Dear
Friend,
If you do not already have a habit of gathering daily manna the first thing in the morning (we can look at the example given to us in Exodus 16 and find the pattern for make it a habit. Establish your life and your schedule to allow you the necessary time to do your daily collection first thing every morning to give you the strength to make it through the day. And remember that today’s manna will not be sufficient for tomorrow; tomorrow’s manna must be collected tomorrow morning.
Tuesday, November 12, 2019
Today's Passage : Today's Passage :Christianity Lite
Bible Verse :Amos 5:18-24
"Thus says the Lord, the God of hosts, the Lord:
Alas for you who desire the day of the Lord!
Why do you want the day of the Lord?
It is darkness, not light;
as if someone fled from a lion,
and was met by a bear;
or went into the house and rested a hand against the wall,
and was bitten by a snake.
Is not the day of the Lord darkness, not light,
and gloom with no brightness in it?
I hate, I despise your festivals,
and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings,
I will not accept them;
and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals
I will not look upon.
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
I will not listen to the melody of your harps.
But let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like an everflowing stream.
"
Message:
Ancient Israel awaited the “day of the Lord,” when God would come down and destroy Israel’s enemies. But the time of Amos (and his more famous contemporary Isaiah), although a time of peak prosperity for Israel and Judah, was also a time of growing secularism. Devotion to the Lord was becoming ever more perfunctory. Many ignored their religious obligations totally. And increasingly, people failed to provide for those in need, the poor, the widowed, and the orphaned.
In this baleful passage, Amos asks the people of Israel why they act so eager for the day of the Lord to come. Everyone thinks that, simply because they are Jews and possibly engage in the outward trappings of religious life, they will be part of the God’s victory.
If this sounds familiar, it should, because it is terribly close to Western society today. The media preach to us that nice people all go to heaven when they die. But what does the Bible say about idolaters and the self-satisfied?
“[Beware anyone who] blesses himself in his heart, saying, ‘I shall be safe, though I walk in the stubbornness of my heart.’ The anger of the Lord and his jealousy will smoke against that man, and the curses written in this book will settle upon him, and the Lord will blot out his name from under heaven (Deuteronomy 29:19-20).”
The western world uses the Christian knowledge of heaven like a bedtime story for a frightened child. A television network launched, in October, 2016, a sitcom starring Kristen Bell, who wakes up after death and wants to know whether she is in “the good place” or “the bad place.” She is actually in “the good place” — because she was apparently a “pretty good person” — and immediately begins to taste such heavenly delights as being able to get as drunk as she likes without getting a hangover. Her reaction, when she wakes up without a pounding headache? “This place rules!”
Her television character is what passes for theology among much of our populace. A great number of the unfaithful spend their lives in unconfessed sin, and yet they believe that their death will lead them to eternal peace. When they die, their relatives say, “He is in a better place.” It is a great folly in America and Europe today; for the end awaiting the unfaithful is, according to Jesus Christ, “eternal fire (Matthew 25:41)”.
The subject of God’s wrath and the hell that likely awaits most people after they die has become an unpopular subject in mainstream Christianity. But it serves us well to remember, from time to time, that the Bible does not change simply because we ignore or dislike parts of it. Damnation of the wicked and the unfaithful is terrible to contemplate and very real.
Meditation
:
Prayer :
Let the word of Christ richly dwell within me all this day; and whatever I do in word or deed, may I do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks through Him to God the Father.......Amen
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