For today, One Year Bible Online links here.

    Find a teacher who will teach the ways of wisdom and lead you in a straight path. If you do this, nothing will block you as you seek your goals.

    Let us serve the Lord so that our only enemies will be those who hate Him. When that is the case we can be confident that we will stand victorious over them. When your enemies tell you that God is dead, just remember, Jesus’ enemies said the same thing on Good Friday approximately 2000 years ago!

    When the disciples ask Jesus to send the crowd away to get food for themselves, Jesus tells them to feed them. The disciples respond that they have just enough for themselves. Jesus’ answer is to have the disciples bring their food to Him. He then blesses the food and breaks it into portions for the disciples to distribute. The lesson here is that when we do the will of God our supplies will be sufficient to complete the task He has set us.
    This is followed by the story of Jesus walking on the water. Actually, the part of this which has seemed like the important part of this story is that Peter walked on water. There are two elements here. Peter got out of the boat and started walking to Jesus. Then he started looking at the waves and he began to sink. It is often pointed out that Peter got into trouble because he took his eyes off of Jesus. This is true…and important. But we often forget to point out what he was able to accomplish as long as he kept his eyes on Jesus. It was when Peter stopped thinking about Jesus and started to think about what he was doing, “Look at me! I am walking on water,” that Peter got into trouble. When the focus of his thoughts were on going to Jesus, on following where Jesus led, Peter was able to do the impossible. When he started looking around and thinking about what he was doing that Peter got into trouble. It was then that he started thinking, “How am I doing this? What if it stops working?” If we focus on Jesus and following Him without thinking about what we are doing, we too can “walk on water” (literally, but not just walk on water. We can do much more.). However, if we start to think “Look at me! I am really doing the Lord’s work now,” we too will start to worry about what could go wrong. No matter what we are doing, whether it is healing the sick, feeding the hungry, or preaching the Gospel, we need to make sure we are doing it in order to get closer to Jesus, not so that others see what wonderful Christians we are.

    Joseph tested his brothers in many ways in order to see if they had changed as much as he had. He put them into circumstances where they could have easily left their brother to suffer. However, they demonstrated that not only did they regret what they had done to him, they were willing to sacrifice themselves to save their brother Benjamin. However the most important part of this passage was when Joseph told his brothers that they should not be angry with themselves for what they did to him. It was God’s plan to send Joseph into Egypt ahead of them to save them and their families from the famine, as well as saving many others. We should have similar view of life. The difficulties and hardships we face in life are there in order to position us so as to carry out God’s will when the time is ripe.