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Deuteronomy 1:1,2

“The Israelites spent 40 years on a journey that should have lasted 11 days.
It wasn’t distance that stood between them and the promised land. It was the condition of their hearts.

God’s purpose went deeper than simply transporting a huge group of people to a new land. He was preparing them to live in obedience to Him once they arrived.
What good was the promised land if the Israelites were just as wicked as the nations already living there?

The journey was a painful but necessary part of their preparation.
Through it God taught the Israelites who He was: The Living God, the Leader of their nation.
He also taught them who they were:
People who were fallen, sinful, prone to rebellion & doubt.
He gave His rebellious people the law to help them understand to relate to God and to other people.

Your spiritual pilgrimage may be lengthy, and you may face pain, discouragement, and difficulties.
But remember that God isn’t just trying to keep you alive.

He wants to prepare you to live for service and devotion to Him.”

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“It had been 37 years since Israel’s first spy mission into the promised land & 40 years since the exodus from Egypt. The Bible is virtually silent about those 37 years of aimless wandering. The generation of those who had lived in Egypt had almost died off, and the new generation would soon be ready to enter the land.

After 37 years in the desert, the Israelites forgot that their wanderings were a result of their parents’ & their own sin.
They could not accept the fact that they brought their problems upon themselves, so they blamed Moses for their condition.

Often our troubles result from our own disobedience or lack of faith. We cannot blame God for our sins.

Until we face this reality, we will have little peace & no spiritual growth.”
- broadcast from RT 

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Greatest Love… it might be, but the greatest love of all is when God given his one and only son, to save me… , it’s hard to understand by non Christian, but the story might given you an inspiration and more understanding about why Christmas is important for us, not because of that consumerism culture from the west but because He love me, so He come to die, come to save the unworthy, sinful, lost person like me… it is the greatest love of all….

this what Jesus,some known him as Isa Al Masih, said “This is my commandment: that you love one another as I have loved you. No one shows greater love than when he lays down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you.
(Joh 15:12-14 ISV)

The Father loves the Son and has put everything in his hands. The one who believes in the Son has eternal life, but the one who disobeys the Son will not see life.
(Joh 3:36)

For God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.
(Joh 3:16 MKJV)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
You love me, when I was so unlovely,
You sought me, when I was lost,
You show me, how much You really love me,…
When you bought me with a highest cost,

Chorus:
There’s no greater love than this,
There’s no greater love than this,
That a man would give His life for a friend
There’s no highest sacrifice
That a man would give His life …
You have paid a precious price for me

You love me, when I was so unworthy,
You cleansed me with Your own blood,
You clothed me with righteousness and mercy,
And you crowned me with Your steadfast love

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Prologue

But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you

good news of great joy that will be for all the people.”

—L U K E 2 : 1 0

Rakai, Uganda, August 1998

His name was Richard, the same as mine. I sat inside his meager thatch hut, listening to his story, told through the tears of an orphan whose parents had died of AIDS. At thirteen, Richard was trying to raise his two younger brothers by himself in this small shack with no running water, electricity, or even beds to sleep in. There were no adults in their lives—no one to care for them, feed them, love them, or teach them how to become men. There was no one to hug them either, or to tuck them in at night. Other than his siblings, Richard was alone, as no child should be. I try to picture my own children abandoned in this kind of deprivation, fending for themselves without parents to protect them, and I cannot.

I didn’t want to be there. I wasn’t supposed to be there, so far out of my comfort zone—not in that place where orphaned children live by themselves in their agony. There, poverty, disease, and squalor had eyes and faces that stared back, and I had to see and smell and touch the pain of the poor. That particular district, Rakai, is believed to be ground zero for the Ugandan AIDS pandemic.

There, the deadly virus has stalked its victims in the dark for decades. Sweat trickled down my face as I sat awkwardly with Richard and his brothers while a film crew captured every tear—mine and theirs.

I much preferred living in my bubble, the one that, until that moment, had safely contained my life, family, and career. It kept difficult things like this out, insulating me from anything too raw or upsetting. When such things intruded, as they rarely did, a channel could be changed, a newspaper page turned, or a check written to keep the poor at a safe distance. But not in

Rakai. There, “such things” had faces and names—even my name, Richard. Not sixty days earlier I had been CEO of Lenox, America’s finest tableware company, producing and selling luxury goods to those who could afford them. I lived with my wife and five children in a ten-bedroom house on five acres just outside of Philadelphia. I drove a Jaguar to work every day, and my business travel took me to places such as Paris, Tokyo, London, and Florence. I flew first-class and stayed in the best hotels. I was respected in my community, attended a venerable suburban church, and sat on the board of my kids’ Christian school. I was one of the good guys—you might say a “poster child” for the successful Christian life. I had never heard of

Rakai, the place where my bubble would burst. But in just sixty days, God turned my life inside out, and it would never be the same. Quite unexpectedly, eight months earlier, I had been contacted by World Vision, the Christian relief and development organization, during their search for a new president. Why me? It wasn’t something I had sought after. In fact, you might say I had been minding my own business when the phone rang that day. But it was a phone call that had been twenty-four years in the planning.

You see, in 1974, at the age of twenty-three, in my graduate school dormitory, I knelt down beside my bed and dedicated my life to Christ. This was no small decision for me, and it came only after months of reading, studying, conversations with friends, and the important witness of Reneé, the woman who would later become my wife. While at the time I knew very little about the implications of that decision, I knew this: nothing would ever be quite the same again, because I had made a promise to follow Christ—no matter what.

The Man Who Wouldn’t Buy China . . .

Several months after becoming a Christian, I was newly engaged to Reneé. As we were planning our wedding and our life together, she suggested that we go to a department store to register for our china, crystal, and silver. My self-righteous response was an indication of just how my newfound faith was integrating into my life: “As long as there are children starving in the world, we’re not going to own fine china, crystal, and silver.” Perhaps you can see God’s sense of irony in my becoming president of America’s premier fine tableware company a couple of decades later. So when I answered that phone call from World Vision in January 1998, I knew that God was on the other end of the line. It was His voice I heard, not the recruiter’s:

Rich, do you remember that idealistic young man in 1974 who was so passionate about starving children that he would not even fill out a wedding registry? Take a good look at yourself now. Do you see what you’ve become? But, Rich, if you still care about those children, I have a job I want you to do.

In my prayers over the weeks leading up to my appointment as World Vision’s president, I begged God to send someone else to do it, much as Moses had done.

Surely this was a mistake. I was no Mother Teresa. I remember praying that God would send me anywhere else, “but, please, God, not to the poor—not into the pain and alienation of poverty and disease, not there.” I didn’t want to go there.

Yet here I was, the new president of World Vision, sent by knowing staff to get a “baptism by fire” for my new calling, with a film crew to document every moment. Bob Pierce, the founder of World Vision, once prayed, “Let my heart be broken by the things that break the heart of God.” But who really wants his heart broken? Is this something to ask of God? Don’t we pray that God will not break our hearts? But as I look at the life of Jesus, I see that He was, as Isaiah described him, “a Man of sorrows . . . acquainted with grief ”(Isaiah 53:3 NKJV). Jesus’ heart was continually moved to compassion as He encountered the lame, the sick, the widow, and the orphan. I try to picture God’s broken heart as He looks today upon the broken world for which He died. Surely Richard’s story breaks His heart.

Two crude piles of stones just outside the door mark the graves of Richard’s parents. It disturbs me that he must walk past them every day. He and his brothers must have watched first their father and then their mother die slow and horrible deaths. I wondered if the boys were the ones who fed them and bathed them in their last days. Whatever the case, Richard, a child himself, is now the head of household.

Child-headed household, words never meant to be strung together. I tried to wrap my mind around this new phrase, one that describes not onlyRichard’s plight but that of tens of thousands, even millions more. I’m told that there are sixty thousand orphans just in Rakai, twelve million orphans due to AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. How can this be true? Awkwardly I asked Richard what he hopes to be when he grows up, a ridiculous question to ask a child who has lost his childhood. “A doctor,” he said, “so I can help people who have the disease.”

“Do you have a Bible?” I asked. He ran to the other room and returned with his treasured book with gold-gilt pages.

“Can you read it?”

“I love to read the book of John, because it says that Jesus loves the children.”

This overwhelmed me, and my tears started to flow.

Forgive me, Lord, forgive me. I didn’t know.

But I did know. I knew about poverty and suffering in the world. I was aware that children die daily from starvation and lack of clean water. I also knew about AIDS and the orphans it leaves behind, but I kept these things outside of my insulating bubble and looked the other way.

Yet this was to be the moment that would ever after define me. Rakai was what God wanted me to see. My sadness that day was replaced by repentance. Despite what the Bible had told me so clearly, I had turned a blind eye to the poor. Now my heart was filled with anger, first at myself, and then toward the world. Why wasn’t Richard’s story being told? The media overflowed with celebrity dramas, stock market updates, and Bill Clinton’s impending impeachment hearings. But where were the headlines and magazine covers about Africa? Twelve million orphans, and no one noticed? But what sickened me most was this question: where was the

Church? Indeed, where were the followers of Jesus Christ in the midst of perhaps the greatest humanitarian crisis of our time? Surely the Church should have been caring for these “orphans and widows in their distress” (James 1:27). Shouldn’t the pulpits across America have flamed with exhortations to rush to the front lines of compassion? Shouldn’t they be flaming today? Shouldn’t churches be reaching out to care for children in such desperate need? How could the great tragedy of these orphans get drowned out by choruses of praise music in hundreds of thousands of churches across our country? Sitting in a hut in Rakai, I remember thinking,

How have we missed it so tragically, when even rock stars and Hollywood actors seem to understand?

Ten years later I know. Something fundamental has been missing inour understanding of the gospel.The word gospel literally means “good news.” Jesus declared that He had come to “preach good news to the poor” (Luke 4:18). But what good news, what gospel, did the Church have for Richard and his brothers in Rakai? What “good news” have God’s people brought to the world’s three billion poor?

What “gospel” have millions of Africa’s AIDS orphans seen?4

What gospel have most of us embraced in the twenty-first century?

The answer is found in the title of this book: a gospel with a hole in it

http://www.theholeinourgospel.com/

2009 by World Vision, Inc. – Published by Thomas Nelson, Inc.

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Disclaimer

soegianto.net is not related to World Vision. This writing is not belong to soegianto.net.  We just want to share his writing on “the Hole in Our Gospel” because we believe it can help us on answering GOD calling. We take the article from a mailing list which we believe that can be shared among the readers.

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(Isa 40:10-31)

Janji yang terakhir yang aku pegang… TUHAN… ajar aku untuk menanti-natikan TUHAN!

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Sebab beginilah firman Yang Mahatinggi dan Yang Mahamulia, yang bersemayam untuk selamanya dan Yang Mahakudus nama-Nya: “Aku bersemayam di tempat tinggi dan di tempat kudus tetapi juga bersama-sama orang yang remuk dan rendah hati, untuk menghidupkan semangat orang-orang yang rendah hati dan untuk menghidupkan hati orang-orang yang remuk.
(Isa 57:15)

THIS VERSE has reference to God’s two Homes–the macrocosm of .the great universe and the microcosm of the human heart. Our God is so great that the Heaven of heavens cannot contain Him, but He is so lowly and humble that He will stoop to fill the heart of a child. He bids us learn of Him, for He is meek and lowly in heart.
The humble and contrite heart. It seems almost too wonderful to believe that the Eternal One will care to come and live with the child of Time; that the Infinite and Holy God will descend to the narrow limits of a human heart! (see Joh_14:23).

Jawab Yesus: “Jika seorang mengasihi Aku, ia akan menuruti firman-Ku dan Bapa-Ku akan mengasihi dia dan Kami akan datang kepadanya dan diam bersama-sama dengan dia.
(Joh 14:23)

PRAYER
Spirit of purity and grace,
Our weakness, pitying, see;
O make our hearts Thy dwelling-place,
And worthier Thee. AMEN.

source : Meyer Daily Devotion. e-Sword – The Sword Of the LORD with an electronic edge

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