For today, One Year Bible Online links here.
They key to a life filled with righteousness and honor is to seek righteousness and love. If you put your effort in to living righteously and loving others you will find life, righteousness, and honor.
This psalm makes a point we often forget. The wicked have no fear of God, in part because they fail to realize how wicked they truly are. In their pride they believe that the evil they do is actually good. Those who think they are not being wicked will never turn from evil to do good.
We, by our very nature, tend to think of ourselves as good people. It is only when we realize our sinfulness, our wickedness, that God’s Spirit can begin to transform us into His image.
Paul writes that different believers have different spiritual gifts. All of these gifts are manifestations of the Holy Spirit. Each and every one of us receives God’s gifts in order to help the whole body of believers. You did not receive gifts from God in order for you to become famous, or wealthy. It may be that God chose for you to become famous or wealthy because by doing so you could serve Him even more, but neither of those are ends in themselves. Further, the gifts we have received do not make us better than someone who received different gifts…and every believer has received some gift from God. And the gifts which others have received do not make them better than us.
We are all part of the Body Christ, and we are all as important to the well-being of the Body as any other one of us. Those who have “menial” tasks are every bit as worthy of honor as those who have the “glorious” tasks. In fact, we should probably honor those who do what we consider the menial tasks even more than we honor those who have what we consider to be the glorious tasks. The final point I am going to make is that Paul is very clear here that we should not value one spiritual gift over another. Every spiritual gift is given by God because His work needs it in that place at that time (which means that if God has given you a particular spiritual gift, you had better be using it!).
This passage dovetails nicely with the point I concluded the last section with. When Haman sought to destroy the Jews, Esther found herself in a position to counter his plans. In order to do so she needed to take a risk. The lesson here for us is that God did not put us into the position we are in for us to be comfortable. He put us where He did so that we can serve others and Him. If we refuse to accomplish the task He set us, He will send someone or something else to do so, but we will suffer for our failure to act.