Jeremiah 4:19-6:14, Colossians 1:21-2:7, Psalms 77:1-20, Proverbs 24:23-25
Today is October 5th. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I’m Brian. It’s great to be here with you today from the lovely rolling hill of Tennessee. And I hope it’s a lovely day in the rolling hills of wherever you are or the mountains or the planes or the valleys or the desserts or the coastland of wherever you are. I’m excited that wherever we are we have a place that we can all go around the global campfire as we allow God’s word to come washing into our lives for today. So, we’re reading from the Common English Bible this week and we’ll continue our journey in Jeremiah today. Chapter 4 verse 19 through 6:15.
Commentary:
Okay. So, in our reading from Psalm 77 today we saw, in poetic fashion, Asaph who was the author, in great distress as he cried out to God for comfort and for some resolution to what was going on his life. And this Psalm is pertinent to us because, I mean, because we’ve all likely walked through those same kinds of emotional seasons in our lives and in this Psalm six questions were asked. Will my Lord reject me forever? Will He never be pleased again? Has His faithful love come to a complete end? Is His promise over for future generations? Has God forgotten how to be gracious? Has He angrily stopped up His compassion? Okay. So, once again we see the Bible saying out loud the things that we sometimes feel inside, but do not give voice because it will seem ungrateful. But these questions, whether we speak them out loud or whether we just like stuff them deep inside, they find their way into our lives. And it usually happens when we’re feeling the discomfort of crisis, right? Or we’re going through hardship or we’re suffering from loss or from pain or whatever is coming against us. We never ask those kinds of questions, right? Those six questions. We never ask them when things have turned out, right? When things turn out the way you wanted them to turn out, when we think things are going well for us. But when we’re suffering, Asaph’s conclusions often do become our own. His conclusion was, this is…this is my misfortune. It’s my misfortune that the strong hand of the most high seems different now. Seems like He's…God’s turned against me. So, if this is sounding eerily familiar, then the Bibles speaking. What are we to do when we feel downcast and bewildered like this. The psalmist suggests something that might seem counterintuitive or even unproductive but it’s essential. We must stop and remember. In Asaph’s words, I will remember the Lord’s deeds. Yes, I will remember Your wondrous acts from times long past. I will meditate on all Your works. I will ponder Your deeds. So, Asaph is suggesting that focusing our energy on remembering God’s faithfulness will bring back context, right? Will give us our balance back. And this is not unlike what the apostle said about the peace that passes all understanding. Right? When we closed the letter to the Philippians a couple days ago. Asaph used the remainder of the Psalm to bring his emotions into balance by worshiping God and remembering His faithfulness. So the next time one of those six questions or all of those six questions start filtering into our life experience, go back to your old journals you’ve kept or just sit quietly, still yourself, and remember times when God undoubtedly carried you through a difficult time because He’s doing that right now. It’s just hard to see when you’re in the thick of it, but it’s much easier to see in hindsight. Surely, I thought I was going down but surely I’m still standing here today because God was faithful and brought me through. He will never leave us. We will not be forsaken. The Bible tells us over and over and over and over, His faithful love endures forever. So, that’s either true or it’s not true. It is true however. And it’s true whether we believe it or not. So, we can embrace this, His faithful love endures forever or we can deny it but it’s still true. When we deny it in thought, word, or deed we’re simply not participating, we’re not partaking of the gift that is available to us.
Prayer:
Father, we definitely confess that we’ve had these postures of heart that we read from Asaph in the psalms. We definitely felt this way before. And we take the counsel to stop and remember, slow it down and remember that You have been faithful that You have carried us through difficulties before and You are continuing to carry us now. And in the future we’ll be able to look back on this time and see that You were faithful because Your faithful love endures forever. Come Holy Spirit, bring Your comfort into our lives today. We ask in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Announcements:
dailyaudiobible.com is the website, it’s home base, it’s where you find out what’s going on around here.
We were just talking about remembering and journaling and that’s something that we’re big on around here. So, we make our way through the Bible, the Bible speaks an awful lot of things into our lives. And it’s important that we remember them. But we don’t. I mean, we think we’ll never forget but then we forget 10 minutes later. And, so, when we take a few moments out of our day, write down some thoughts, some of the things that stuck out in the Scriptures, some of the interesting things that happened in our lives, we’re creating the story of our lives, we’re telling it as it happens. And we can look at previous chapters, right? We can look back at other seasons exactly like Asaph is suggesting and remember God’s faithfulness to us. So, we have the Daily Audio Bible Journal and some great writing utensils in the shop for exactly this, to take this journey through the year and to write down what God speaks to us so that we don’t forget and so that we can remember. So, you can check that out in the Daily Audio Bible shop.
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And that’s it for today. I’m Brian I love you and I’ll be waiting for you here tomorrow.