Category: devotional

It’s decision time.  Do I have use for this Christmas present?  Do I try to return it to the store from which it was purchased?  How do I do that if I don’t have the receipt?  Do I save it until next Christmas and regift it?  If so, I better label who gave it to me lest I give it back to the person who gave it to me.  Or worst of all just throw it away!

I have known people who have regifted salvation.  (I know.  That is crazy, but who says everyone is sane?)  They accepted Jesus’ offer and did one of two things.  They decided they didn’t want it so they gave it back to Jesus.  Or they first shared it with another and then threw it away.  Or they consciously or subconsciously decided once saved they had to start contributing toward the cost by living a life according to law.  It is a normal reaction.  When we receive something wonderful we want to do something back.  And we can.  We can with God’s help live a Christ-like life.  The important issue is motive.  If our motive is to pay back we nullify the gift.  If my motive is love for God and growing love for people that He plants within us then our good works do not nullify grace.

Paul refers to this in Galatians 2.  He wrote, “I do not nullify the grace of God, for if righteousness comes through the Law, then Christ died needlessly.”  The last thing we would ever want to do is to cause Jesus to have died needlessly.  So as we give good gifts to others we always remember we are NOT contributing to the cost of our salvation.  We are not regifting.  We are reproducing.

Written by Roger Bothwell on December 28, 2015

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I was only five-years-old and psychologically traumatized.  We didn’t have a fireplace so Santa had knocked on the door and dragged his bag of goodies into our small house.  I was so excited I raced out onto the street and looked up onto the roof.  “The reindeer must be on the backside,” I told myself as I rushed back inside. It was then that it happened.  All I did was pull open his sack and reach inside. The big guy, the jolly (?) old man with the red suit slapped my hand.  Stepping back agape I exclaimed, “You wouldn’t do that if my daddy was here.”

I am very sure that was the last time my father ever struck me.  My mother could never say, “Just wait until your father comes home.”   If I needed it she did it (a rubber spatula) because she knew he never would do anything other than sit with me on the backstairs and talk.

Frequently I hear people who have experienced a traumatizing loss say something about God punishing them.  I wonder about their God.  The writer of Hebrews wrote, “For the LORD disciplines those he loves, and he punishes each one he accepts as his child.”  There is a difference between discipline and abuse.  Our heavenly Father will never abuse us.  The abuse we receive in life comes from the enemy of our souls who is delighted when we blame our Father.  However, our heavenly Father does on occasion find it necessary for our character development to punish us.  But it will always be the mildest, gentlest, most loving discipline possible with never a single degree of severity more than we need.   After all, our Father is there.

Written by Roger Bothwell on December 31, 2014

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A storm is coming.  A big one.  Weather gurus are using the “blizzard” word telling us twenty to thirty inches of snow is coming for New York City and the same for central Massachusetts.  People are flocking to grocery stores and making sure their cell phones have a full charge. It is so unlike it was a hundred years ago when people prepared for winter by drying foods and filling Mason Jars.  By the end of November root cellars were filled with potatoes and beans.  No one knew what day the big one would come.  They just knew it would come.

Jesus tried to warn us that in life the big one would come.  No one gets out of here without something extremely harsh happening. It is called “Life.”  Even though we live in the richest time and place in history no one is exempt from hard times.  If you have four minutes Google the words “Hurt Johnny Cash.”   Listen to the YouTube as he sings the words written by Nine Inch Nails, “Everyone I know goes away in the end.”

The question we ask is are we ready.  Can we ever be ready?  I am not about to give you a list of things to do to prepare.  I’m not sure anything we can do really prepares us. Perhaps what we are is more important than what we do.  Are we safely tucked into the arms of the one who declared Himself to be “the resurrection and the life”?  Are we part of God’s family?  Are we sons and daughters of the Most High?  I guess there is something we can do.  We can accept His gift.  It comes with the assurance that the big storm shall pass and we shall be saved.

Written by Roger Bothwell  on January 24, 2015

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When we think of the names of Bible writers we rarely mention King Lemuel.  But he was responsible for one of the more famous chapters in Scripture.  Proverbs 31 describes the perfect wife.  She does everything and she does it well.  I have one of those wives.  My snow blower broke and we have a storm moving in tonight.  The next thing I know is she walks in from the garage and says, “If you will loosen those two bolts and reposition that part, it will be fine.”  Really?!  So I went out and loosened the designated bolts, repositioned the part and presto.  It works just the way it is supposed to.

Someone might ask, “Doesn’t that threaten your masculinity?”  And my response is, “Are you kidding?  It’s wonderful.  Now I don’t have to walk across the street to my engineer neighbor and ask him for help.  That threatens my masculinity.”

So I am a happy man with my cup running over with blessings.  I realize very few men have wives that can diagnosis a broken snow blower.  And she even makes me Cream of Wheat for breakfast.  You can’t beat that!

Riches come in many forms.  One cannot and should not equate wealth with numbers in an investment account.  Riches are so much broader than that.  And of course the thing that makes us extremely rich is Jesus.  Because of Jesus, God has adopted us into His family making us princes and princesses of the Most High.  Ephesians 2 says, “He has raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus: That in the ages to come he might show the exceeding riches of his grace in his kindness toward us through Christ Jesus.”   Now that is rich!

Written by Roger Bothwell on January 18, 2017

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Thursday morning was recycling morning.  Stacked in front of one house was evidence that a heavy drinker lived there.  Maybe.  There is a trailhead close to these homes and occasionally a lone man with his dog can be seen cleaning up the trash left there by partiers.  It is amazing how people can come to a nice clean place in the forest and leave it looking like a pigpen.  So it is not unusual to see this man leaving the forest with a garbage sack full of trash and beer cans.

It is so easy to judge people.  Feeling somewhat like Sherlock Holmes we observe and then form clever deductions.  The people walking by the pile of beer cans waiting to be picked up by the recycling man might draw a conclusion about the residents of that house.

Most of us are guilty when it comes to playing the Sherlock Holmes game.  Often the things we think we know about people are just not true.  Much of what we think we know is conjecture and supposition.  And even when we do actually see someone doing something we cannot know his or her motivation.  Jesus is so right when He tells us not to judge others.

Written by Roger Bothwell on July 27, 2000

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Thursday morning was recycling morning.  Stacked in front of one house was evidence that a heavy drinker lived there.  Maybe.  There is a trailhead close to these homes and occasionally a lone man with his dog can be seen cleaning up the trash left there by partiers.  It is amazing how people can come to a nice clean place in the forest and leave it looking like a pigpen.  So it is not unusual to see this man leaving the forest with a garbage sack full of trash and beer cans.

It is so easy to judge people.  Feeling somewhat like Sherlock Holmes we observe and then form clever deductions.  The people walking by the pile of beer cans waiting to be picked up by the recycling man might draw a conclusion about the residents of that house.

Most of us are guilty when it comes to playing the Sherlock Holmes game.  Often the things we think we know about people are just not true.  Much of what we think we know is conjecture and supposition.  And even when we do actually see someone doing something we cannot know his or her motivation.  Jesus is so right when He tells us not to judge others.

Written by Roger Bothwell on July 27, 2000

rogerbothwell.org

Thursday morning was recycling morning.  Stacked in front of one house was evidence that a heavy drinker lived there.  Maybe.  There is a trailhead close to these homes and occasionally a lone man with his dog can be seen cleaning up the trash left there by partiers.  It is amazing how people can come to a nice clean place in the forest and leave it looking like a pigpen.  So it is not unusual to see this man leaving the forest with a garbage sack full of trash and beer cans.

It is so easy to judge people.  Feeling somewhat like Sherlock Holmes we observe and then form clever deductions.  The people walking by the pile of beer cans waiting to be picked up by the recycling man might draw a conclusion about the residents of that house.

Most of us are guilty when it comes to playing the Sherlock Holmes game.  Often the things we think we know about people are just not true.  Much of what we think we know is conjecture and supposition.  And even when we do actually see someone doing something we cannot know his or her motivation.  Jesus is so right when He tells us not to judge others.

Written by Roger Bothwell on July 27, 2000

rogerbothwell.org

Masses of people are scurrying about trying to finish their list before Christmas Eve.  Fortunately for those of us in New England this year we don’t have any snow to hamper our doings.  While doing my doings today I heard people greet each other with “Are you ready for Christmas?”  Some people had reduced it to “Are you ready?”  I thought it might be a great greeting all the time – referring to the second coming of Jesus.  Are you ready?

I grew up in an environment where it wasn’t PC to say “Yes.”   We were trained to say, “I hope so.”  After all we might have sinned in the past hour and hadn’t had a chance to ask for forgiveness.  As a child of God who has read the Gospels and the letters of Paul I now understand how insulting that is to God.  It takes love out of the equation and replaces it with a computer-like program of ons and offs.  Sin and it’s off.  Ask for forgiveness and it’s on.  That is really pathetic.  If we as parents loved our children that way the state social service should remove them from us.

Salvation isn’t about ons and offs.  It is about family.  Being in God’s family with Him being the best ever Father is what Jesus talked about.    Just as a good human parent would not cast his child out of the house for an infraction of some sort neither will God reject us; especially for an unknown sin of some kind.  Salvation is about belonging to the family.  We enter the family by accepting the invitation.  So do it.  Once done we can always answer with a big “Yes” to the question “Are you ready?”

Written by Roger Bothwell on December 24, 2015

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It’s been a busy day doing the Lord’s work.  It started snowing last evening and we are at about the two foot level now.  That makes it very difficult for the chickadees, cardinals, blue jays and others birds to stay fed.  We have had to refill the seed feeder and the suet feeders because of the constant stream of about eighteen different kinds of birds staying nourished.

In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus said, “Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?”

God’s work manifests itself in a huge variety of ways.  Who’s to say which is more important than another?  The farmer plowing his field, the auto worker going to his assembly plant, the teacher going to her classroom, the grocery store shelf stocker stocking, the cook cooking at Denny’s, the highway patrolman patrolling, the nurse nursing in the emergency room are all doing God’s work.

Occasionally I talk with someone ruing the fact they never got a job working for the church.  They made the mistake of thinking that working for the church is the only way to do God’s work.  God’s work is caring for others’ needs.  If I had to rank jobs as to what is the number one task that is God’s work I would most likely list Hospice workers.  The fact is God needs all of us to make life work.   Our part can change from day to day.  Today our job was to feed His birds.  Tomorrow when the snow melts it will be something else.  Whatever it be let’s do it well.  Luke 9:62.

Written by Roger Bothwell on January 28, 2015

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On our walk today we came upon Santa.  He had painted the big letters UPS on the side of his brown sleigh.  I think that stands for Ubernorth Pole Service.   I’m glad he got an early start this year because if what I saw is any indication of how busy he is, he is slammed.  I kid you not.  He stopped at more than half the houses.  My dog and I eventually passed him and turned the corner before he did.  He even had an elf with him and we were taking time to sniff along the way.  Well, at least one of us was sniffing.  Often after a good inhale she looks up at me trying to understand why I am not down there enjoying the pure essence of it all.

As we rounded the corner I pondered about how wonderful it is that our heavenly Father is omnipresent; talk about orders needing to be filled and delivered.  Our prayers and those of billion of beings on each of billions of planets are continually reaching His ears.  The sheer cacophony of languages asking for something all at the same time would totally overwhelm a lesser being.  But have no fear.  He is more than up to the task.  He is even anxious for increased attention from us.  He loves it when we trust Him to care for us.

When speaking about Jesus, Paul wrote in Colossians 1, “For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him.”  How marvelous to think that He and the Father are tuned into us all the time.

Written by Roger Bothwell on December 15, 2015

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