For today, One Year Bible Online links here.

    Those who do what is right rejoice when society enforces justice, those who wrong are terrified by it. You can see this in people who encourage others to jump to conclusions before the facts are in and then do their best to suppress facts which run counter to the judgment they want people to make.

    The key to a good life is to be choose your words correctly. Do not speak evil, do not tell lies. This is the first step, if you do not follow this advice you will be unable to follow the rest. The next step is two-parter. Turn from evil and do good. It is not enough to not do evil, you must also do what is good. Of course, the best way to avoid doing evil is to fill your time with doing good. There is one more step to leading a good life. Search for peace and when you find it, do what you can to maintain it. As I read this, I think about the troubles I see around this country. There are some true problems which have led to these troubles, but the protests and riots are not going to make things better. There are times when protests are necessary, but currently the country needs someone to calm the situation and quietly address the real grievances.

    Paul makes several points in today’s passage, but I am going to focus on just one. Here Paul talks about our freedom in Christ. We do have freedom in Christ. We are free to do whatever we choose. The Christian faith does not bind us to a set of rules in the way that the Law of Moses binds those who follow the Jewish faith (or even the way the Koran binds those who follow the Muslim faith). So, we are indeed free to do whatever we choose. However, Paul tells us that we need to remember that not every course of action is good for us. Some courses of action are merely not beneficial (that is they do not harm us, but they also do not improve us). But some actions are actively harmful, either to ourselves or to others (I believe that actions which are harmful to others are almost always, if not always, also harmful to us). We should choose actions which are beneficial for both ourselves and others. Let us not only avoid actions which harm others and ourselves. Let us choose actions which make us all better off, not just the actions which bring us pleasure, but those which improve who we are.

    The leaders of the Jewish people lived in Jerusalem so that they could work together for the good of the entire people. However, in order for it to be viable for them to live there, other people needed to live there as well. The decision was made to choose those people by lot, allowing God to determine who, besides the leaders, should live in Jerusalem. And while they chose them by lot, the passage tells us that those who went to live in Jerusalem did so voluntarily. This is a reminder that we should never use something like the lot to select people for a task who are not willing to undertake the task.