Mike Browning

Tag: Sunday Reflection

  • Probably Even Worse Than You Think

    Probably Even Worse Than You Think

    But remember who’s in charge.

    It’s not uncommon today to hear young adults talk about not wanting to have kids. Laying aside the ones that are just being selfish (without always realizing it), there’s usually a couple of main reasons for it.

    One is that they feel they should wait until they are more financially stable. Which at least shows some forward thinking, though I think most people who waited to have kids will tell you they wish they started sooner. It turns out there’s never a “good time” financially, and you tend to figure out how to make it work.

    Not to mention when you’re younger you have more energy to chase the little bundle of joy around.

    The other big reason is that the world is in such a terrible state now, they want to be able to act noble for not “bringing another life into a fallen world.”

    They aren’t wrong that things are in a sorry state. You can’t turn on a TV or look at your phone without seeing that, and it only seems to be going in one direction.

    If anything, what we see probably doesn’t even really show us how bad things really are. There’s almost certainly depravity going on that’s even worse than what we are told about. It’s enough to make anyone want to curl up in a ball and not do much of anything.

    But it’s always been this way.

    Terrible wars as far back as we want to look. People mistreating each other. The holocaust. The brutality and decadence of the Roman world.

    All the way back to Sodom and Gomorrah, it’s never been particularly good.

    But here’s the other thing, God was in charge then and he’s in charge now. If we only know two things for sure, it would be these: that we are closer to the end now than we ever have been, but we don’t know how close. And that everything will be reckoned and brought back to order. We don’t have to know how or when to trust it will happen.

    If you were sick, and a doctor told you he had a 100% cure but it would require a period of extreme discomfort, you could withstand it because you know what’s on the other side.

    So when God has told you that things will be worked out but there will be tribulation in the meantime, know you can withstand that too.

    And get to listening for what God wants you to do, and do it. Because you can.

    P.S.- If you’d like to read through the Bible this year, you can join us at His Word Together.

    No commentary. No telling you what to think. Nothing to buy. Nothing fancy.

    Just steady time in the Word.

    Check it out here.

  • Not a Warning

    Not a Warning

    At least not the way I always heard it explained.

    Last week I wrote about resentment toward latecomers. How we might get a little jealous of people who lived however they wanted for years longer than we did, and still walked away with the exact same deal we got.

    But think about it. Why would we actually feel jealousy?

    If the life we were living beforehand was so great, why did it ever occur to us that something needed to change? And why, once we figured that out, could we not manage the change ourselves? Lucky for us, somebody else could.

    There’s a passage where Jesus talks about counting the cost before you follow Him. Every explanation I ever got made it sound like a warning label. You’re going to give up a lot, so you’d better be sure before you sign on.

    But like usual, the surface reading and the real one aren’t pointed the same direction.

    Living a worldly life means chasing what the world values. Money, status, whatever version of “made it” you’ve picked out for yourself. Sometimes you actually get some of it. And the second you do, you want more. What you did manage to grab tends to slip through your fingers anyway, one way or another, eventually.

    Once you’ve accepted Jesus, some people respect you for it. Plenty more will look down on you, or at least think you’re a little weird. You’ll probably lose some of your appetite for piling up wealth too, because you know good and well there’s something coming after this where none of it will matter.

    Trade a life that doesn’t satisfy you, and that you can’t hold onto anyway, for one that does and that you can’t lose.

    Sounds like a pretty good deal. Not much of a warning at all.

    So maybe we shouldn’t be jealous of the people who show up later. If anything, we should be kicking ourselves for not showing up sooner.

    P.S.-If you’d like to read through the Bible this year, you can join us at His Word Together.

    No commentary. No telling you what to think. Nothing to buy. Nothing fancy.

    Just steady time in the Word.

    Check it out here.

  • Same (Unfair) Deal

    Same (Unfair) Deal

    It was unfair when we were on the receiving end too.

    Last week I wrote about how we tend to read ourselves into Bible stories as the good guy. Job, not the friends. The son who stayed, not the one who left. It’s a habit, and mostly it’s a wrong one. We’re usually standing closer to the other side than we’d like to admit.

    There’s a parable that puts this on full display, and it’s an uncomfortable one if you think about it.

    A landowner goes out at dawn and hires workers for his vineyard, agreeing on a day’s wage. He goes back out at nine, noon, three, even five, an hour before quitting time, and hires more, telling them he’ll pay what’s right. End of the day, he pays the five o’clock crew a full day’s wage. Then the nine o’clock crew. Then the ones who’d been out there since sunrise, sweating through the whole thing. Same amount. Every one of them.

    The all-day workers are furious. Not because they got paid less than promised, they got exactly what they agreed to. They’re furious because somebody else got the same deal for less work. The landowner’s answer is basically, it’s my money, I can be generous with it if I want, and what’s that to you?

    If you’ve already accepted Christ’s offer of forgiveness, it’s easy to look at someone who hasn’t yet and feel a little something when they finally do. Some version of, must be nice, they get everything after they were out there living however they wanted until an hour ago.

    But not too long ago, that was you. Doesn’t feel that way now, but it was.

    It’s not wrong to notice they didn’t earn what they got. Because they didn’t.

    But neither did you. You still don’t deserve it.

    That was the whole point of the deal in the first place. Christ is free to hand out grace to whoever He wants, on whatever timeline He wants, and none of us are in a position to file a complaint about the terms.

    If you’ve already accepted, congratulations. Now maybe quit keeping score on who got a better deal than you, and spend the energy instead trying, and mostly failing, to live like someone who’s actually been given what you now have.

    And if you haven’t accepted yet? It’s free for the asking. You don’t have to clean anything up first. Nothing you’ve done disqualifies you. And once you have it, nobody can take it back.

    And if you get the side eye treatment from some of us, don’t worry about it. You’ll probably be doing the same soon.

    It’s never too late.

    Until it is.

    P.S.- If you’d like to read through the Bible this year, you can join us at His Word Together.

    No commentary. No telling you what to think. Nothing to buy. Nothing fancy.

    Just steady time in the Word.

    Check it out here.

  • We’d Never Do Something That Bad (Part 2)

    We’d Never Do Something That Bad (Part 2)

    If God used Paul as his vessel, He probably has a job waiting for you too.

    A couple weeks ago I wrote about Peter’s denial, and how we read it like something we’d never stoop to. But the truth is it was a pretty garden variety move, the kind of go-along-to-get-along thing we all do more than we’d like to admit. God still used him anyway.

    Paul’s a different case. Most of us, hopefully, never go anywhere close to the lengths he did. And God still used him too. In a big way.

    I guess in Paul’s defense he thought he was doing good at the time. Which also sounds familiar to a lot of us if we are honest.

    When word got around that Saul of Tarsus had a change of heart, nobody believed it. Why would they?

    This wasn’t a guy who’d quietly disagreed with Christians. He’d built a reputation hunting them down. Stephen was stoned to death while Paul watched and held coats for the men doing the throwing. Another time he says “I cast my vote against them,” talking about believers being put to death. Not one incident. A pattern, with him positioned right in the middle of it.

    Later Saul obtains letters of authority to go after believers outside Jerusalem too. He was a man on a mission, and it wasn’t a mission for Jesus.

    Then the road to Damascus. Blinded, knocked down, told to go into the city and wait. A believer named Ananias gets sent to heal him and clearly does not want the job but he does it anyway. No word on whether he acted like Jonah later.

    Saul’s sight comes back. And he becomes Paul, who will be used by God to spread the Gospel.

    Obviously the disciples weren’t thrilled to see him at first. And it wasn’t easy. But Paul did what he was told and trusted God, and ended up writing most of what comes after Acts. Romans, Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, Thessalonians, the letters to Timothy and Titus.

    Most of the New Testament, written by the man who used to hold the coats of those killing believers.

    Here’s something you’re probably starting to notice a pattern about: God didn’t wait for Paul to clean up before using him.

    He went from a terrible oppressor to the greatest evangelist ever known in the blink of an eye. All because that’s what God wanted him to do and Paul trusted God.

    When you think you’re too damaged or have done too much for God to be able to use you, remember Peter, Paul and others. And just trust God and listen. And when you hear, act.

    P.S.

    If you’d like to read through the Bible this year, you can join us at His Word Together.

    No commentary. No telling you what to think. Nothing to buy. Nothing fancy.

    Just steady time in the Word.

    Check it out here.

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  • Don’t Assume God Wouldn’t Use You

    Don’t Assume God Wouldn’t Use You

    He’s used flawed people since the beginning. He has no choice.

    Even among professing Christians, many people’s exposure to the Bible mostly consists of whatever passage their pastor teaches from on Sunday, or from devotionals they read during the week.

    There’s nothing wrong with any of that. But it can leave you with a strange idea of what the Bible is actually like when read straight through.

    You mostly hear the stories where somebody trusted God, did the right thing, and things worked out in the end. It gets in your head that the people in scripture were kind of superheroes of faith. More disciplined. More obedient. More spiritually stable than regular people are.

    At least that’s how it felt to me.

    Then I actually read the whole thing straight through.

    Surprising to say the least. A huge percentage of the Bible is people screwing things up.

    Moses kills a man and runs away.

    David impregnates one of his loyal soldiers’ wives, tries to cover it up, then arranges for the man to die in battle.

    The sons of Eli the priest were corrupt and openly abusing their position.

    The disciples themselves constantly misunderstand Jesus, even while following Him directly.

    And this kind of thing keeps happening over and over.

    At first it’s confusing because you expect the “heroes” of the Bible to act differently. But most of them were not spiritual superheroes. They were regular people. Flawed people.

    In some cases, people who did things most of us have never done and hopefully never will.

    Yet God kept working through them anyway.

    That does not mean their sins were unimportant. Scripture is very clear that actions have consequences. But it also means failure was never automatically the end of the story.

    People sometimes disqualify themselves because of things they’ve done wrong. Or because they assume God only uses unusually gifted, disciplined, impressive people.

    The Bible really doesn’t support that idea very well.

    God uses regular people.

    It’s the only kind He has.

    P.S.- If you’d like to read through the Bible this year, you can join us at His Word Together.

    No commentary.
    No telling you what to think.
    Nothing to buy.
    Nothing fancy.

    Just steady time in the Word.

    Check it out here.

    PPS- If you’d like to receive these in your inbox, enter your info below:

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  • You’re Not Going To Break It

    You’re Not Going To Break It

    God’s plan was designed to account for the fact we are human.

    A lot of people are waiting to understand perfectly before they move.

    It may sound wise, but it’s really just fear with religious language wrapped around it.

    We all tend to want certainty. To know exactly what God is doing, exactly what the outcome will be, exactly how things are supposed to unfold before they take a step.

    But if you actually read the Bible, that’s not really how it works.

    Abraham is told to go somewhere without being told where.

    The disciples follow Jesus while constantly misunderstanding Him. Even near the end they still don’t fully grasp what’s happening.

    Peter gets corrected repeatedly.

    Moses loses his temper.

    David wrecks things more than once.

    Solomon is the wisest man who ever lived, but also screwed things up on an order we can’t really fathom.

    Notice a pattern?

    God keeps working through people who do not fully understand what they are doing while they are doing it. And they screw up repeatedly, yet God keeps working through them anyway.

    That does not mean mistakes don’t matter, because they do. Sometimes painfully. Moses still didn’t enter the Promised Land. David still suffered consequences for what he did. Actions matter, and scripture never pretends otherwise.

    But there’s another mistake people make.

    They act like one honest error can somehow derail God’s entire plan for their life.

    As if the outcome ultimately depends on them executing everything flawlessly.

    It doesn’t.

    Romans says all things work together for good for those who love God and are called according to His purpose. Most people apply that only to external suffering, and things that don’t look like our fault.

    But it also applies to our mistakes.

    You are going to misunderstand things sometimes and make decisions that later look immature. You’ll move too slowly in some situations and too quickly in others.

    That’s being human. God has already accounted for it.

    A baby doesn’t learn to walk by studying for years. They just start moving, wobble around a bit, and learn through the movement itself.

    Faith works similarly.

    A lot of people are frozen because they are waiting for a level of certainty that they will never see.

    Meanwhile the people throughout scripture were often moving forward with partial understanding at best.

    The outcome was never resting entirely on them getting everything right. And it is not resting entirely on you either.

    God already knew imperfect people were going to be involved.

    Our mistakes don’t surprise Him.

    P.S.- If you’d like to read through the Bible this year, you can join us at His Word Together.

    No commentary.
    No telling you what to think.
    Nothing to buy.
    Nothing fancy.

    Just steady time in the Word.

    Check it out here.

    PPS- if you’d like these in your inbox simply enter your info below:

    Register to Receive Posts Via Email!

    By submitting, I understand I will receive marketing emails and blog posts from Mike Browning Realty and/or associated companies. Unsubscribe at any time.

  • It’s a bad idea to try to fix yourself.

    It’s a bad idea to try to fix yourself.

    You’ll usually make it worse, and it won’t even fix the real problem.

    The end of the Book of Judges is a long, ugly chain of decisions that all trace back to one moment.

    Israel made a vow not to give their daughters in marriage to the tribe of Benjamin. At the time it probably felt justified. Benjamin had done something so evil that the other tribes went to war over it.

    Then the war ended, and the consequences of that vow became clear. Benjamin wouldn’t recover. An entire tribe of Israel would disappear, not because God commanded it, but because of something they said.

    They saw the problem, but they wouldn’t deal with it directly. They could have admitted the vow was wrong and broken it. That would have cost them, mostly in pride, but it would have been clean.

    Instead, they started working around it.

    There was a town that hadn’t joined the war, so they attacked it, killed the inhabitants, and kept about four hundred young women alive to give to Benjamin. That solved part of the problem, if you ignore what they had just done to get there.

    It still wasn’t enough, so they came up with something else. There was a festival at Shiloh, and they told the men of Benjamin to hide nearby and take the women when they came out to dance. That way, technically, Israel wasn’t “giving” their daughters.

    They stacked one decision on top of another, each one designed to protect the original vow, and each one making things worse.

    Most people don’t go that far, but the pattern isn’t hard to recognize.

    We don’t like admitting we were wrong, so we adjust instead. We explain it, justify it, and look for ways to clean it up without ever backing up and saying it shouldn’t have happened in the first place.

    That trade almost always goes the same way. A smaller, honest wrong gets replaced by something bigger that’s easier to defend.

    The instruction from Jesus is simple. Confess.
    Not manage it. Not reframe it. Not work around it.

    Confess, and He will forgive you.
    Even the mess you made trying to fix it.

    The sooner you set aside your pride and say it plainly, the less you usually have to clean up later.

    Or you can keep digging.

    P.S.-If you’d like to read through the Bible this year, you can join us at His Word Together.

    No commentary.
    No telling you what to think.
    Nothing to buy.
    Nothing fancy.

    Just steady time in the Word.

    Check it out here.

  • We All Talk a Good Game

    We All Talk a Good Game

    But talk is cheap.

    Most people know the right answers.

    Put God first. Don’t chase money. Be content with what you have. You’ll hear all of that from people who mean it when they say it.

    And most of the time, nothing really tests it. It just sits there as something we agree with and repeat back when it comes up.

    Then something real shows up. An opportunity with a big number attached to it that doesn’t quite line up with how we say we want to live. Or a situation where saying no actually costs something. A job. Status. Comfort.

    That’s where things change.

    Not always out loud, but in practice. Because what we do is what we actually believe, not what we say.

    If someone says God told them not to take a shot, then takes it anyway to keep a job, that’s the answer.

    If someone says money doesn’t matter that much, but keeps pushing for more long after they have enough, that’s the answer.

    If someone says they trust God, but panic shows up the second things get uncertain, same thing.

    Most people don’t lie directly. It’s quieter than that. We say the right things, then make decisions that contradict them and don’t even notice the gap.

    The lottery is a clean example. Everyone’s seen how that tends to go. Not every time, but often enough that it’s predictable. People win, and then things start to come apart. Health slips, relationships get strained, the money goes faster than it should.

    It’s not complicated. When you don’t have to say no anymore, most people don’t become more disciplined. They lose whatever discipline they had. And when you can afford anything, saying no to other people gets harder too. That creates a different set of problems that money doesn’t solve.

    None of this is new information.

    But it doesn’t change behavior. People still line up to buy tickets.

    Which tells you something.

    Most of us don’t actually believe what we say we believe, at least not when there’s something in front of us that we want.

    There’s an easy test. Don’t listen to what you say. Watch what you do when it costs you something.

    That’s the part you actually believe.

    If you want to see it in real time, watch how people act when there’s real money or real pressure involved. Or just pay attention the next time you’re standing in line buying a ticket.

    And don’t tell anyone you saw me.

    P.S.– If you’d like to read through the Bible with us this year, you can join at His Word Together.

    No commentary. No telling you what to think.

    Nothing to pay for. Nothing to buy.

    Nothing fancy. Just steady time in the Word.

    Check it out here.

  • Don’t Forget When It Gets Easy

    Don’t Forget When It Gets Easy

    When things are going well, that’s when we are in the most danger of tripping up.

    There’s a part of Deuteronomy that’s easy to skip past.

    It’s not about struggle or hardship. It’s about what happens when things go right.

    In Deuteronomy 8, Moses is warning the Israelites before they cross into the promised land. They are going to get there, without him, and everything will be working the way it should. Crops growing, buildings already there from the prior inhabitants, everything they need already provided.

    And he says, in plain terms, when things are going well, you’re going to think you did it.

    “My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth.”

    This is when we are in the most danger. Not when things are falling apart, but when they’re working.

    We all remember to pray when something is wrong. When we’re worried, when something breaks, or when someone we love is in trouble, you don’t have to remind yourself. We start asking God to fix it. Yesterday, if possible.

    A few years ago I was in one of those stretches. I needed help and was asking for it.

    Then an opportunity came along and everything lined up. Timing, people, outcome. One of those deals where it just works.

    I had basically been asking for a miracle, and then something happened I wasn’t expecting. It wasn’t exactly what I was asking for, but it sure came in handy.

    Next thing I know I was telling myself, “Man, I did a great job on that.”

    Not really funny, but I had to laugh at myself.

    It’s easy to see dependence when you need something. It’s harder to see it when you just got it. That’s the warning.

    If you read during the week here, you’ll see I still get close to it sometimes. Like when I talk about how I operate in a way that makes it more likely that things line up.

    And that’s true. I am consciously doing things that put me in the path of what we like to call luck.

    But if I’m not careful, I can forget why it really happens.

    There’s nothing wrong with things going well. There is something wrong with rewriting the story after the fact, forgetting where it came from, how much of it was outside your control, and how quickly things can change.

    Lucky for us, God knows what we’re made of and that we go off course all the time. I think, or at least hope, He laughs sometimes too.

    Most people don’t forget on purpose. They adjust the story a little at a time until they’re the hero of it.

    Deuteronomy calls that out before it even happens.

    If things are going well right now, that’s a good thing.

    Just don’t let your memory get selective.

    P.S. If you’d like to read through the Bible with us this year, you can join at His Word Together.

    No commentary, no telling you what to think.

    Nothing to pay for, nothing to buy.

    Nothing fancy. Just steady time in the Word.

    Check it out here.

  • Why Do We Keep Asking?

    Why Do We Keep Asking?

    If you think about it, you know why.

    We like to act like if God would just tell us clearly what to do, it would be easy.

    That’s what makes the story of Balaam so uncomfortable.

    Balak wants Israel cursed.
    So he hires Balaam, a man who actually hears from God.

    God tells Balaam the first time:

    Do not go.
    Do not curse them.
    They are blessed.

    Seems pretty straightforward, right?

    Then Balak comes back with more money and more honor.

    Balaam says the right words.
    “I can only do what God tells me.”

    And then he asks again.

    He already knew the answer. He just wanted a different one.

    God tells him to go ahead, but only say what He says.

    So Balaam goes.

    God’s anger burns against him on the way.

    Because even while his feet were moving in “obedience,” his heart was chasing money and honor.

    So God stands in the road against him.

    Balaam doesn’t see it.
    His donkey does.

    Three times the donkey turns aside to avoid the angel with a drawn sword.
    Three times Balaam beats the donkey.

    The only thing keeping him alive is the thing he’s angry at.

    God opens Balaam’s eyes and he finally sees what was right in front of him.

    He was on a road God had already warned him not to go down.

    But he kept asking until he got permission to go anyway.

    And even then, God opposed him on that road.

    That’s the lesson.

    We like to think our problem is that we don’t know what God wants.

    Most of the time, we do. (By most of the time, I mean pretty much all the time.)

    We just don’t like the answer.

    So we ask again.
    We look for a loophole.
    A technicality we can stand on.

    We want God to bless what we’ve already decided to do.

    Sometimes He gives us what we insisted on.

    That is not a blessing.
    That is judgment.

    We get our way.
    We get what we wanted.
    And it costs more than we thought.

    So what do you do with that?

    You don’t need one more conversation.
    You don’t need to “pray about it” again if God has already spoken clearly in His Word.

    You need to decide whether you are going to obey what you already know.

    Turn around while it’s still just a nudge.

    It’s a lot better than having to be stopped by force later.

    P.S. If you’d like to read through the Bible with us this year, you can join at His Word Together.

    No commentary, no telling you what to think.

    Nothing to pay for, nothing to buy.

    Nothing fancy. Just steady time in the Word.

    Check it out here.