One generation shall commend Your works to another, and shall declare Your mighty acts. Psalm 145:4
When my children were small, the first prayer they learned to pray was,
God is great,
God is good,
Let us thank Him
For our food.
Typical, right? I’m sure this is probably the #1 “first prayer” that all children learn.
However simple the words in this child’s prayer may seem, they are quite profound in meaning.
Continue reading Passing On The Praises Of God
[clickandtweet handle=”” hashtag=”” related=”” layout=”” position=””]Teach me, O Lord, the way of Your statutes; and I will keep it to the end. Psalm 119:13[/clickandtweet]
Blessed are those whose way is blameless, who walk in the law of the LORD!
Blessed are those who keep His testimonies, who seek Him with their whole heart,
who also do no wrong, but walk in His ways!
You have commanded Your precepts to be kept diligently.
Oh that my ways may be steadfast in keeping Your statutes!
Then I shall not be put to shame, having my eyes fixed on all Your commandments.
I will praise You with an upright heart, when I learn Your righteous rules.
I will keep Your statutes; do not utterly forsake me!
Psalm 119:2-8
Life can be a struggle. Making difficult decisions can lead to undesirable consequences. Sometimes we feel lost and confused about the direction our life has taken us. Indecision, uncertainty, and doubt regulate our thoughts, at times.
Well, navigating through life can be tough, and to quote President Obama, “This is just really hard.” (1) (I guess he found out that it was harder than it looked.)
However, we do have a Plan Book available to us–the Bible, God’s Holy Word, the Scriptures…whatever you choose to call it.
God has graciously given us a written account of how we are supposed to live our lives. The problem is that the Bible doesn’t have a topical index that we can turn to and look for the solutions to our problems—wouldn’t that be nice.
But the solutions are there; the plans are there; the instructions are there, and all we have to do is dig them out. We cannot know God’s wisdom and understanding unless we study—not just read, but study, His Word.
Is it important to study God’s Word?
Of course it is! In the Psalm above, law, testimonies, ways, precepts, statutes, and commandments all refer to God’s Holy Word. To live a less hectic, more God-loving, people-loving, self-loving life, we must find His plans for us.
For I know the plans and thoughts that I have for you,’ says the Lord, ‘plans for peace and well-being and not for disaster to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call on Me and you will come and pray to Me, and I will hear [your voice] and I will listen to you. Then [with a deep longing] you will seek Me and require Me [as a vital necessity] and [you will] find Me when you search for Me with all your heart.
Jeremiah 29:11-13 (AMP)
1. Obama on Middle East peace efforts
Amplified Bible (AMP) Copyright © 2015 by The Lockman Foundation, La Habra, CA 90631. All rights reserved.
“To whom then will you compare Me, that I should be like him?” says the Holy One.
Isaiah 40:25
Who is comparable to God? There is no one like Him. There is no one comparable to Him. Have you ever tried to explain God to a young child? It’s hard to do; a child’s world is full of magical characters like:
But these characters, and others like them, are not comparable to God and His greatness.
As we grow older, these fantasies are replaced by super heroes who have their own legends to live up to. Today most super-brave, over-accomplishing, fictional characters have complete historical backgrounds built around their super-ness, which kids of every age thrill to discover.
However, these super characters pale in the light of our powerful God.
As adults we may lay aside the whimsical heroes and felons of our childhood, but often we replace these fanciful feelings with idolization of those who we consider to be great in their own rights. We try to compare man and his accomplishments to God and His greatness. Maybe it’s because it’s easier for us to quantify man, because God is immeasurable, but no one is comparable to God.
No one is comparable to God; no fictional character we can imagine, no person who has achieved the ultimate pinnacle of success, and nothing we create with our hands can compare, either.
To whom then will you liken God, or what likeness compare with him? An idol!
A craftsman casts it, and a goldsmith overlays it with gold and casts for it silver chains.
He who is too impoverished for an offering chooses wood that will not rot;
he seeks out a skillful craftsman to set up an idol that will not move.
Isaiah 40:18-20
Who is comparable to God? No one… there is no one comparable to God. There is no one else who has immeasurable power, unending authority, boundless mercy, and everlasting love.
God’s love cannot be compared to any other love we will ever know.
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And God saw every thing that he had made,
and, behold, it was very good.
And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.”
Genesis 1:1, 31
Some people have a hard time believing that creation of the world took only six days to complete. Some say that there is a gap between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2.
(1) In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. {And then other things happened for billions of years} (2) And the earth [became?] without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
While they teach that God created all things, the gap comes from the efforts of men to coincide the scientific faith, that the earth is billions of years old, with the spiritual faith, that God is the Creator.
They propose that supposedly billions of years ago when God created the earth, it was somehow filled with all the living life forms—including the cave men and dinosaurs— that our geologist are now finding in ancient ruins, hidden caves, and on top of uninhabited mountain tops.
However, (according to their theory) this age came to an end shortly after Lucifer and his entourage of fallen angels were banned from heaven and cast to the earth. It was then that the earth was—or to use their word—“became” without form and void.
There are many arguments out there for and against the gap theory and you can study and believe what you would like. However, if we take the Bible literally, then God created the heaven, the earth, the universe, and everything that exits (and continues to procreate) in six literal days—24 hours—morning to night.
In the beginning, God created:
Day 1—God created light
Day 2—God created the sky and seas
Day 3—God separated the sea to create dry land and created vegetation
Day 4—God created the sun, the moon and the stars
Day 5—God created the swimming creatures and the flying creatures
Day 6—God created the land creatures and man (and woman)
For six days God’s Spirit breathed on our universe creating everything from the smallest thing seen through the lens of a microscope to the largest thing seen through the lens of a telescope.
What an amazing God we have the privilege to serve!
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“Blessed is the man that
walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly…
But his delight is in the law of the LORD;
and in his law doth he meditate day and night.”
Psalm 1:1-2
Blessed is the man that
walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly,
nor standeth in the way of sinners,
nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful.
But his delight is in the law of the LORD;
and in his law doth he meditate day and night.
And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water,
that bringeth forth his fruit in his season;
his leaf also shall not wither;
and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.
Psalm 1:1-3
Want to be happy? Want to be blessed? Want things to work out in your personal situation?
Then stay away from people who will give you bad advice!
Simple, huh?
The world is full of people who want to tell us how to run our lives. In fact, advice is about the only “free” commodity there is anymore. And although at times we may need another head or two to bump together to come up with some different tactic, we are cautioned to stay away from advice given by people who don’t care to know God.
If we do take ungodly advice, we inadvertently become comfortable with those who are disrespectful of things that are holy.
This psalm shows the progression of bad advice…walking-standing-sitting…which eventually turns into sin. It doesn’t matter what sin it is, it could be a bad habit, a bad attitude, or a terrible action. But let’s imagine bad advice, or sin, as walking along our life’s road.
Yep, there it is, we turn around and look, and there we see ‘sin’ over our left shoulder (notice it’s not the “right” shoulder). It sneaks up behind us—because sin is usually sneaky. We look back again and then turn our eyes back towards the front and keep walking, but it’s not too long down the road until sin steps up right next to us.
Now we’re walking with Sin (counsel of the ungodly)
Oh well, I’m strong, we think, as we continue our walk with Sin keeping up with us. But then Sin starts to whisper something. At first we may disagree; we may even vehemently disagree, but then Sin starts to lull us into its way of thinking…we think these are our thoughts…we begin to like what Sin is saying. Wait, let’s stop and think this out together, we say.
Oops…now we’re standing on our life’s road with sin.
We soon find ourselves thinking the wrong things, doing the wrong things, and going to the wrong places. Sin has taken us off our road and now we are sitting along the path complaining how badly things have turned out for us. We criticize others, because we are miserable; we mock those who do good works, because our work is so unpleasant to us; we are intolerant of others, because we can no longer tolerate our life with Sin.
Now we sit in the seat of scorners…
So what preventive steps can we take to escape this downward spiral? We meditate on God’s Word!
Yes, it’s important to read the Bible. Maybe you are a disciplined person who reads through the Bible every year (wow! brownie points for you, I’ve never been that consistent). But this is talking about reading, then reading again, and thinking about it, and considering all that God has said about it, over and over again.
Maybe it’s because I’m a farmer’s wife, but I love this quote from Sprugeon:
“Meditation chews the cud, and gets the sweetness and nutritive virtue of the Word into the heart and life…It is not only reading that does us good; but the soul inwardly feeding on it, and digesting it.”
Meditating is taking God’s Word and reading it with our lips, thinking about with our minds, and allowing it to sink into our hearts, so our spirits can feed on it and grow to produce godly fruit. (Galatians 5:22-23)
“This is the Lord’s doing;
It is marvelous in our eyes.
This is the day which the Lord hath made;
We will rejoice and be glad in it.”
Psalm 118:23-24
O give thanks unto the LORD; for he is good:
because his mercy endureth for ever.
The LORD is my strength and song, and is become my salvation.
Open to me the gates of righteousness:
I will go into them, and I will praise the LORD:
This gate of the LORD, into which the righteous shall enter.
I will praise thee: for thou hast heard me, and art become my salvation.
This is the LORD’S doing;
it is marvelous in our eyes.
This is the day which the LORD hath made;
we will rejoice and be glad in it.
Psalm 118:1, 14, 19-21, 23, 24
As a young girl, I remember one morning coming into the kitchen where my Mother was fixing her morning coffee. She greeted me with a semi-cheery, “Good morning”, which I countered with a rhetorical question, “What’s so good about it?” (I probably had a test that day, or something else of equal misfortune).
But her sincere reply stopped me in my contemplating tracks, and has directed my thought pattern over the years.
“Any day that God gives you is a good day,” she wisely replied.
How true are those words! Isaiah talks about our lives being one snip of a chord away from death. None of us know when we will take our last breath. None of us know if we will see tomorrow. None of us know if we will even see the next moment; only the present moment is assured.
Life is a gift from our eternal and loving Father. He created each of us individually. No one, no matter what the circumstance, was “accidently” given life. It’s an ongoing gift that is renewed for us daily.
But another gift has been given to us also, and that is the gift of salvation. The special “day” that is spoken of here in these verses is the day that Jesus redeemed man back to God, after the sin of man thrust all of us into eternal separation.
We can find occasion every day to rejoice in the fact that Our Lord has given us the gift of life. It can be celebrated, appreciated, and spent for God’s glory.
But even more so, we can celebrate the fact that Jesus is our Redeemer, and echo the psalmist by saying,
[ctt template=”3″ link=”Nrpza” via=”no” ]“Oh, let’s give thanks to our Lord; He is so good: His mercy endures forever!” Psalm 118:1[/ctt]
Matthew 16:5-2
“And when his disciples were come to the other side, they had forgotten to take bread. Then Jesus said unto them, ‘Take heed and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees.’
And they reasoned among themselves saying, ‘It is because we have taken no bread.’
Which when Jesus perceived, he said unto them, “O ye of little faith, why reason ye among yourselves, because ye have brought no bread? Do ye not understand, neither remember the five loaves of the five thousand, and how many baskets ye took up? Neither the seven loaves of the four thousand, and how many baskets you took up?
How is it that ye do not understand that I spake it not to you concerning bread, that ye should beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees?’
Then understood they how that he bade them not beware of the leaven of bread, but of the doctrine of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees.”
Bread has been a long time no-no in the low-carb diet world, and it appears here that the disciples thought Jesus was warning against bread, too. However, historically, leaven has been synonymous with sin, which is the context in which Jesus was using it.
I find it a little humorous when I read these verses. Jesus had just lambasted the religious leaders for being hypocrites, and then he and his disciples sailed over to the other shore where Jesus admonished them not to be like the Pharisees and Sadducees. However, not understanding the Lord’s lesson (this is the part that makes me chuckle J) , their thoughts centered on the provision of food, or lack of.
Can’t you see them? Jesus, in his concern for the spiritual lives of his friends and disciples, lovingly warns them not to allow sin to taint their beliefs, as the religious leaders were doing. And here may be where the problem originated…”they reasoned among themselves”. Well, that is always a danger, but maybe they were hungry and food was the only thing on their minds at the time?
However, we know that’s not what Jesus was talking about. The Lord was warning against leaven, or sin in their lives. He was cautioning his followers not to be like the religious leaders of that time, who knew the law, but didn’t recognize the Truth. He did not want them to allow sin, hypocrisy, complacency, and self-righteousness to hinder them and to influence what he had taught them.
Aren’t we like that, too? How much time do we spend considering the spiritual world? How often do we meditate on the temporal (our physical needs) instead of the eternal (our spiritual needs)? We Christians are always fussing over the food. Some would not even have a prayer time if they didn’t say “grace” before a meal. Then of course, all of our church programs revolve around food. We have a birthday dinner for the preacher, an outdoor BBQ to celebrate the founding of the church, an ice cream social on the 4th of July, VBS snacks, fall festivals, Thanksgiving dinners, and Christmas cookie parties. Sometimes our priorities get so mixed up, like the disciples, we allow our physical needs to take priority over our spiritual needs, or like the Pharisees and Sadducees, we allow some leavening to infiltrate the truth we have learned in God’s word.
Jesus reminded his disciples that they had no need to think about what or when they were going to eat…ever, because he was more than able to provide. He cited the two occasions when he miraculously provided food for thousands of people out of a few loaves of bread—and had leftovers!
Heeding the warning taught by our Lord, we should think less on what is provided for our temporal existence and be careful not to allow leaven in our lives that hinder our spiritual walk.
“Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed?…for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things. But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness…”
Matthew 6:31-33
