Even In The Darkest of Times
8 This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; ~ Matthew 15:8
Lip service is cheap and can be insincere, or at the very least, it can come across as insincere. But when you live a life of gratitude, you will experience the joy of Thanksgiving, and it’ll keep you humble before God because now your mind, your carnal nature, won’t begin to believe or think that it was all you.
Peace. Love. Go Forth and Don’t Forget God.
6 Let everything that has breath praise the Lord! ~ Psalms 150:6
William Arthur Ward once said, “Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.” According to God, we are to serve Him (God) with gladness. We are to come into His presence with singing and thanksgiving because it was God who created us in His own image, and He is continuously molding us to be more like Him. We are not self-made people.
We are the sheep of His pasture. He loves us and cares for us, and He is faithful even when we are unfaithful, and all He wants is our obedience and our gratitude. Our thanks. Therefore, we should give thanks to God for all He has done for us and for who He is. But you know what? God wants us to take it a step higher.
He wants us to not only give thanks to Him but to live a life of gratitude. He wants us to live like we are thankful for life. Thankful for the things we enjoy. Thankful for the things we take for granted, like family and close friends. Thankful for the food we eat. Jesus never ate one bite of food without giving thanks. Should we do any less? Peace. Love. Go Forth and Live a Life of Gratitude.
11 But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things that have come, then through the greater and more perfect tent (not made with hands, that is, not of this creation) 12 He entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves but by means of His own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption. 13 For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the sprinkling of defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer, sanctify for the purification of the flesh, 14 how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God. ~ Hebrews 9:11–14
Today is Yom Kippur. The day the High Priest would make atonement for himself and all of Israel. He would have to take a very sharp knife and slit the throat of the bull that he had just transferred his and his family’s sins to by the laying on of his hands. The blood would gush out, and then he would have to catch some of the blood in a bowl.
Doubtless to say he would be splashed with blood all over his hands and splashes of blood all over his nice, clean, white linen robe.
There were probably flies buzzing around, and the smell of blood was thick in the air. This showed the people the raw, nasty horror of sin. It taught the people that sin was not some innocent white lie that could be brushed under the rug.
Aaron then took this blood and went into the Holy of Holies as a sin offering for the people of Israel.
While Jesus, on the other hand, did not go into the Most Holy Place with the blood of bulls or goats but with His own blood. For with His own blood, He made atonement for us all.
The innocent for the guilty. The righteous for the unrighteous. The Holy for the unholy. Jesus paid it all. In fact, He didn’t just pay our debt; He gave us more. He gave us His Holy Spirit, who is now transforming us into the Image of God that was lost in the Garden of Eden.
Christ gave us His all. He set aside His Godliness, became a man, and died the cruel death in place of the people nailing Him to the cross. It was His blood that was shed that made atonement for our sins. It wasn’t anything we could ever do that could save us. So, the least we could do is show Him we are thankful for His sacrifice by living for Him.
Peace. Love. Go Forth and Be Atoned.
11 But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things that have come, then through the greater and more perfect tent (not made with hands, that is, not of this creation) 12 He entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves but by means of His own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption. 13 For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the sprinkling of defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer, sanctify for the purification of the flesh, 14 how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God. ~ Hebrews 9:11-14
Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is easily Israel’s most High Holy Day. It is a day of fasting and mourning. The Scriptures say it is a day to afflict yourself. It was the day that the sins of the nation were atoned for with the blood of bulls and goats. The High Priest presented this sacrifice in the Most Holy Place once a year before the LORD. They had to repeat this every year because the blood of bulls and goats could never cleanse us of our sins. It could never redeem us from death and give us life. So, God got off of His throne and presented His own blood on the altar for our sins so that we might be washed clean. So that we could be forgiven. The LORD Himself shed His blood for us. Never forget that. Never overlook that. God Himself died for us so that we might live.
How often do we spend time with God? How often do we pray and seek Him? He paid our debt, yet the majority of the time, we would rather spend time watching tv, reading books, playing games, and almost any other distraction the world has to offer than spending time with God. How can we expect to accept Jesus’ sacrifice and then keep living our lives as if He doesn’t exist? Jesus did all of the heavy lifting; the least we can do is spend time with Him and show Him that we are thankful for His sprinkled blood.
Peace. Love. Go Forth and Thank Him for His sacrifice.
20 For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. 21 But what fruit were you getting at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death. 22 But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life. 23 For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. ~ Romans 6:20-25
We all have a past. Some of us have a past that we feel is worse than others’ pasts. In fact, many of us don’t like to even think about the past that we have been redeemed from because of shame and guilt, but what if remembering the past isn’t always a bad thing? When we accept our Salvation, and we begin to follow Christ, we are washed clean by the Blood of The Lamb. We, in that moment, are no longer slaves to sin, but now we are given the opportunity to overcome that sin that once kept us in bondage, and we can overcome it through Christ. When we remember all that Christ saved us from, our love for Him grows. Our desire to grow closer to Him grows. It’s only when we forget all that God has done for us and begin to take it for granted that we fall into our old ways and choose our past over our future.
There’s a song by I AM THEY called Scars. The premise of the song is that they are thankful for the scars that they have because, without those scars, they wouldn’t know the love of God. If they didn’t have those scars. In other words, if we didn’t have scars, we would not only have the memory of what God has done for us but we also wouldn’t have been saved. We’re human, so we’re going to make mistakes. We’re going to sin.
Sin causes cuts and wounds upon our souls and our spirits. Some of us have been broken and shattered because of the poor decisions we’ve made. So, when God picks up that broken vessel, He reworks it into a new creation. You can see that it’s gone through hard times and, at one point in time, was chipped and shattered, but the new creation it is is more beautiful than ever. We shouldn’t dwell on our past and let guilt or shame overcome us, but we also shouldn’t try to forget it. We have to remember where we have been so that we might know where we are going. We were once slaves to sin, and now we are free in Christ Jesus. A new, completely different creation that is beautifully remolded and sowed back together by God Himself. Why would we want to forget that?
Peace. Love. Go Forth and Be Thankful For The Scars.
8 The Lord says, “Don’t harden your hearts as Israel did at Meribah, as they did at Massah in the wilderness. 9 For there your ancestors tested and tried my patience, even though they saw everything I did. 10 For forty years I was angry with them, and I said, ‘They are a people whose hearts turn away from me. They refuse to do what I tell them.’ 11 So in my anger I took an oath: ‘They will never enter my place of rest.’” ~ Psalms 95:8-11NLT
For forty years, the people of Israel sought other gods, complained to God, complained to Moses, and never once did they stop and thank God for all that He had done for them. God had just rescued them from 400 years of slavery. He showed them His power and His glory, yet they were not moved by this.
Today, we are the same way. We seek the world instead of God, and when things go wrong, we blame Him. Then when He comes to our rescue, we return to our old ways. We rarely give Him the glory and honor He deserves. If we continue in our ways and refuse to be thankful and give God the praise and honor He deserves, we’ll end up like the Israelites of old. They walked around the desert for 40 years, yet they never entered into the rest of the LORD. Jesus is coming back real soon. If we aren’t careful, we’ll miss out on His rest. We have to be thankful. We have to praise Him. We have to follow Him.
Peace. Love. Go Forth and Enter Into His Rest.
17 And Samuel said, “Though you are little in your own eyes, are you not the head of the tribes of Israel? The Lord anointed you king over Israel. 18 And the Lord sent you on a mission and said, ‘Go, devote to destruction the sinners, the Amalekites, and fight against them until they are consumed.’ 19 Why then did you not obey the voice of the Lord? Why did you pounce on the spoil and do what was evil in the sight of the Lord?” 20 And Saul said to Samuel, “I have obeyed the voice of the Lord. I have gone on the mission on which the Lord sent me. I have brought Agag the king of Amalek, and I have devoted the Amalekites to destruction. 21 But the people took of the spoil, sheep and oxen, the best of the things devoted to destruction, to sacrifice to the Lord your God in Gilgal.” 22 And Samuel said, “Has the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to listen than the fat of rams. 23 For rebellion is as the sin of divination, and presumption is as iniquity and idolatry. Because you have rejected the word of the Lord, he has also rejected you from being king.” ~ 1 Samuel 15:17-23
We all know the saying, “It is often easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission,” but is this the Truth? From the moment that Saul disobeyed the LORD and then tried to make it up to the LORD by making a sacrifice, things went from bad to worse. Saul was like a lot of us today. We think that because God loves us and He shows us grace that it’s better to live our lives in fear of the unforgiving world instead of the forgiving God.
Like Saul, every time we sin and just think we can ask for forgiveness after, we fail to realize that we can’t receive forgiveness without the shedding of innocent blood. Could this be why rebellion is the sin of divination? Because we treat shedding the blood of the innocent as a magic potion that erases all of our sins instead of what it truly is, a sacrifice. Obedience is better than sacrifice, not because God wants mindless robots following Him but because He doesn’t want the shedding of innocent blood.
When we begin to get used to living in sin with the idea of just asking for forgiveness later, we’re spitting on the innocent blood that has to be shed for our forgiveness. The innocent blood that was shed 2,000 years ago on calvary. We have to stop treating the precious blood of Jesus as if it was a magic potion that can just wash away our mistakes so we can live our lives however we want and start treating it as it is. It is the very embodiment of true love, for God Himself poured out His own blood that we might be saved. This isn’t a gift we should take advantage of, but that should be revered. A gift that should fill us with praise and thanksgiving for our God.
Peace. Love. Go Forth and Obey Over Sacrifice.
9 Then Moses said to Aaron, “Say to the whole congregation of the people of Israel, ‘Come near before the Lord, for he has heard your grumbling.’” 10 And as soon as Aaron spoke to the whole congregation of the people of Israel, they looked toward the wilderness, and behold, the glory of the Lord appeared in the cloud. 11 And the Lord said to Moses, 12 “I have heard the grumbling of the people of Israel. Say to them, ‘At twilight you shall eat meat, and in the morning you shall be filled with bread. Then you shall know that I am the Lord your God.’” ~ Exodus 16:9-12
When the people of Israel were in the wilderness, they were grumbling before the LORD. They even accused Moses of bringing them into the wilderness to starve them. Keep in mind that they were just taken out of the land of Egypt where they were slaves, and they were away from the LORD their God. They are now, however, free people, and God Himself is leading them, yet they are grumbling and accusing Moses of saving them just to starve them to death.
This is how we are today. The LORD takes us out of our filth, frees us from our slavery, and we aren’t grateful. We complain about how hard life is. We accuse Him of starving us and leading us to our death when it’s only in Him that there is food for our hunger and water for our thirst. It’s easy to look at everything we don’t have and become upset and feel some type of way, but if we seek God and humble ourselves in thankfulness and gratitude, He will supply ALL our needs according to His riches in glory.
Peace. Love. Go Forth and Be Thankful For Freedom.
18 When the child had grown, he went out one day to his father among the reapers. 19 And he said to his father, “Oh, my head, my head!” The father said to his servant, “Carry him to his mother.” ~ 2 Kings 4:19
Now, the young boy went out into the field one day during harvest time. That’s like trying to get some dad’s attention during Superbowl. The boy cried out, “Oh my head, my head!” But dad was too busy harvesting his crops, directing his workers, and overseeing the job. He had to provide for his family. So, what is he to do?
Take him to his mother; she will know what to do. Whenever we are feeling sick, who is it that we want? Mom. And once you get married, who is it that you want? Your wife, another motherly figure. It’s just something about a mother’s love.
So, this young boy goes to his father and complains about his head. His father turns to one of the servants and basically says, “I’m too busy right now; take him to his mother.” Dads may be too busy to deal with their children, but mothers are never too busy.
So, especially today, remember to take time out and honor your mother. The woman you honor may not have given birth to you, but she is/was the woman that was always there for you no matter what. Today is her day; honor her for all she’s done for you.
Peace. Love. Go Forth and Remember Your Mother.
15 Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice; 16 and he fell on his face at Jesus’ feet, giving Him thanks. Now he was a Samaritan. 17 Then Jesus answered, “Were not ten cleansed? Where are the nine? 18 Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” 19 And He said to him, “Rise and go your way; your faith has made you well.” ~ Luke 17:15-19
Jesus had just healed ten lepers, yet when one returned to Jesus and thanked Him, Jesus told him his faith made him well. Keep in mind the man was already healed, so what healing was Jesus talking about? If we go to the original Greek, we get the word SOZO, which means delivered in every way. The man wasn’t just physically healed; he was emotionally, spiritually, psychologically healed. He wasn’t a Jew, yet because he saw the miracle he received, he went back and thanked Jesus, and he received even more than before.
Sometimes, when we have been in Church for a long time, we forget to be thankful for the little miracles. We forget to take time out for God just to thank Him for all that He’s done for us. We become like the nine Jewish lepers, becoming almost entitled. We forget that God has saved each of us from the same filth. We didn’t deserve it. We weren’t entitled to it. We did nothing to earn it. It was a gift of grace from God, and each and every day is a gift. When we forget to thank God for the little things, we miss out on experiencing the big gifts of God.
LORD God, please forgive me for overlooking Your great unfailing grace and love that I don’t deserve. Thank you for each and every gift, blessing, and miracle that I’ve received, known and unknown. Thank you for keeping me safe each night and waking me up each morning. Thank you for giving me life, and please help me to run the race set before me that I might enjoy eternal life with You one day. In Jesus’ name, I pray, amen.