Archived Daily Manna | Rejoice Fellowship | A mission to release people to rejoice in the world.

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.

Message: Here is a message we can understand, because we see it so often in other people! The King James translation adds a dimension to it: “Be not wise in your own conceits.” And The Message really gets to the point: “Don’t think that you’re so smart.” The sin of pride is embedded in human nature. We think that whatever is in our mind is true, no matter how it got there. If others think something different, they are wrong. If somebody tries to teach us something that we don’t want to be true, we refuse to listen to them. We are all, in a word, closed-minded. And unfortunately, nowhere is this phenomenon more pronounced than in reading the Bible. To paraphrase an old joke, most people use the Bible like a drunk uses a lamppost: For support, rather than illumination. But God knows what is true and what isn’t; and if we apply our closed-mindedness to the Bible, we sin. lighthouse, light unto the nations And it is not just us laymen. No church that I know of is free from this problem. Every church either ignores, or “interprets” beyond recognition, the plain meaning of some part of the Bible, and most often will omit embarrassing passages from worship services. Our “Memory Verse” for this week is directly on point here. To give the complete quote: “You must not be called ‘Teacher,’ because you are all equal and have only one Teacher. And you must not call anyone here on earth ‘Father,’ because you have only the one Father in heaven. Nor should you be called ‘Leader,’ because your one and only leader is the Messiah. The greatest one among you must be your servant. Whoever makes himself great will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be made great. ” (Matthew 23:8-11, Good News Trans.) People will tell you that the Bible says what they want it to say rather than what it actually says. But we must read it for ourselves. And we should not read it seeking to justify our preconceptions, but with an open mind. Our purpose, first and foremost, is to learn where we are wrong or ignorant. This is what Christ meant when he said “Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 19:14) Or again the first words of the Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 5:3) We must strive to be like children, our minds emptied of preconceptions and eager to be taught, for this is the opposite of being “wise in our own sight.”