For today, One Year Bible Online links here. I have been convicted over the last few weeks to seek to develop a disciplined prayer life. It is still a work in progress. Please pray for me, that the Holy Spirit may show me how to pray in a disciplined manner.
No one expects a fool to be honourable any more than they expect snow in the summer. It happens on rare occasions, but people are always surprised when it does. Curses can be real, but those who are undeserving of a curse will be no more effected by it than a sparrow will land on a moving person’s head.
Let us remember that our lives are short. We do not have much time to serve the Lord, so let us not waste what time we have. If we seek to do the Lord’s will, He will make our efforts successful.
This psalm speaks to me with what is going on in the world today. If we make Him our shelter and rely on Him for our safety, we need not fear anything in this world. In a world where diseases such as Ebola are once more spreading, where war and chaos are spreading, and where economies seem about to crash, the psalmist tells us this:
nor the disaster that strikes at midday.
The Lord is my shelter, my place of safety. He is my God and I will trust in Him.
Often times we see those who have come to Christ after being lost in sin, drug addicts, convicted criminals, low-life’s of various sorts, as the greatest witnesses for Christ. However, Paul commends Timothy for the faith imparted to him by his mother and grandmother. Timothy was able to serve the role he had in the early Church because he was raised in a godly household. Those of us who were raised in Christian families and came to our faith as a result bring necessary skills to the Church. Let us use those skills to further God’s will, just as those who experienced the complete devastation of sin use their skills for that purpose. Whatever background we have, God has used it to mold us into the people we are, people He wants to use to accomplish His purposes.
We have been given a spiritual gift. Let us seek to fan into flames the gifts which the Holy Spirit has given us. These gifts will help us to proclaim the Gospel to those we encounter without shame. Perhaps the hardest part of what Paul tells us here is that we should never be ashamed to tell others about Christ. God will give us the strength to face and embrace any suffering which may result from us doing so. We will face ridicule and worse when we publicly declare our faith, but let us embrace that as evidence that we have been judged worthy of sharing in the suffering of Christ. Rather than trying to avoid persecution and suffering for our faith, let us embrace the opportunity to show our love for God, relying on the Holy Spirit to give us the strength to see us through.
When Jerusalem fell, just as Jeremiah had predicted, Jeremiah was given a message for the man who had rescued him from the death certain Jewish courtiers had planned for him. Because that man, Ebed-melech, had trusted God and acted to protect Jeremiah, God protected him when Jerusalem fell, even though he had been a high official in Jerusalem and the Babylonians slaughtered most of those.
The Babylonians offered Jeremiah a place in Babylon where they would care for him. However, Jeremiah chose to stay in Judah and continue to minister to those Jews who remained. One of those who had led guerrilla forces against the Babylonians killed the governor Nebuchadnezzar had set over the land. His actions suggest that he intended to set himself up as the next king of Judah. The other former guerrilla leaders banded against him and gathered the people together to decide what to do. They were afraid of what Nebuchadnezzar would do when he heard that his governor had been killed.