For today, One Year Bible Online links here.
Do not testify against your neighbor just to pay them back for some perceived slight, especially if it involves lying.
The people of Israel sinned so much against God that He allowed the Ark of the Covenant to be captured by the Philistines. He allowed His own glory to be sullied because of their sin. If God would do that to the people of Israel, what makes us think that He will turn His anger and judgement aside from us when we sin in similar fashion. Yet, even with those sins, God welcomed them back when they returned to Him. He will do the same today, if we turn to Him He will raise us up. If the people turn from sin and back to God, He will raise up a leader to lead them to greatness once more.
Paul wraps up his letter to the Church in Colossae with a series of instructions. He tells wives to submit to their husbands and husbands to love their wives (elsewhere he qualifies this latter with “as Christ loves the Church). Today, the former is hard for us to hear, but part of the problem is that we overlook how hard it is to truly do the latter. It is hard to put your own wants and desires second, especially when that someone is submitting to you. When Paul tells husbands to love their wives he is telling them to put their wives interests and desires ahead of their own. As human beings we are very good at rationalizing how what is in our best interest and what we want is really the best for other people as well. We are all called to work at getting past that, because we are called to love our neighbor. But as a husband, I have a special obligation to do that with respect to my wife. Whenever I make a decision, I need to think about whether what I decide is in my wife’s best interest and does it fulfill her desires. The fact of the matter is, I often, perhaps even usually, fail to actually do that.
Paul goes on to tell us that we should do whatever work we do wholeheartedly, as if we were working for the Lord, because we are working for the Lord. We should strive to work so that our boss will be pleased with what we do, even if they will never know what we did. If we are boss over someone, we need to remember that we answer to God for how we treat them.
Then comes the part I was just thinking about last night. I have written how I have been challenged about my prayer life by the passages I have been reading. A week or so back I started a prayer journal, but I have not yet really gotten it going. Last night I was thinking about it and how since I got it I have not read a passage which challenged me on prayer. This morning I read, “Devote yourselves to prayer with an alert mind and a thankful heart.” Challenge accepted. Tonight I will dedicate some time to praying and writing in my prayer journal. Each and every one of us needs to find a way to have a disciplined prayer life.
Jeremiah describes how idolaters worship things made by man. By doing so he illustrates how foolish it is to worship anything other than God. Today, many people worship things other than God, things made by human effort. I listen to sports radio and hear callers and hosts refer to the “football gods” or the “baseball gods”. They aren’t serious when they say these things. Yet, if you listen to them you realize that they worship sports. It is sports which gives them a sense of fulfillment and a sense of purpose. But it is not just those who worship sports who worship something made by man. There are those who tell us that believing in God is foolish superstition. If you talk with those long enough, you will discover that most of them put their faith in “science”, or human reason. Their high priests are scientists, people who supposedly are unbiased by their own interests and are just seeking after truth. Time and again, when they discover that a scientist has distorted his or her results in order to support a pre-determined conclusion, they insist that this was a special case. Let us not be fooled by such idols, rather let us worship the God who made the earth by His power.