Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.”

• John 6:51

“Jesus Christ was made broken bread and poured out wine for us, and He expects us to be made broken bread and poured out wine in His hands for others. If we are not thoroughly baked, we will produce indigestion because we are dough instead of bread. We have to be made into good nutritious stuff for other people. The reason we are going through the things we are is that God wants to know whether He can make us good bread with which to feed others. The stuff of our lives, not simply of our talk, is to be the nutriment of those who know us.”

• Oswald Chambers, The Ministry of the Unnoticed (Daily thoughts for Disciples, May 9)

This is a bit of confession time.  I have gotten totally out of my devotional routine.  I have been working on posts and doing a lot of research, but a lot of my “what’s happening in my life” posts used to pertain a lot to daily devotions that were meaningful to me and then sharing.  With everything that has happened for the past couple of months, I have not needed that to fill the blog space, but I need it now to fill the mind and soul space.

One of the books that my wife saw in my shopping cart at a used bookstore was a two-volumes in one Oswald Chambers.  It is set up to be My Utmost for His Highest in the morning and then Daily thoughts for Disciples in the evening.  It is odd, but Rev. Chamber’s widow compiled both books.  The second of these gives a variety of books or collections of lecture notes that devotions come from.  But I am just now getting to read it since my wife’s passing.  I have used My Utmost for His Highest a lot, especially in the early years of this blogsite.  I am excited that I can now use the companion collection.

I do not think many Christians think in terms of being bread and wine for another person.  Jesus talks about us taking up our cross and following Him, but we make that so figurative in our minds that we lose all the significance of it.

Some people think that “carrying their cross” is having a head cold.  They suffer a little.  Isn’t that enough?  But to carry our cross so that someone else can know Jesus?  Wow!

But then a few months ago, I was feeling down, and my wife said that I spent twenty-five years of our marriage trying to get her off the fence.  What she meant by that was that she would do things that showed her servant’s heart, but then she would say things that looked like she had no purpose of glorifying God in her heart.  She simply served people out of some type of inner drive to put others before herself – a major problem when she was in PTSD therapy.  (She flunked out of the therapy rarely putting herself in a list of her top twenty people to be concerned about.  But that was after accepting Jesus as her Savior.)  When we would talk about Christianity in those days, I would say that she can’t ride the fence.  She had to commit to Jesus or those fence riders would be like those on the other side of the fence.

So what she was telling me was that all our conversations over the years had been stored away in her heart, and when she finally accepted Jesus after her vision, or maybe before when she prayed, “God, I do not want to die alone” she counted my talks with her as part of her reason to become totally committed to Jesus Christ.  And as I wrote recently, the new person of my wife was so much like the old person, it was her motivation that changed.  She was now on fire for Jesus, serving others tirelessly until her health failed, instead of tirelessly serving other people because it was a nice thing to do and she enjoyed doing it.

But to carrying our cross, and be the bread and wine for some other person…  That is a tall order, but then again, when you read Oswald Chambers, you get the idea that no one can live up to the standard that he set for his disciples.

I spend many hours writing, but have I shed blood recently?  I do a lot of research, but have I sacrificed my body for others?  Okay, there is not much energy left for that, but …

In going through these devotions, I am sure it will be like my previous study of Oswald Chambers, and I will be preaching to myself.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.