The Lord Has Need of It

The Lord Has Need of It.  Underscoring Christ’s humility, who entered Jerusalem on a donkey instead of a war horse, is the easily overlooked detail that the donkey he rode was borrowed. His Majesty, King Jesus, could have legitimately confiscated any donkey or horse that he desired, since: “The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof” (Psa. 24:1). Or, Christ could have materialized inside any locked palace skipping all modes of travel. No, never—Jesus showed common courtesy to the donkey’s owner through his disciples: “If anyone says to you, ‘Why are you doing this?’ say, ‘The Lord has need of it and will send it back here immediately’” (Mark 11:3). It is apparent from cross-references that two donkeys were involved: mother and foal. Jesus wanted the young one (John 12:14), “on which no one has ever yet sat (Luke 19:30), and so arranged for the mother to join: “Untie them and bring them to me” (Matt. 21:2). Jesus’ head would have barely raised above the standing crowd.

“And they went away and found a colt tied at a door outside in the street, and they untied it. And some of those standing there said to them, ‘What are you doing, untying the colt?’” (Mark 11:4-5). Conceivably, the animal’s caretakers balked for many reasons: untying the (untrained) colt, potentially separating a baby from its mother, allowing a stranger to borrow livestock, and proceeding without a formalized contract. While it is impossible to determine the subtle tone of the dialogue about the donkey, since merely the summary of it is included in each of the four Gospel accounts, one thing remains clear: although Jesus was courteous, he was not technically asking permission. The most forceful factor for lending the animal(s) seemed to be the word of the Lord. “And they told them what Jesus had said, and they let them go” (Mark 11:6). Is Jesus asking? In that case borrow the animal, of course, right away!

Assistance to walk the two miles between Jerusalem and the villages of Bethphage and Bethany on the Mount of Olives was not why Jesus borrowed the colt. He had walked that path many times before in his life; footing it seemed to be what Jesus did most in his three-year public ministry. The donkey had another deeply symbolic and significant role to play that day. Precisely because it was less than a horse (Deut. 17:16), a mule is what both David and Solomon rode into Jerusalem when their time came to present themselves publicly as king (1 Kings 1:38). Yet different than a mule, a young donkey is lower still. As a sign, the Messiah will ride into Jerusalem explicitly on a donkey when his time comes to present himself publicly as king (Zech. 9:9), accompanied not by soldiers but by singers and children. Jesus will not need the donkey twice that day, or ever again! Next time he will ride “a white horse” (Rev. 19:11).

Ponder the Path of Your Feet

Ponder the Path of Your Feet.  The scene is tender; a wise father distributes advice to his young son long before he needs it (Prov. 4:20-27). Generalities are sufficient to illuminate the way ahead since no child is a specialist … not yet. The ABCs and 123s of walking the path set before that son in the ancient past are the same principles for any son or daughter today. “My son, be attentive to my words” (Prov. 4:20a). In this case, Solomon’s words are God’s words. Solomon links walking the wise path to using the physical body skillfully: “incline your ear” (vs. 20), “let them not escape your sight” (vs. 21), “keep your heart” (vv. 21, 23), “put away from you crooked speech” (vs. 24), “let your eyes look directly forward” (vs. 25), “ponder the path of your feet, then all your ways will be sure” (vs. 26). “Do not swerve to the right or to the left; turn your foot away from evil” (vs. 27).

It is rare genius to extract life lessons from common sense. Wisdom usually flows from the known to the unknown. In this case, physical walking informs spiritual walking. Solomon does not instruct his young son, ponder your feet on the path; rather, ponder the path of your feet. The destination determines the path. Watching our feet ensures stumbling. Look ahead to stay upright!

Approximately every quarter we ponder the path of our feet, like re-centering our location on the GPS map. We look ahead for the purpose of staying upright. Watching our spinning feet ensures our spectacular stumbling. Where are we going? Our destination determines our path. How will we know we are on the right path? We will “incline our ear” to the word of God.

Our church is one of those hidden gems that embodies the saying: strategically small, intentionally simple. As such, we are generalists, not specialists. Every person plays his or her part, but his or her part is always in flux according to the needs of the many. During some seasons, some people will clean the church. In other seasons, they will teach children. In a pinch, they will advance the slides for the worship songs. Pondering the path of your feet, to extend the metaphor, might mean going south for a little while, across the river, to proceed east. Service of others is the perennial need in the strategically small and intentionally simple church, not necessarily a sense of personal fulfillment in ministry. We are all utility players here. But this is not a chore; it is a gift! We all get to play a part! Every member has a ministry. 

The Man Behind St. Patrick's Day

The Man Behind St. Patrick’s Day (The Voice of the Martyrs, devotional, 3/11/2026). On March 17, many around the world will celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day. The real Patrick was a bold evangelist who lived during the fifth century and was persecuted for his faith while sharing the gospel among the Druids in Ireland. Later, shamrocks and mythological leprechauns would creep into the holiday celebrations of Saint Patrick’s Day.

Patrick’s life was spent in hardship. Just before he turned 16, his family’s holiday villa in Britain was raided by Irish pirates who kidnapped Patrick and sold him into slavery in Ireland. Though raised in a Christian home, Patrick came to faith in Christ during his time in slavery. In his autobiography, he wrote, “The Lord opened my senses to my unbelief, so that … I might remember my many sins; and accordingly I might turn to the Lord my God with all my heart.”

Patrick was forced to be a herdsman, but his faith in God grew as he prayed while shepherding flocks. After six years as a slave, Patrick escaped his slaveholders, returning to Britain and his parents. As he settled back into his home, he studied to become a priest. But one night he had a dream of a man carrying a letter with the words “The Voice of the Irish,” and he heard the voices of the men he had worked with shouting for his return.

Patrick planned to return to Ireland, but his parents as well as church leaders opposed this idea as they did not think the Irish people were worth saving; additionally, the Druids in Ireland were known to torture runaway slaves. At the risk of his life, Patrick returned to Ireland and shared the gospel with his former slaveowner, who refused to hear it.

That was just the beginning of Patrick’s challenges as he spread the gospel across Ireland. The Druids tried to poison Patrick; a barbarian warrior speared his chariot driver to death in an attempt to kill him; and he was often ambushed at his evangelistic events. He was even briefly enslaved again. However, Patrick faithfully shared Christ throughout Ireland until his death on March 17 in A.D. 461.

The Destoyer

The Destroyer.  In many instances in Scripture, God is distinctly, righteously ferocious. “The Lord has roared; who will not fear?” (Amos 3:8). He has legitimate fury and wields genuine wrath but never with bad temper or uncontrolled rage. God doesn’t fly off the handle; he initiates, explains, enforces, establishes, and executes justice to such an extent that the most appropriate, albeit paradoxical result is not terror but gladness. “He will judge the peoples with equity. Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice” (Psa. 96:10-11). God alone is awesome in the most literal sense, awe-inspiring in the most holy, glorious way. “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Heb. 10:31). Thus, encountering God without the covering of Christ is lethal. Encountering God with the covering of Christ is no less lethal, but all God’s lethality has fallen upon his Son on behalf of the redeemed.

It is highly shocking yet perfectly congruent to notice first at the Passover, but then fully in the Passion of the Christ, that God is the Avenger. Just as God deliberately crushed his Son vicariously for the sins of humanity—“It was the will of the Lord to crush him; he has put him to grief” (Isa. 53:10)—God deliberately caused the Ten Plagues for the sins of Egypt. “For the Lord will pass through to strike the Egyptians, and when he sees the blood on the lintel and on the two doorposts, the Lord will pass over the door and will not allow the destroyer to enter your houses to strike you” (Exo. 12:23). To strip God of his lethality is awfully dangerous.

Some questions remain as to whether the Lord himself is the Destroyer, a holy angel is the destroyer as God’s appointed executioner, or an unholy demon is the destroyer that God has commandeered to accomplish his good purpose of justice. But any controversy is moot because, clearly, the Lord is intimately involved. “At midnight the Lord struck down all the firstborn in the land of Egypt” (Exo. 12:29). Psalm 78 remembers the Ten Plagues and attributes to God directly the actions upon Egypt. “He turned their rivers to blood” (Psa. 78:44). “He let loose on them his burning anger, wrath, indignation, and distress, a company of destroying angels” (Psa. 78:49). “He struck down every firstborn in Egypt” (Psa. 78:51).

The New Testament unflinchingly names God himself as the Destroyer (1 Cor. 10:10; Heb. 11:28). Thus, the Destroyer is also our Deliverer. The same God who judges sin is also the Sacrifice which takes away sin. “Note then the kindness and the severity of God” (Rom. 11:22).

I Never Made a Sacrifice

I Never Made a Sacrifice.  The norm is to grandstand; the rule is to bet on oneself. Therefore, any deviation from the norm or exception to the rule draws attention, positive or negative. Compared to some of today’s celebrities who are entirely contained in the Internet, it is hard to imagine the international celebrity heaped upon the Scottish medical doctor turned missionary, David Livingstone (1813-1873). Livingstone was the first European to crisscross the African Interior, opening the continent to commerce and Christian evangelism while exposing the dark industry of the slave trade. Livingstone grew up in a tenement adjacent to a cotton mill and fought hard to enter medical school at Glasgow only to set it all aside immediately after graduation to answer the call to missions in Africa.

Legend grew up around Livingstone and his expeditions, especially when he trekked the mountains all over Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Burundi, Malawi, etc., searching for the source of the Nile River. "The Nile sources," he told a friend, "are valuable only as a means of opening my mouth with power among men. It is this power [with] which I hope to remedy an immense evil" (Tim Jeal, Livingstone: Revised and Expanded [2013], p. 289). After his wife, Mary, died in Mozambique of malaria (1862), no one had seen him in years. When Henry Morton Stanley finally found Livingstone in 1869, sick and recuperating in Ujiji, a Tanzanian village, he said, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume.” Livingstone replied, “Yes, I feel thankful that I am here to welcome you.”

Of his physical heart Livingstone had famously said, “If I die, bury my heart in Africa.” His friends did exactly that when Livingstone died of malaria in Zambia (1873) while the rest of Livingstone’s body was buried in Westminster Abbey, London. But one brief interchange by Livingstone to a group of Cambridge students (1857) during a furlough captured his spiritual heart. When asked about his sacrifice, he resisted using the term.

“For my own part, I have never ceased to rejoice that God has appointed me to such an office. People talk of the sacrifice I have made in spending so much of my life in Africa. . . . Is that a sacrifice which brings its own blest reward in healthful activity, the consciousness of doing good, peace of mind, and a bright hope of a glorious destiny hereafter? Away with the word in such a view, and with such a thought! It is emphatically no sacrifice. Say rather it is a privilege. Anxiety, sickness, suffering, or danger, now and then, with a foregoing of the common conveniences and charities of this life, may make us pause, and cause the spirit to waver, and the soul to sink; but let this only be for a moment. All these are nothing when compared with the glory which shall be revealed in and for us. I never made a sacrifice” (R. Winter and S. Hawthorne, Perspectives on the World Christian Movement, [1981], p. 259).

He Must Increase

He Must Increase.  In more highly liturgical churches across the globe, today marks Ash Wednesday, the formal beginning of Lent (derived from the Latin word for fortieth). Last year’s palm fronds from Palm Sunday have been burned, their ashes are smeared on the foreheads of the penitent ones who will observe the 40 days leading up to Good Friday (not counting Sundays) in mourning over their sin. Such is a worthy gesture, especially if the day before Ash Wednesday, Mardi Gras (from the Latin phrase meaning Fat Tuesday), was raucous. Traditionally, people give something up for Lent: meat, one meal per day, etc. Modern examples often include giving up chocolate, booze, sugar, social media, etc.

Yet, on a basic level, giving up to gain something is faulty logic. I can’t subtract my way into addition. I can’t decrease my body fat index by simply tightening my belt. I can’t balance my family budget by solely turning off a few lights in the daytime. So then, why would decreasing my luxuries for six weeks increase holiness? We need holiness, for sure, but holiness isn’t added by subtraction. Only because Christ’s holiness has been added to our account (i.e., imputed)—by grace through faith (Eph. 2:8)—can unholiness ever be subtracted from our account. Ultimately, we need Christ, not math.

According to faith, we can and should sometimes fast from certain rights and privileges, as Christ assumed was normal in the rhythm of faithfulness. “Can the wedding guests mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them? The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast” (Matt. 9:15). We fast not that Christ might sanctify us, but because Christ has sanctified us, is sanctifying us, and will sanctify us. “He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ” (Phil. 1:6).

When John the Baptist spoke his wise words as almost a prayer, “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30), the increase of Christ was not the result of John’s decrease, but the cause of John’s decrease. In other words, the only way John could possibly decrease was that Christ had arrived in a state of fullness. The increase that John desired was not for Christ to increase in essence but in recognition. Christ was already preeminent; John wanted everyone, including himself, to see Christ as the Preeminent One. “He who comes from above is above all. He who is of the earth belongs to the earth and speaks in an earthly way. He who comes from heaven is above all” (John 3:31). Recognizing Christ as maximum displaces all other ambitions, desires, and rivals.

By Faith Abraham Obeyed When He Was Called

By Faith Abraham Obeyed When He Was Called.  When the kids were little, we would say to them as often as the situation required, “Slow poking is not obeying.” Unnecessary nonchalance in compliance to a direct instruction, to maintain plausible deniability and perhaps to avoid discipline, did not fit the spirit of obedience. For instance, picking up toys while playing with said toys on their way to the toybox was slow poking, dragging feet on the way to the car when we were late for church was slow poking, reading past Lights Out time was slow poking. Abraham was non-compliant in some ways, unwise in other ways, and dreadfully wrong when he lied twice about Sarah being his sister to save his own skin (Gen. 12:13; 20:2), but he did not slow poke when God initially called him (Gen. 12:1-3).

The quickness of Abraham’s initial obedience is emphasized in Hebrews 11:8: “By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance.” By using a present tense participle—when he was called—with a past tense verb—obeyed—the grammatical effect is spontaneous action. His obedience virtually accompanied his calling, as if while God was calling him Abraham was already packing. He had an eagerness to obey despite a lack of knowledge about where this journey would take him.

Making application to our faith response to God’s calling could be endlessly varied, but the eagerness of our faith response is worth evaluating. Do we slow poke? Will we get around to it, whatever it is? Or will we masterfully construct excuses like the potential followers of Jesus? 

As they were going along the road, someone said to him, "I will follow you wherever you go." And Jesus said to him, "Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head." To another he said, "Follow me." But he said, "Lord, let me first go and bury my father." And Jesus said to him, "Leave the dead to bury their own dead. But as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God." Yet another said, "I will follow you, Lord, but let me first say farewell to those at my home." Jesus said to him, "No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God" (Luke 9:57-62).

God, who sees the end from even before the beginning, says that Abraham, despite his many fumbles, is “the father all who believe” (Rom. 4:11). Sarah also, who might have been pigeon-holed by humans as the mother who doubted, since she first scoffed at God’s announcement that she would have a baby at 90 years old (Gen. 18:12), is honored by God to be as important in faith as Abraham. “By faith Sarah herself received power to conceive, even when she was past the age, since she considered him faithful who had promised” (Heb. 11:11).