Good morning!
Welcome to your morning coffee! May our Heavenly Father love us well, in all the ways that he has promised. Father your love for us is so rich and so full and so good. But sometimes your love is discipline on us, on our foolishness, on our defeated but still present sin, on our grasping at the throne meant for your son. Father help us to see your discipline as your love, and to accept it, to repent, and to rejoice! Let lip-service cease, God, and instead let us be faithfully obedient children. In the name of your son Jesus, Father, and by the power of the Holy Spirit in us bearing much fruit, reveal your will to us today, that we would be without excuse to obey it. Father we love you! Forgive us when our actions and inactions don't match our claim to love you! Lead us in the rejoicing of daily repenting! Hear our worship!
Your Morning Song: "Instead of a Show" by Jon Foreman
Your Morning Scripture: 1 Corinthians 10:1-6
For I do not want you to be ignorant of the fact, brothers and sisters, that our ancestors were all under the cloud and that they all passed through the sea. They were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea. They all ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink; for they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ. Nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them; their bodies were scattered in the wilderness. Now these things occurred as examples to keep us from setting our hearts on evil things as they did.
Paul is speaking here to the Corinthians Christians, many of them likely Jews. And he is reminding them of the nation of Israel, slaves, taken out of Egypt. And of how so many of them died in the wilderness between Egypt and the Promised Land of Canaan.
"God was not pleased with most of them; their bodies were scattered in the wilderness." If you're anything like me, this verse, and other like it, are hard to read. But they are a helpful reminder.
When God has mercy on our attempts to control him and our relationship with him, he is not condoning our foolishness.
Our relationship with God is truly on his terms.
Do we understand that obedience is better than sacrifice in God's eyes? Nothing we could ever do or give to God will ever surpass simply doing as he says.
Are we hiding un-confessed sin in our lives?
God will not hear our worship.
Are we refusing to forgive a brother or sister in Christ?
God will not hear our prayers.
Are we living two lives, singing on Sunday and sinning on Monday?
God will not give us rest.
Are we worrying prayerlessly?
God will not guard us with his peace.
We need to be careful, we who claim to have been claimed by Christ. Are we walking with God on his terms? Or our own? Are we living obedient to his word? Do we only sing on Sunday? Or is our faith as dry and barren as bones in the desert? How seriously does God take his commands to us? How easily do we grasp at God's rightful place over us?
Let us not confuse God's mercy on our foolishness as him calling us wise. Let us be mindful of the examples he left in the wilderness as warnings, to set our hearts fully on God.
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