If anyone out there is actually reading this, I am about to get pretty honest and transparent. My family has been in my home for the last couple of days for Thanksgiving. It has been wonderful! We are not all together very often, so we take advantage of the times that we are together and have lots of fun. But in this short time that they have been here, I have found that I am easily distracted and have not been spending meaningful time in prayer or in the Word. Sure, I have kept up with the daily readings and I have made sure I know which country I'm supposed to be praying for each day, but these things have taken a backseat to other stuff going on and I have rushed through it. Why? My family loves the Lord, too, so it's not like they are critical of me spending time with Him. Somehow, it just seems less important, and that scares me. My greatest desire in life is to know the Lord and bring Him glory, but I do have other desires as well. I dream of a husband and family of my own someday, but don't see how I will ever keep my priorities in the right order if I have them. I am so easily distracted, I just can't imagine how it will work. I'm so thankful for the grace and mercy that come from Steadfast Love.
"O to grace how great a debtor
daily I'm constrained to be!
Let thy goodness, like a fetter,
bind my wandering heart to thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
prone to leave the God I love;
here's my heart, O take and seal it,
seal it for thy courts above."
Lord, meet with me as I read your Word this morning.
Genesis 46-47
So I'm pretty sure when Joseph's brothers sold him into slavery they never realized he would save them by having them move to Egypt and that they would multiply in numbers to the point of the Egyptians fearing them and making them slaves. That didn't all happen in these two chapters, but Israel did move his family to Egypt in the reading today. When they moved his family numbered 70. (And they ended up in the millions!)
Matthew 15:1-28
In this passage we see the danger of thinking like a Pharisee. These men questioned Jesus about things they saw Him doing that they considered to be against the laws of their tradition. Jesus But He called them hypocrites because they weren't keeping other parts of the law. Then he says to them,
"This people honors me with their lips,
but their heart is far from me;
in vain do they worship me..." verse 8-9
Jesus expresses much better than me the concerns I was having this morning. I am fearful that my heart is not in the right place sometimes. That other things take more priority and that my worship is in vain. May it not be so! Jesus goes on to say that it is not what goes into a person physically that makes them unclean, but what comes out from the overflow of the heart that truly defiles a person.
Psalm 19
"The law of the Lord is perfect" verse 7 This is the same law the Pharisees were trying to call into question in the reading from Matthew today.
And again, speaking to my heart:
"Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight,
O Lord, my rock and my redeemer." verse 14
Proverbs 4:14-19
A warning against following the path of the wicked. The wicked will have trouble, "but the
path of the righteous is like the light of dawn, which shines brighter and brighter until full
day." verse 18
Pray: Turkmenistan
This country is in the middle east part of Asia. They are recovering from a leader who basically was crazy and are trying to figure out what to do now. Believers of Christianity are persecuted, but their numbers have grown in spite of it. Pray for the current leaders and for believers to share their faith.
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