For today, One Year Bible Online links here.
If you carefully plan and work diligently at the plan you will prosper, if you hastily knock things together you will soon find yourself impoverished.
When we refuse to confess our sins, to acknowledge that we have done wrong, it will eat at us, destroying our peace of mind and our bodies. However, when we finally confess our guilt and acknowledge our wrong it all changes and we discover that God will forgive us. Then we experience joy and our bodies begin to recover. It is not enough to confess our sins, we must also seek to follow God and no longer do what is wrong. Instead of continuing to do wrong, let us follow the path that God lays out for us and do right.
This is a complicated passage because Paul is making several closely related points. The stimulus for Paul’s teaching was “the present crisis” which was occurring in Corinth (and perhaps throughout the Mediterranean). However, I believe there is applicability to what he taught here for the Church at any time. The primary message was that in times of crisis we will be better off if we do not change our current status; if we are single, we should remain single; if we are married, we should stay married.
However, I think the modern Church (and probably the Church through most of history) misses an important point Paul makes here. The Church all too often treats single adults as if they are not yet adult. There is tendency towards the attitude that when they finally grow up they will get married. Paul tells us that those who are single can focus more on serving God than those who are married. Those who are married must spend some of their time considering how they can meet the needs of their spouse, not just on serving God. Paul is not saying that this is wrong, just that those who are single are able to expend more effort on serving God. Those who are single can spend their time doing God’s work and thinking about how to please Him. On the other hand, those who are married need to spend some of their time thinking about how they can please their spouse. God’s calling is for some Christians to be single and for some Christians to be married. All too often the people of the Church have acted as if being married is the norm and being single is somehow abnormal. We spend too much of our time trying to find God’s intended mate for our single friends and not enough time considering that they can, in many ways, better serve God by remaining single.
I rejoice that God gave me a wonderful wife, but I regret that when I was single I did not spend less time looking for a wife and more time looking to serve God.
The first thing that struck me about this passage was that the rebuilding of Jerusalem’s wall did not happen by government mandate. Nehemiah inspired the people of Jerusalem and the surrounding area to work on rebuilding the walls. He did not tax them in order to hire workers, nor did he conscript their labor to do the work. Instead, those who were able rebuilt the sections of the wall near where they lived and worked. The reconstruction was not a top down, government mandated effort. Instead, it was an effort by the people which was supported and encouraged by the government.