For today, One Year Bible Online links here.
Let us never forget the teachings we find in the Bible. If we practice loyalty and kindness in all of our dealings we will earn favor with both God and man. The next stanza of this proverb is most important:
do not depend on your own understanding.
Those two parts fit together perfectly. We must trust in the Lord with all our hearts and seek to do His will in all we do, but we cannot depend on our own understanding to know what His will is. It is only by listening to others who are also seeking to do God’s will that we can hope to truly discern what His will actually is.
I beg of God that He save me from the troubles that I will face. I beg this of God so that I can praise Him. The reason I wish to be rescued is so that I can continue to do His will. The wicked seek only to accomplish their own will and will be trapped by the troubles their actions bring them. Those who seek only to do as God wishes will be rescued by God. Let us praise Him for all He has done.
Today’s passage is three stories of Jesus healing people. Later in the Gospels Jesus tells His disciples (and through them us) that they will perform the same sorts of miracles He did and more. Yet, I do not see healing happening very often in the Church today. I do not know why, but I am convinced that our failure to see more miraculous healing says something is wrong in the Church today. I am convinced that part of the problem is that we do not really expect to see miraculous healing. Another part of it is our failure to discern the Holy Spirit’s leading. This is an area I struggle with.
There are a lot of things in this passage about trusting God and how God will provide us guidance. However, what struck me today was Abraham’s vehement insistence that Isaac not return to the land of Abraham’s ancestors. There are hints throughout the story of Genesis that Abraham came from a community which shared worshiped God, but there are also suggestions that there was something “wrong” with that community.
We have Abraham sending his servant to his relatives back where he came from to get a wife for his son from among his relatives. This suggests that there is something about them that makes them a better match for Isaac than the local people (this theme is brought up again with Jacob and Esau getting married). However, there is something about them that leads Abraham to not want his son to live among them. I am not sure what this means for us, but it is something I think is worth some thought.