Author: Beverly Van Kampen

The Unkept Commandment

“You will never have enough till you get Christ; but when you have him, you will be full to the brim. Contentment is the peculiar jewel of the beloved of the Lord Jesus.” – Charles Spurgeon

When God gave the Ten Commandments, we notice that the last one is different from all the rest. It’s about an attitude, not an action that is noticed by others: It says we are not to covet. Ignoring this commandment may have something to do with the breaking of many of the others. People can want something so much they are willing to steal, lie, or even kill to get it.

When a ruler of Israel came to Jesus asking how he could have eternal life, he boasted that he had kept all the commandments. Jesus didn’t argue with him. He simply told him to sell his possessions and give the money to the poor. Hearing this, the man was disheartened and sorrowful (Mark 10:22). His reaction showed the commandment he was not willing to keep was the one against coveting – wanting more, not less. We’ve all been there at some point.

Coveting is not always about things. Sometimes it’s about reputation, status, or relationships. And it’s dangerous: Coveting steals our contentment and replaces it with bitterness, resentment, and even hatred. Above all, coveting separates us from God and creates stress.

Luther says the cure for coveting is trading our worldly desires for holy desires. In other words, we have to look at what really matters: We have God’s love. He will never leave us. We have work to do in his kingdom. We have a glorious eternity. We already have what matters most. And contentment is the result of recognizing that.

“Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart.” – Psalm 37:4

Saying More by Saying Less

“The most precious things in speech are the pauses.” – Sir Ralph Richardson

When we look at Jesus, we find that sometimes he preached long sermons. But, it seems that, quite often, he spoke only a few words at a time, but words that changed everything for the one or ones that took them in. Things like, “Follow me,” “Peace, be still,” (Mark 4:39), or “Child, arise” (Luke 8:54).

Bible studies or business meetings are a great place to observe people’s communications habits. There are those who dominate the discussion, eagerly sharing their understanding or ideas. That’s not bad. But the ones I like to see are those who sit through most of a meeting attentive, but quiet. Then, we hear them say something that ties everything together for everyone. They seem to process all through the session, and, in a few words near the end, bring everything to a point. Their words are few, but valuable.

At the empty tomb, Jesus said one word and, for Mary Magdalene, it changed everything. She thought he was dead. Someone must have stolen the body. Then she sees a man and thinks it is the gardner. That is until he spoke. He simply said, “Mary.” She couldn’t believe her ears. It was Jesus.! She fell at his feet and, then, she, too, said one word, “Master.” When he spoke her name, she responded with simple submission.

There is a time for listening, processing, meditating, pondering. After that, what we say will be helpful and, by God’s grace, maybe even powerful. I, for one, would like to practice saying more, but with fewer words.


“Do not be quick with your mouth, do not be hasty in your heart to utter anything before God. God is in heaven and you are on earth, so let your words be few.” – Ecclesiastes 5:2

Would it be enough?

“We pray for the big things and forget to give thanks for the ordinary, small (and yet really not small) gifts.” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Jacob was returning home after running for his life years earlier because Esau had threatened to kill him. As he got close to home, Jacob heard Esau was approaching with 400 men. He prayed desperate prayers for himself and his family.

Later that night, though, he went off by himself and experienced God’s presence in the form of an angel. They wrestled all night until, at last, we are told Jacob wouldn’t give up fighting until the angel blessed him. He was done asking for specifics and wanted only God’s blessing. His prayer was answered in a most unexpected way: The blessing was a new name and a limp, both of which he accepted as coming from the hand of a loving God.

That makes me wonder if we trust God enough to stop praying for specific requests, at least for awhile, and, instead, spend more of our prayer time worshiping him? Maybe for awhile we could offer prayers of submission to his will instead of offering our list of requests. What if we dared to pray “Bless me, Lord. All I need is you and whatever blessing you decide to give.”

If we really believe he knows better than we do what would meet our deepest needs, it would be enough if we just ask him to bless us and then accept whatever he gives as coming from his hand. His answer to us might be as unexpected as Jacob’s was. But it was exactly what he needed. Do we dare to pray as he did? All I need is your blessing, Lord.

“The Lord bless you
    and keep you;
the Lord make his face shine on you
    and be gracious to you;.” – Numbers 6:24-25

Stay for dinner.

“Hospitality means primarily the creation of free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend.” – Henri Nouwen

“Behold, I stand at the door and knock”.  Jesus announces his presence at the door of our heart. If we let him in, what will he do? Criticize the dirt that’s there? Tell us our closets need to be cleaned or there’s stuff we need to get rid of? Or maybe he’ll turn around and leave when he sees what’s behind the door.

No. None of those things. Here’s what he says next: “If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me (Revelation 3:20).” If we let him in, this verse tells us he wants to have dinner with us. He wants to sit at our table and have us tell him about our day. He wants to enjoy the vegetables we bought from the farmers’ market. He wants to share our everyday life.

Eating together is an important value to God. Psalm 23 tells about him preparing a table for us. Some of the sacrificial offerings in the Old Testament times were fellowship offerings. The sacrificial lamb was eaten as a sign of communion with God. And don’t forget Jesus fed 5,000+ people at one time and 4,000+ another. God seems to love the relationships that come from sharing food.

If Jesus is knocking on the door of your heart today, or mine, let’s let him in. Then invite him to stay for dinner. Let him become a friend. He will surely change some things in our lives over time, but, for now, he just wants us to invite him in.

“And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts . . .” – Acts 2:46

Things God Never Says #5

“All my knowledge of him depends on his sustained initiative in knowing me.” – J. I. Packer

We humans tend to think of God as human-like – just bigger, stronger, wiser, and holier. But that’s not good thinking. He is so, so different from us.

I hope this short series of “things God never says” helps us realize that God doesn’t say the things humans say or think the way humans think. Our Creator is different, and he’s outside of anything he’s created – including us.

So, when God, a being we cannot even imagine let alone understand, wants to communicate with us, is it any wonder we don’t always “get it”? Even when God took on a human body and came to earth to help us understand him and his plan for us, his disciples often misunderstood. They didn’t really grasp Jesus’s mission until after his resurrection.

God doesn’t give up. He continues to teach and reveal and guide. Jesus is the bridge between the knowable and unknowable God, the Holy Spirit enlightens us, and the Bible is God’s revelation of himself, and still he says, “. . . my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways . . .” (Isaiah 55:8).

But, what he never says to us as we struggle to know him is, “Why can’t you understand?” He knows all our limitations and views us with compassionate patience.

Paul says it’s like we’re looking into a mirror now, seeing images and reflections, but someday we’ll see face-to-face. Then things will become clear. Until then, we’re grateful that God still communicates, and that he’s patient with our dusty efforts to understand.

“As a father shows compassion to his children,
    so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him.
For he knows our frame;
    he remembers that we are dust.” – Psalm 103:13-14

Things God Never Says #4

“In many instances I have felt the power of God transforming the fatigue of despair into the buoyancy of hope.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.

Sometimes life is tiring! Especially if we’ve been working overtime or have made too many commitments or are worried about something beyond our control. That’s when we want to say (whether we can actually do it or not): “I think I’ll take a nap and let the world go on without me for a while!”

Aren’t you glad God never says “I think I’ll take a nap”? We are told that the God of the Bible “will neither slumber nor sleep” (Psalm 121:4b). He’s always awake, always “on duty”, never tired. How is his constant vigilance helpful to us? Lots of ways:

He is always there to protect us and watch over our steps. In fact in the same Psalm cited above, the writer says, “He will not let your foot be moved; he who keeps you will not slumber.” It comforts us to know the almighty God is caring for us and watching out for us 24/7.

He is always there, too, to hear our prayers. He doesn’t keep office hours. Whenever we want to talk to him, to praise him, to ask for his help, he is there and he is listening. He’s wide awake and ready to answer our call.

And, finally, his alertness reminds us of his amazing strength and that he’s willing to use it for our benefit. He never feels fatigued or weak. He is all power, all the time. And our link to that celestial energy is prayer. Connecting to the power of God will give us strength, too, to do what we must do. With joy. With hope.

“Look to the Lord and his strength; seek his face always.” – 1 Chronicles 16:11

Things God Never Says #3

“With the goodness of God to desire our highest welfare, the wisdom of God to plan it, and the power of God to achieve it, what do we lack? Surely we are the most favored of all creatures.” – A. W. Tozer

We can’t be good at everything, and sometimes we are put in a situation that demands a skill we don’t have. I remember someone trying to teach me how to sing. He kept giving instructions to get me to have more volume, more voice, more everything. Frustrated, I finally said, “I’m doing the best I can!” And I was, but it was far from acceptable!

There are times when we ask God to do something for us and he doesn’t respond as we’d like him to. He’s too slow or doesn’t do the job as we want it done. And we might go to him with our complaints. When we do, we know he will never say, “I’m doing the best I can.”

What God wants to do, he does. He does it better than we can ask or even dream. It’s impossible for him to do a less-than-perfect job.

So, if we are frustrated with how he is responding, we might be asking him to do something he doesn’t want done – at least not in the way we are demanding. So what do we do? We trust that God is doing something by far better than we are asking, and we change our will to match his. We yield to him. We give up trying to have things our way, and we say “yes” to his way. He never does anything less than the best!

“This God—his way is perfect; the word of the Lord proves true; he is a shield for all those who take refuge in him.” – Psalm 18:30

Things God Never Says #2

“We should be astonished at the goodness of God, stunned that He should bother to call us by name, our mouths wide open at His love, bewildered that at this very moment we are standing on holy ground.” – Brennan Manning

We have all experienced rejection in our lives. The close friend who moves away and you lose touch. You feel that the friendship wasn’t all you thought it was if it could fade so easily. Or an adult child turns away and doesn’t look back. The worst, though, and we’ve all seen it and some have experienced it firsthand, is when a spouse quietly announces, “I just don’t love you anymore.”

At Jesus’s last meal with his disciples before he was crucified, John tells us that Jesus, “. . . having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end” (John 13:1b). These are friends who would that very night walk away from him in his trial and crucifixion. There was one who would betray him to authorities and another who would deny even knowing him. Jesus knew about their cowardice and disloyalty, and yet he loved them. To the end. Never wavering.

He loves us to the end, too! When we walk away, he loves us anyway. He waits for us to turn around and come back. When we are tired or discouraged, his love is always there holding us up. No matter what we do, we cannot make him stop loving us! And, the funny thing is that when we begin to believe that, it changes us. We want to please him, to talk to him about everything, to get forgiveness when we sin, to always be close. Just accept it. He’s never going to say, “I just don’t love you anymore.”

“The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.” – Lamentations 3:22-23

Things God Never Says #1

“Almost certainly God is not in time. His life does not consist of moments one following another…Ten-thirty– and every other moment from the beginning of the world–is always Present for Him. If you like to put it this way, He has all eternity in which to listen to the split second of prayer put up by a pilot as his plane crashes in flames.” – C. S. Lewis

Do you ever wonder how God does it? How he can listen to thousands of prayers at the same time and be personally involved in every one of them? How he can care, truly care, about every human being ever created? He is never like the frazzled parent who says to a demanding child, “Sorry, I’m busy right now.”

Why does God never say that? He’s eternal. He’s not hampered by 24-hour days or frustrated at having only 60-minutes in an hour. He doesn’t have a calendar with appointments on it. God created time when he created the earth with a sun to mark the days and years. He can enter time whenever he chooses, but it does not restrict him. He actually can answer our prayers before we pray them because being outside of time means he already knows what we will ask for.

Do you find that hard to wrap your mind around? I hope so! If we can fully understand God, he’s not God. But we do know he always has time for us. We never have to stand in line to talk to him. The instant we begin to think of him or talk to him, he responds – always willing to listen. Always caring. Never impatient. Never in a hurry.

“Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory for ever and ever. Amen.” – 1 Timothy 1:17

Letting Go

“This is how our holiness grows, by small surrenders, without which we cannot finally become free.” – Emilie Griffin

We want to be in control of where we go, what we eat, how we dress, how we spend, where we work, where we worship, and everything else. Yet God calls us to surrender. Surrendering means letting God control all of those decisions. Surrendering is hard. Maybe impossible.

So how does anyone do the impossible? One small step at a time. One small surrender at a time: Letting someone else choose the movie. Going to church when we’d rather be working in the garden. Not taking charge of every conversation. Even going to sleep at night can be a surrender.

J Todd Billings in his book, The End of the Christian Life, says that when we fall asleep at night. “We don’t think ourselves to sleep. We surrender our bodies to being overtaken (by sleep). . .” To Billings, going to sleep at night is a way of learning to surrender control of our bodies, our minds. Maybe that’s why some of us have a hard time sleeping. Our minds are still engaged in trying to control the world around us.

And, whether we are healthy or sick, young or old, we are eventually facing death. How can we live full and productive lives knowing that an end is coming over which we have no control? How will we be able to surrender our bodies and souls to him in life or in death? Only by small surrenders now, bigger ones as we get grow in our faith. The better we get at surrendering day-by-day, the easier our final surrender will be.

“. . . this is the one to whom I will look:
    he who is humble and contrite in spirit
    and trembles at my word.” – Isaiah 66:2b