Well, I am continuing to heal this week from the cold/sore throat I had over the weekend.  I am thankful that God allowed me the strength of voice to preach on Sunday.  He is a great God.  I am grateful He has allowed me to be a minister for Him and to serve Him with the talents He has given.  I know that God has blessed me with this ministry and with the wonderful people here at GMC.  And I plan on continuing my service to Him at this church until He calls me elsewhere.  As I preached Sunday, I pray that He gives me the wisdom to use my time wisely and to make the most of every opportunity.  May the Grace of our loving Lord be with you all.

Technology is great until it stops working.  I came in this morning ready to do many of the things I do on Mondays – do my devotions online, upload the weekend sermon to the website, answer a feel emails from the weekend, send out an announcement about our Parent’s Night Out (canceled this month) and our Trunk or Treat (check it out under the Events page), and of course post this blog.  It was a tech heavy morning.  That is until I figure out that the church’s modem was on the fritz.  After multiple phone calls, plugging and unplugging cables, reboots, restarts, refreshes, and finally service tech with a new modem, it is back up.  Until it had to reboot another time.  And so the morning was not what it was cracked up to be.  But with the help of this week’s sermon still fresh in my mind from yesterday (and still a bit of those crazy cartoon hallelujahs singing in my head), I was able to praise the Lord.  He is a technology that will keep us hooked up when everything around us will turn to dust.  Keep on praising.

This devotion, along with the sermon is several days late being posted due to sick kids, the holiday on Monday and my 13th wedding anniversary all happening at the same time.  I have also just been a bit lazy and put this off.  Sometimes it is hard to write posts like this week after week.  And for the longest time, it seemed like few people if anyone ever read them.  However, just before I started this post, I looked at some of the analytics from this website and was encouraged that there have been a few recent hits not only on the sermon podcast, but also on these ramblings.  So my encouragement is passed on to you.  In light of this week’s sermon, I would encourage you to start a daily Bible reading.  If this is tough for you, there are several programs and apps that help you (and even remind you) to start reading.  A couple of them that we have links to on our website are Logos and YouVersion.  I know each of them are free to download and use and I believe both include a reading program that will help you read through the whole Bible in a year or certain books of the Bible.  Also as Christmas is coming, look and ask for “One Year Bibles” that divide the Bible into 365 minor chunks that you can read each day.  If at all fails, take the book of Proverbs and read one chapter each day.  With 31 chapters, it will fill most months (you may have to double up on those months with less than 31 day/month). Remember as the old children’s song goes, “Read your Bible, pray everyday, and you’ll grow, grow, grow.

Well, the sermon was not recorded, but I can still give you a quick word.  Psalm 117 is the smallest chapter in the Bible but has some of the biggest words.  God’s steadfast (hesed) love and God’s faithfulness are two big words in Hebrew.  However the word translated “great” (in NIV) or “powerful” (NLT) or “towers over” (NET) is something even bigger.  It has the idea of something so big and powerful that it cannot be imagined.  And in my sermon I compared it to the waves that are formed off the shores of Nazarè, Portugal.  These waves which only the best can surf are sometimes over 100 feet tall.  And that picture of a massive, unstoppable, powerful wave is the kind of idea behind the words in Psalm 117.  So you can either ride that wave of God’s love and faithfulness, or you can be crushed by it. The choice is up to you.

I preached on Psalm 139 this week, but because of the Acorn Bank Breaking, I was only able to touch on two aspects of this incredible Psalm.  So I hope that if you listened to this week’s sermon, you will dig deeper and read the entire psalm.  And as I hinted on in the sermon, read it in two different modes.  First treat this psalm in a way that sees God’s all-knowing power and all-present person as a positive that inspires awe and wonder at God.  Then read it a second time.  But this time read it as someone who does not like the fact that God know every thing and is everywhere.  Maybe as someone who is under conviction and does not want God to know about things they want to keep hidden or for God to know about.  Then ask yourself an even tougher question . . .  one I did not have time to deal with.  How does verses 19-21 fit in to either one of those readings.  These verses are often skipped over by many preachers and commentaries because they do not seem to fit in.  What do you think?  As always feel free to comment on them on this website.

Another week has passed us by.  We have so much to be thankful for.  But this week’s thought based on Sunday’s service has to do with our past failures.  Do we try to forget them?  Or do we try to remember and learn from them?  But our learning from our mistakes should not be then end of them.  Do we remember, learn, and then tell the next generation of our failures?  Too often we are tempted not to share with others the mistakes we have made.  We may even believe that we should let the next generation fall into the same mistakes we did so they will learn from them.  And while that may need to be the case in certain circumstances, we should try to help our kids not to make those same mistakes.  That is what learning from history is all about.  Because as I quoted from some wise people in my sermon, “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it”.

As I mentioned in my sermon Sunday, this week’s topic for this devotion is going to focus on the pain that sin sometimes brings.  David says in Psalm 32, “When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long.  For day and night you hand was heavy upon me; my strength was sapped as in the heat of summer . . . Many are the woes of the wicked.”  Sin can do a number on you.  And this is not just a Old Testament teaching.  As in the sermon, I quoted from James 5 about confessing your sins to each other. But if you read the whole context, James is talking about healing and some of the problems the readers needed healing from were caused by sin.  Starting in 5:13, James writes about praying for healing for those who are sick.  He mentions forgiven sins in vs 15, “If he has sinned, he will be forgiven.”  Then it goes to verse 16, “Therefore (in light of the previous verses about praying for healing and forgiveness), confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed.  He then ends his book a few verses later talking about how we should help those who have wandered into sins.  Sins can cause physical ailments.  The Bible does NOT equate that all physical ailments are caused by sin, but sins can cause ailments.  This is just one reason why we need to make sure that our sins are confessed and we have a right relationship with God.  Thankfully we all have the promise of 1 John 1:9, “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”

The fact that we live in a world that is fallen, broken, and failing makes this psalm and the many like it so vital.  We need a God who will remain firm and strong when the world around us falls to pieces.  I love that there is so much confidence in these psalms.  It gives us a shelter when times are dark.  And the hymn by Martin Luther is so clear on this concept that it is one of my favorites.  “A Mighty Fortress is our God”

I am glad we have a God who keeps his promises.  That the wrong will fail and the right prevail (with peace on earth, good will toward men . . . as the old Christmas hymn goes).  That we do not have to fret, worry, fear, get angry with those in the world who wish us harm and seem to get away with it.  God will reward us with blessings beyond our imagination if we continue to remain faithful in following him through the tough times.  That is what “the land” means.  It is our promised inheritance that we can dwell in even now.  So as the old song goes, “Don’t be a doubting Thomas, rest fully in His promise. Why worry, worry, worry, worry, when you can pray”