Good Morning All,
Acts
2:42; “And they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship,
to the breaking of bread and the prayers.”
In
the olden days of VCR’s we used to watch them movies and every so often, push
the pause button or even run it backwards.
When you did this, run it backwards, you could watch the guy fall on his
horse instead of off his horse. If you
could push the pause button at just the right moment, you could see the water
just start to touch the top of the head of the unsuspecting victim. If you were watching a mystery, you could
pause the movie and look to see if there were any clues sitting there that you
might miss otherwise.
Of course the greatest use of this slowing
down, pausing and then backing up is in watching sports today. They take close plays, ones that at real and
normal speed are almost impossible to see exactly what happened. So they slow it way down, they zoom in on the
play, they run it backwards slowly to see exactly what happened. They study it and look at it until they
almost have it memorized.
We scrutinize old VHS tapes and
controversial sporting events yet our Bible often just gathers dust on the
shelf. We put it up there just in case, some
time, we might want to look something up that we “know” is right but we heard
it differently. We use it to store the
family documents in, maybe a pressed flower from a loved one’s funeral; that is
about all that we have it for. It is
just there.
Yet God gives us this book for a very special
reason. This is how he chooses to talk
to us. This is how he reveals himself to
us. As we read it, we see his nature unfold
before us as his desire to love us and for us to love him is revealed over and
over. We see that God is by nature
loving but can be provoked to anger but only for a short time. We read about how, no matter how many times
we fall short of his will; he keeps bringing us back and restoring us to our
place in his kingdom.
So by reading God’s Word and listening to
what he is saying to us, we can find comfort; we can find hope. This is where God shows us his desire to save
us and to make us his people and what that means to us. Many try to accomplish this by guessing or
postulating or simply making it up. Yet
God shows us what his plan for us is. His
plan is to prosper us by his grace and to give us comfort and hope as we face
this life’s challenges and to give us the true peace that the world cannot
give. We get this through the prayerful
study of God’s Word. We get this by
listening to what He speaks to us.
Wonderful
and loving Father, in your mercy you took the time to record for us your
message of salvation and to give it to us.
Guide us by your Spirit to love reading and studying it. Teach us to savor the message of salvation
which you speak to us. Help us to share
this message with those around us. In
Jesus’ precious name we pray, amen.
God’s Peace,
Pastor Bret