In my read through the Bible this year, I am struck by the story of Balaam in a challenging way (Numbers 22-24). Here is a random stranger to the story and the people of faith in all of the story of the Bible so far, yet he is able to speak for God, but he allows greed and pressure from a local king to cause him to act only in his own self-interest.

I used to think that only those who are super-spiritual and faithful to God carried His power, but I’ve learned in my life through experience and encounters, that God often gives great gifts to others, like He did with Sampson, to show his power, even in broken vessels. He also often leaves His power with those who have fallen from their willingness to obey Him, the way He allowed Saul and Solomon to continue in their roles as king long after their faithfulness to God failed.

In our own modern world, I’ve seen this take place too. I’ve encounters a few individuals who use their God-given gifts of prayer or preaching primarily for their own personal gain. But I won’t name any names, I don’t invite you to judge or bash God’s servants publically, unless you’ve tried to confront them privately and need to help keep others from being led astray.

Here are some key takeaways that come to mind as I process Balaam’s story:

We should seek to be faithful, not gifted – just because someone is blessed with a great gift from God doesn’t mean that they are someone to be emulated or that they should be envied. Often times those gifted individuals are God’s example of a fool or a tragic story, both of which were true of Balaam.

He was a lot more like us than we might want to believe. Balaam wasn’t evil, so far as the Scripture indicates. He was foolish. He was disobedient. And He didn’t give God or God’s gift to him it’s proper respect. He was more one to try and bend God’s rules than to break them…and that reminds me, of me.

After Balaam asked God a second time about whether he should go with the messengers that were sent to him–disobeying God’s initial order which he should not have questioned–he ended up on a donkey that wouldn’t walk the path and ended up having a conversation with that animal in front of the officials from Midian. God made him foolish in the eyes of the officials.

Then he embarrassed the king three separate times–again failing to obey God’s clear and unchanging commands–and making the king foolish to his officials as well.

They wanted God to meet their terms. Both the king and Balaam hoped that they could game the system, and persuade God to get on their side through money and trickery. But God is not persuaded or manipulated. He showed that He will do exactly as He plans, and that His power will be used to accomplish His goals.

Ultimately, both the king and Balaam lost their lives to the Israelites later in the story. They made the mistake we often do all the time: they wanted God to meet them on their terms, rather than meeting God on His. Had the king relented in his plan to curse Israel and repented to the God who was clearly superior and powerful, perhaps his people would have been forgiven and given a life in their land.

So many people I meet want to be forgiven, to be blessed by God, and to do great things…but they want them on their own terms. They will not come to Jesus to be saved. They will not give up sin in their lives. They make foolish choices and expect God to bless their unwillingness to listen to wisdom, or at least rescue them. As a pastor, one of the most heartbreaking trends I see is people who come to the church needing food or shelter–but instead of letting us help through people and partners who are experts at getting people back on their feet long term, they demand that we do thing their way.

God’s power is always present–always guaranteed to those who meet God on His terms. God is never slow or unwilling to save someone who cries out to Jesus. He saves EVERY person who meets Him at the cross. His power is felt in every person who cries out for it and meets God where He is at. And there’s not a person I’ve met who seeks God with a humble spirit in His ways; in the Bible, prayer, and a community of people, that I don’t feel the Spirit of God powerfully when I’m around them.

We should seek to be faithful, not gifted.

We should never try to trick or manipulate God into doing what we want.

We need to obey what He commands, and not question a command or hope He changes His mind. To honor Him is to hold to the guidance we get from God, the first time He says it.

We need to meet God on His terms, not expect Him to meet our demands.

And if we truly desire for His power to be at work in and through us, we should see God humbly, daily.

(Something I am working through is reading my kids stories of the behaviors I hope they will model someday. When I can’t find a good story book, I’ve started writing my own. This one is for and about my middle daughter, and although the details are fake–and there is never a gun in my home that the kids could reach–I wrote it in hopes that if a kid ever finds one at a friends house, they do the right thing)

Lizzy is the kind of girl who’s often very sweet and kind toward others. She will readily share just about any toy, aside from her pillow. She stops what she is doing and immediately seeks to comfort someone around her who is hurting or crying. And although her red hair always draws the attention of strangers everywhere she goes, she is content without a lot of special attention.

Lizzy also loves to have something nice to wear. She will gladly change clothes twice or even three times in a day, to ensure she has one of her favorite outfits on, one that fits the occasion. She loves to play her own games, in her own way. She can role play with animals or simply dig in the dirt contently for hours.

She has a lot of her dad in her heart and mind, and he cherishes the way God gave her such great qualities.

But…

On this day, Elizabeth Grace Fowler showed something fierce and strong that God put in her for special occasions.

On this day, Lizzy was at a special party, and she was playing there with her favorite cousins: Levi, Joel, and her most favorite of all, Lilly. Lilly and Lizzy were just finishing the best tea party ever, when a bunch of boys burst into the room and broke up the party with their guns. Lizzy and her siblings didn’t have many toy guns at home, so everyone was excited to get to do a battle with new toys, and Lilly and her quickly forgot about their tea party and joined the battle.

They ducked behind a nearby table and began to shoot the soft darts across the room at the boys. Lilly was an especially good shot and had all the boys hiding low behind their chair. Lizzy ran around the chair with her gun and chased the boys from the room. The girls won! They high-fived and began to reset their tea party in victory.

But their victory was only temporary, it wasn’t long before the boys regrouped and came up with a new plan. Cutting shields from an old box, the boys gathered up their guns and charged back into the room with extra protection. But just as the battle began again, Lizzy noticed that the new boy in the group had a gun that looked different than the rest. It only took a moment for her to realize, it wasn’t a toy gun, it was a real gun!

With shouts of “No, no no” that stopped everyone in the room, Lizzy ran to the little boy and confronted him. She told him to put the gun down on the ground. When he did, everyone gathered around and marveled at the sight. None of them had ever seen a gun up close before! One little boy asked if he could hold it, and another said that he had shot a gun before–and he was the only one who should be allowed to hold it.

Lizzy bravely chose to do what she knew was right. To stop anyone from playing with it, she crossed her arms and sat over top if it. When someone threatened to move her, she cried at the top of her lungs, “Mom, Dad, come quick!” The urgency of her voice got a lot of adults in the room quickly. Only when her parents were standing over her, did she move and tell them that someone had found a real gun.

Dad quickly picked up the gun from the floor, and Mom picked Lizzy up to give her the biggest hug ever! Dad told her that the gun was loaded and would have shot someone if one of the kids had pulled the trigger. They took the bullets out and put it where no kids could get it again. Then they treated her to a big bowl of Unicorn Sparkle Ice Cream to celebrate her boldness!

Mark Miller once made a statement that has forever stuck with me: “The Bible is all true…but it does not contain all truth.” I believe you would agree with me that God gave us the ability to learn and pass on our knowledge of the world, so that we can build up wisdom through discovery. You would certainly want your brain surgeon to have gotten his education from just the Bible, and your ship captain to have some knowledge of a map, a compass, and how the ship’s engines work! God’s gift to us is a book of spiritual guidance and history, a community of people, and our ability to learn. Science is not in opposition to God, it discovers and glorifies Him when done with Him in mind!

I begin with this train of though because people often criticize the Bible for not giving more clear medical guidelines, or for often suggesting practices that cause people to lean more on faith for their healing than science. I believe that the Bible balances this approach well. As I read through the most specific laws regarding cleansing, disease, and even epidemic sickness in Leviticus and Numbers, I am reminded of a few key ideas that I wish to pass along:

The Bible’s medical guidance is often pretty advanced:

The Bible defines an authority figure, a process, and isolation for both people and buildings showing signs of dangerous contamination. Many of the animals it defines as unclean are, generally, not as good for you as the one’s it approves for the Jews to consume. Although I’m no expert on the ancient world’s medical practices, I find that these restrictions and processes are pretty advanced. Today we understand microorganisms, disease transmission, and hygiene in a way they could not. It was gracious for God to provide a law that required them to follow practices that helped them avoid the outbreak of disease. Just imagine how much more devastating a serious disease would have been in ancient times, when there were no hospitals, medications, and sanitizing agents to help control disease!

The Bible’s medical guidance is also often spiritual:

Although a disease or circumstance often had very rational origins, it is also often the timing of God that causes hardship to come upon a group of people, which is why a medical process was also almost always coupled with a spiritual act of repentance and cleansing. There are even a lot of circumstances where God did not follow conventional medical cures to solve a medical problem, showing His people that He can and will often heal them if they will heal their own hearts first, the most noteworthy example of this in is Numbers, when God chooses to have the people look upon the figure of a snake to counteract the venom of serpents who had invaded their camp and were killing people.

Balance, again, is the key. Not every sickness or circumstance should be interpreted to have spiritual origins. And every cure should couple the wisdom we have in medicine with a plea to God for healing. To isolate one from the other can often mean asking God to heal something supernaturally that He has given us knowledge to heal naturally–robbing people of their purpose and taking the significance of our accumulated wisdom He has allowed us to collect away. On the other hand, trusting doctors to cure us without asking God to intervene, and seeking anything sinful in our own lives we should take the opportunity to ask forgiveness for, robs God of the respect and opportunity to intervene personally and powerfully in our lives.

We need always keep in mind that from the first pages of Scripture, the world is broken because of humanity’s unwillingness to obey God. Plants do not grow as well as they should, all of nature is out of sync and in conflict with us, and sickness reigns where everlasting life would have existed in it’s place, because we disobeyed God and sought the knowledge of good AND evil. Sickness, disease, pain, and death are ultimately our fault, not His, but He graciously intervenes in the midst of it all to provide for us.

For those who seek God’s forgiveness, a new paradise and everlasting life is again our promise: our healing will ultimately be a reality! And, for those who walk in faith, God extends to us protection, empowerment, and resources in this life in much the same way as He sent food for Israel for 40 years in the wilderness, and kept their sandals from wearing out.

God’s Word often outpaces human knowledge.

God’s Law can be trusted and followed, even when we don’t fully understand why.

And the answer to our crisis is always faith: faith in God and faith in the ways God has allowed us to advance our knowledge for health.

Let’s lift up our hearts and minds today in prayers of faith: repenting for our sins and those of our world, asking for God’s healing, thanking Him for how much He’s allowed us to learn about treating sickness, and asking for strength and wisdom for each person who is in the medical field, working hard to help others in this specific time.

As I read through the book of Numbers during this turbulent time in our own nation due to Covid-19, I see the severity of the burden that Moses must have felt in his last 40 years as a leader.

Having led the nation of Israel out of Egypt after the miraculous plagues, through the Red Sea, to the mountain where God gave them the Ten Commandments and Law, and then through the wilderness, he is faced with a group of people who continue to complain and rebel.

Moses’ scouts return from the Promised Land, turn the people against Moses, and try to return to Egypt. Then, condemned to the wilderness, they mount a campaign to enter the land against his guidance. Then, the Levites rebel, wishing to have the priestly privileges that Aaron and his sons alone are entrusted with, resulting in the earth opening up to swallow the rebels and their families.

Moses leads despite the criticism and difficulty of the task. He does not abandon them, and we don’t see him lash out at them. They don’t appreciate his leadership or God’s intervention, and yet he sticks his neck out and pleads for God’s mercy upon them several times. It’s no wonder he writes these accounts of the people…by all accounts, any other writer would have written Moses in as a terrible leader.

And what about these times: God was doing amazing things, the people needed only to trust God, trust Moses, and be willing to focus on the blessings they had been given, rather than the hardships their current situation included.

I wonder if our leaders feel this same disdain for their hard work? Unappreciated and untrusted, they feel like every small decision is contested and debated. We should not blindly trust our leaders, and they certainly will make mistakes, but I hope we show respect and courtesy, even in our times of confusion and differing opinions. They have a hard job, and I hope we don’t make it harder, and that they are willing to put their lives on the line for us, just as Moses did.

I wonder how much focusing on negatives has made our current struggle worse than it really is! We are surrounded by blessings, but if we are not careful, we will continue to take them for granted. How amazing is it that we have assistance all around us, offering food, making medical masks, and offering jobs to those who find themselves unemployed during this time?

I wonder how much of this situation we can change more radically if we really pull together as a nation, put our own agenda’s aside for a time, and really work to support those who need it most: truly distancing ourselves, contributing time, money, and work to supply needs, and getting businesses reoriented to prepare buildings and equipment for patients who need it most.

And I wonder, how will our nation respond, if we face a longer crisis than this immediate one ahead of us? The nation of Israel faced 40 years in the wilderness during this time. Their crisis didn’t have a light at the end of a short tunnel they could see. Hope was far off, and they had to settle into a lifestyle in hardship. They had to respond to their leader and work hard to help each other out for the long term. Right now, Americans are operating in a way that expects normal to return soon. I pray that when normal turns out to be a long way off, or another issue keeps us in turbulent times longer, they don’t abandon their goodwill and expressions of faith.

God leads us through the dark times, short and prolonged. I trust Him to do it, and I urge you to do so too!

I’ve got a six year old (today is his birthday!), a four year old, and a two year old in my home, and they are pretty media-starved.

And that’s not to say that we are not tempted! We home school and Stacy works part time from home, so the kids spend a lot of time around the house–a single story ranch home.

On a daily basis, they watch a 20 minute morning show when I leave for work, and they often get an episode or short movie as a reward for doing school. When we go out, the kids often watch a movie in the car on long trips, but I can only count about a dozen times that I’ve set them in front of a tablet or computer on the go. It’s a necessary thing from time to time, but Stacy and I both try our best to exhaust our other options first. It’s harder with three of them than it used to be!

When they do watch shows, however, I love to leverage the best content I can find…and free content at that. Stacy and I only pay for an Amazon Prime membership, so everything else we watch comes from the free web, for the most part. Here are my favorite media resources to push my kids to.

For Spiritual Growth:

We always start with the amazing free content created by Life.Church. It’s easy to get to on computer or phone (just go to life.church or the LC app and click media…then scroll down), reinforces what our kids are learning at church each week, and my kids love it. The only time I’ve seen them dance and yell at the TV is in response to the Bible App lessons. There’s also a memory verse that we review at night with them in each lesson. Currently Eli uses the Crosstown material, and Lizzy and Abby use the Bible App lessons, but at home they will watch each others. My only reservation when it comes to using this content is: practice those dance moves! Worship is a full-body experience, and if I am watching with the kids, I am leading the way in dancing!

For our Bible Time together, the kids and I have enjoyed Louie Giglio’s Indescribable Devotional these past few months together. We bought it off Amazon here, and it looks like there’s a sequel now too. This may not be “media” in a video sense, but its highly engaging and applicable.

We also love the Biblical print media available at Dollar Tree stores in their book section. I have found everything from board books, to sticker books, and paint with water resources, all inexpensive and engaging to help reinforce the things the kids learn about God everywhere else. I recently found a few short character books that we will read at bedtime this next week.

TV Shows:

My favorite TV resources come through Amazon Prime:

• Superbook is a great show with two kids who journey into Bible stories to learn life lessons. The first season was a bit rough (you could definitely tell it’s the first season), but season two is excellent. My kids love to watch this show, and each episode is under half an hour too!
• Sid the Science Kid is a great show that promotes education and science through the eyes of a young, curious kid. I love the extended family that is represented in it, and the many things my kids have learned about. Eli and Lizzy are adamant recyclers after a great key lesson in season 2.
• Tumble Leaf is a show I checked out after it won some awards. It really is a nice, low key show about figuring out how things work. I like the fact that it’s not about epic action sequences of events. Sometimes you need a show that keeps the kids calm and let’s their imagination think more about a unique way of doing things than grand fantasy adventures.
• Wallykazam (YouTube, not Amazon Prime) I fell in love with this show long ago, after my kids rejected Seasame Street. I wanted to make sure they were taught literacy basics when they watched TV, and this one does a great job of illustrating letter sounds and words. I also think it passes along pretty good values and friendship examples. After Nick Jr. made the episodes pay related, I opted to pay for a few of them and found others here.

Shared Media:

One of the greatest challenged I find in my own experience, and one I feel my generation is often failing on, is picking appropriate media that my kids and I can watch together. I constantly meet young kids who have too great a capacity for violence at a young age, and I struggle with that. I want my kids first impression of guns to be as tools that must always be used responsibly.

My kids haven’t seen me play video games (and when they do, I’ll start with Mario and other animated games). They haven’t gotten to watch Harry Potter, Star Wars, or any of the Marvel movies made in the last few years. They only have a few nerf guns they keep outside and play with only for target practice.

That random tangent aside, the thing I love to watch with the kids most is nature shows. We LOVED the science and visuals behind PBS’s show, Earth: The New Wild. And with our Disney Plus subscription, we frequent the National Geographic content available on that platform a lot too. I now own Planet Earth seasons one and two, and Blue Planet is also in our collection. The thing I love most about nature shows, is how the wonder, complexity, and way everything works together intricately reminds me of how great our God is and how powerful and wise His plans are. I’m astounded by His works, and I love to pass that sense of wonder onto my kids.

In addition to our Amazon Prime membership, I do pay for a premium music subscription through Amazon, because I let my kids have free reign with our Echo devices around the house. I’ll admit that we primarily use these for music and weather updates, but I find that the kids also ask great questions to Alexa from time to time, learning about animals, or discovering whether a random fact is accurate (like are watermelons fruits or vegetables?)

Stacy and I also make use of the local libraries in Tulsa and Coweta. We have tons of books we use for school. The kids get to pick out one book each time we go themselves, which usually ends up being an animal book. I have successfully gotten Eli interested in the Fly Guy books, Berenstain Bears books (best ones for teaching values), and Elephant & Piggy books.