For today, One Year Bible Online links here.

    If you spend your time and money on pleasure when you should be working or saving you will end in poverty. If you are constantly spending your money on luxuries you will soon have none.

    If we faithfully follow Christ we too will experience what the psalmist references in this psalm. There will be those who will do evil to us in response to our good acts. There will be those who lay traps for us even though we did them no wrong. We will fast and pray for them when they suffer, but they will rejoice when we are in trouble. All of this and more we will face as we try to faithfully serve the Lord. However, if we are in that situation we can rely on God to oppose those who oppose us. He will give us victory. So, let us continue to pray for those who do not serve Him, for God will protect us if we do.

    In today’s passage Paul tells us that a man dishonors his head if he prays or prophesies with his head covered (the origin of the tradition of men removing hats and caps when the National Anthem is sung. I will come back to this.). He also says that women dishonor their head if they pray or prophesy without a covering on her head (the reason that women wore hats or some other kind of head covering until modern times). I do not fully follow Paul’s argument here.
    I follow the idea that women are supposed to cover their heads because the first woman was created out of the first man. Then Paul says something intended to make sure that men do not become arrogant about this and believe that this makes them overlords over women. He tells us that every man since the first man came out of women. So, the first woman came from man, but every man since that has come from a woman. And both come from God. The resulting teaching is that women are not independent of men, but then neither are men independent of women. We all need each other. There are men who say that they do not need a woman. They are wrong. They may not need a wife, but every man needs at least one woman in his life. Of course, there are women who say that they do not need a man. They are just as wrong. This is not about sexual relations (if you need sexual relations, you need a spouse of the opposite sex).

    Nehemiah had left Jerusalem for a time to return to the court of Artaxerxes. When he got back to Jerusalem he discovered that the men of Judah were working and doing business on the Sabbath, which they had vowed not to do. Nehemiah confronted them and got them to stop. In addition, Nehemiah discovered that some of the Jewish men had married women from the surrounding peoples and had failed to even teach their children to speak their language. In other words, rather than assimilate their wives and children into the people and worship of God, they were assimilating into the local people and pagan worship.
    This is an important lesson for us as Christians. We are called to bring people from our society into the Church. However, we must assimilate them into the culture and society of the Body of Christ, not allow ourselves to assimilated into the secular culture and society that is around us.