15:2 Luke 15:1–7 Psalms 54–56; Romans 3 I have a friend—her name is Edith—who told me about the day she decided to follow Jesus.  Edith cared nothing for religion. But one Sunday morning she walked into a church near her apartment looking for something to satisfy her discontented soul. The text that day was Luke 15:1–2, which the pastor read from the King James Version: “Then drew near unto him all the publicans and sinners for to hear him. And the Pharisees and scribes murmured, saying, This man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them.”  That’s what it said, but this is what Edith heard: “This man receives sinners and Edith with them.” She sat straight up in her pew! Eventually she realized her mistake, but the thought that Jesus welcomed sinners— and that included Edith —stayed with her. That afternoon she decided to...

OUR DAILY BREAD July 30, 2018 Monday OVERCOMING CHALLENGES Kirsten Holmberg So the wall was completed on the twenty-fifth of Elul, in fifty-two days.  Nehemiah 6:15 Nehemiah 6:1–9, 15 Psalms 51–53; Romans 2 We gathered monthly to hold one another accountable to our individual goals. My friend Mary wanted to reupholster the seats of her dining room chairs before the year’s end. At our November meeting she wittily reported her progress from October: “It took ten months and two hours to recover my chairs.” After months of not being able to obtain the materials required, or find the quiet hours away from her demanding job and her toddler’s needs, the project took merely two hours of committed work to finish. The Lord called Nehemiah to a far greater project: to bring restoration to Jerusalem after its walls had lain in ruin for 150 years (Nehemiah 2:3–5, 12). As he led the people in the labor, they experienced mockery, attacks, distrac...