Ecclesiastes 7:1-9:18, 2 Corinthians 7:8-16, Psalms 48:1-14, Proverbs 22:17-19
Today is the 4th day of September. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I am Brian. It is great to be here with you as we continue through this week. And like was saying yesterday, continue getting moved into this month, this brand-new month that we’re just a few days into. It is a pleasure to be here on this day right now with you as we move forward and take the next step. So, in the Old Testament, we have been working through the book of Ecclesiastes, which is what we will do today. We’re reading from the New Living Translation this week. Ecclesiastes 7 through 9.
Commentary:
Okay. Let’s talk about sorrow on this wonderful day today. Let’s talk about sorrow. What do you think about when you hear the word sorrow? What does that bring up inside of you? Some of you might be like, well…it brings up Ecclesiastes to me. It sounds like the book of Ecclesiastes.” So, is sorrow a good thing or a bad thing? Like, let’s take that step back for second and just look at it. Is sorrow something positive or is sorrow something negative? Is it something that we should embrace or is it something that we should at all costs avoid or is it just something that…that we really…that no matter how much we prepare for that we really can’t embrace or avoid, it’s just something that happens sometimes and we have to endure it? So, I mean…I…I have experienced plenty of sorrow in my life. I’m sure that that is true for you too and we each have our story to tell, but I can say that, at least for almost all of my life, like sorrow…I could say for all of my life…for all of my life…sorrow isn’t something I get up in the morning and go like, “how can I find more sorrow”, right? Like, how…like “I’m feeling pretty good today, what I need is a good scoop of sorrow, where can I find that?” So, even though like, I don’t seek out sorrow…even though I don’t know anybody who seeks out sorrow, I don’t know anybody that hasn’t found sorrow, right? So, it’s something that we generally try to avoid pretty much at all costs, and something that no matter what the costs we can’t avoid and we usually think about it like it’s a dark thing, it’s depressing, it’s distressing, it’s disruptive, it’s a condition that you enter into and endure and try to escape as soon as possible. So, like the apostle Paul who is writing in second Corinthians, which is the New Testament letter that we’re working through, this guy was not unfamiliar with suffering, right? We walked through the book of Acts, we listened all the way through the book of Romans, and now we are in these letters to the Corinthians, and we see that, you know, he doesn’t have a bunch of friends, like there’s not a lot of allies for the apostle Paul. He has a ton of enemies and suffering is like a part of his story, but he makes a really fascinating distinction about hardship when it comes to sorrow. So, Paul says from our reading today, “the kind of sorrow God wants us to experience”, right? So, let’s just stop there for a second, take a deep breath and once again allow the Bible to speak for itself and disrupt us however it needs to go into because we go into a relationship with the Bible with so many assumptions and then we actually get to know the Bible and we’re like , “holy cow…this is way way way way way more where the rubber meets the road…like this is right down at the base level of life”, right? So, “the kind of sorrow God wants us to experience” Paul says, “it leads us away from sin and results in salvation. There’s no regret that kind of sorrow but worldly sorrow, which lacks repentance, results in spiritual death.” So, according to the apostle Paul there is a kind of sorrow that leads us somewhere good, like it’s something that we should experience. We should feel sorrow when we find ourselves wandering into what we know is not right. It should disappoint us. It should feel like we’re losing something. It should distress us, right? So when we…when we walk into sin and our eyes are wide open we should experience the gravity of what’s happening because…because we’re stepping in and cutting off the process that God is doing within us, the process of sanctification. We’re cutting that lifeline off and willingly walking back toward death. So, it should be distressing. We’re betraying our source of life which isn’t healthy, which isn’t good, which isn’t leading anywhere helpful. We should feel sorrow because, like Paul said, it leads us away from sin and results in salvation. Whew…there’s is plenty, plenty, plenty, to think about there…like…and should be…what a week we are having out of the gate already. The Bible is well…it has literally brought us to all kinds of stories. We’ve been on mountaintops and we’ve been in deep ravines. Now we’re actually where we live. And, so, let’s reconsider sorrow today. Like I said, like I don't…I’ve never got out of bed and, like, “I’m feeling a little too, happy today. Where can I go get some sorrow”, but when we do have this experience where…where it’s kind of bubbling up inside of us what we normally do is try to avoid it, try to get away from it, try to change the subject, try to move in another direction, try to go to our to do list and, you know, get busy. All of those things when what we might need to do first before we do all of that is stop and feel it and invite God into it and ask the Holy Spirit what it’s about. Certainly, it may just be sadness and certainly there may be reasons to be sad, but we can invite the Holy Spirit’s comfort into that. But sometimes we’re feeling something that we can’t name. It’s a sorrow, it’s an anxiety, it’s something that we can’t name. We’re not sure exactly what its origins are. But if we would stop and retrace our steps we would see, “oh, this is what it feels like to be absent from God. Like, He would never remove His presence from me, but I’m withholding. Like with my eyes wide open I’m walking…I’m trying to resurrect what was dead and not allowing the life of Christ to conduct…this intimacy to continue to flow through me. That, according to Paul, is something God wants us to be aware of and wants us to sense and feel.
Prayer:
Father, we invite You into this. This is this is parenting stuff here. Wow, how You love us and how You parent us and how You care for us. Now You have expectations that we will grow and that will become more and more aware of what’s going on. So, Father if we experience sorrow over these next days as we make this a part of the habits of our lives we realize sorrow…we can feel it and run from it or sorrow can come and we can embrace it and look at it for what it is and invite You to interpret it for us. So, rather than just running away, help us to stand still and allow your Holy Spirit show us the next steps and interpret what is going on inside of us. Come Holy Spirit we pray. In the name of Jesus. Amen.
Announcements:
dailyaudiobible.com is the website, its home base, it’s where you find out what’s going on around here.
And somethings going on around here today, something new. Actually, there’s gonna be plenty of things new going on here as he move through the rest of this year, but today is a day that’s been on the calendar and I’ve been looking forward to this day. We got a couple of new things in the Daily Audio Bible shop.
So, let’s start with coffee. We…well…I mean…I guess it starts with me because I’m a little bit of a coffee lover, a lot of a coffee lover, a little bit of a coffee snob. And, so, good coffee is good coffee and bad coffee is, at least to me, kind…it kind of taste like liquid pencil into me if it’s horrible but good coffee is good coffee. And, so, we’ve had good coffee for a long time. We started our Windfarm brand of coffee, a good decade ago just as a way of supporting the Daily Audio Bible and representing…I mean it pairs well with a devotional time, a time of reflection, a time to slow down and have your morning coffee or your evening tea or whatever. And, so, we started all that from Ezekiel chapter 37 where the Lord takes Ezekiel to the valley of dry bones and tells him to call to the four winds. And, so, we just thought, what if he did this all the time, that would be spiritual windfarm. And, so, that’s where our coffee and tea name and brand was born. So, we’ve been doing that for a long time and over the years we’ve been asked repeatedly, very repeatedly for a portable solution, usually like a kind of a little cups, those little cups, the Keurig K cup kind of thing, that type of solution. And the problem is there’s no good way to do that with actual good fresh roasted coffee. It’s usually really really old, really low-quality coffee that, you know, needs a lot of cream or sugar or whatever. So, we just haven’t been able to find this good portable solution because good coffee is fresh ground and then, you know, French pressed or poured over and it’s delicious when it’s like that, when it’s made how it how it is best enjoyed. And it was last last December, I ran into this product in a coffee shop and got some samples and they went to Israel. So, they were a couple months old when they went to Israel. And they like…coffee…like fresh roasted coffee…that’s a perishable product. So, the longer that you go the more bitter it’s gonna taste. And one way to mask that is to burn it, to over roast it and that’s a style. But anyway, this product was like, you know, going to last for an indefinite period of time. So, a couple of months later I’m in Israel and I took these little packages and drank my coffee and I was surprised. And, so, we did some investigation to see if you can make them for ourselves. And we can. And, so, we now have windfarm steeped coffee in the shop. They come in little packets of 10. So, 10 cups of coffee that are fresh roasted but that are portable. So, how this is portable is they are packaged…this is so cool…like a teabag. I know that sounds weird, but, you know, the filters that you use to do your drip coffee or to do your pour over coffee, the e container of coffee is made out of that material, like coffee filter material. It’s just fashioned like teabag and you steep your coffee, you dunk it in your hot water and then you let it sit however long you want, however strong you want it to be. But the thing is, the packages are nitro sealed. So, the oxygen is pushed out of them and the nitrogen is there. And, so, they are kind of frozen in time, as it were, keeping them fresh and then when you open it then the oxygen gets to use it and you use it like regular coffee and its…I mean…pretty fantastic. So, we finally have this portable solution that we can be proud of and put our name on and know that we’re serving up excellence while continuing a brand and a reminder of the valley of dry bones and the four winds of life breathing around the world. So, the steeped Windfarm coffee is now available in the Daily Audio Bible shop in the coffee and tea section. And you won’t miss it. If you go there you will see it and can read about it and look at it and hopefully enjoy it. That’s something I happen to be doing as I am speaking right now. So, go grab them while you can. They’re in the shop now.
And we have another product in the store to announce today, a product that we’ve had in the past, but a product that we have refined and that is the Daily Audio Bible journal. So, it’s been over a year since we launched the new Daily Audio Bible journals. They are beautiful. They are finally crafted. They are made out of really good paper. They are wonderful to write on. It’s something that I do every day, nearly every day of my life. And journaling has been a part of our story as a community here, I guess, just about as long as I can remember because I’ve personally been a journaler for as long as I can remember. And it just…I found myself going through the Bible, writing copious notes after every reading just, you know, learning the Bible. And, so, our first journals, it just came out of this…like, man…if this is God’s Word and God’s gonna speak then somebody ought to be taken notes, especially if it just sticks. And, so, you know, really something that speaks into your life it should be written down because we forget everything. And, so we had our first versions of the journals way back but then the last…I think beginning of last year, or late 2017, I can’t remember, but we launched these new Daily Audio Bible journals that are just really beautiful, great pencil or pen holder on them, they hold together, they lay flat, they got up a little ribbon to mark the page, like everything right. Like, just thinking, if I were making my journal that I would want to journal in, what would be in it? And that’s what we figured out and styled it and it’s got a beautiful, very subtle embossed logo from the Daily Audio Bible. It’s great. And that kind of came out of me finding the Black Wing pencils and just kind of going back to old school sharpening a pencil, writing in my own hands and just encouraging us, like, there’s something to that, there’s something tactile to that. Like, there’s is plenty of digital solutions, like there’s plenty of ways to do this, but there’s something about actually taking the time to do it and enjoying the experience of it. So, that’s kind where the Daily Audio Bible Journal came from. And, so, we had lots of them and we’ve moved through them and then earlier in this year we began kind of going, alright what would version 2.0 look like? Like what would we tweak now? And, so, we made some tweaks to the binding so that it’s just a little tighter, it’s just a little better constructed and lays flat better. So, it’s just a little more compact and holds together better and I love that. That was one of the things. And we tweaked the paper and the ink it’s printed on the paper for a little bit…for a little better experience. And, so, now journal 2.0 is available in the Daily Audio Bible Shop as well in the Lifestyle section.
So, we’ve got two new things in the store, a portable solution for Windfarm coffee, steeped coffee, and our daily to journal 2.0. Those are in the Shop now and we’re excited about them and hopefully they’re resources that will be helpful as you continue your journey through the Scriptures and as we continue our journey through life together at this point in history. So, check those things out in the Daily Audio Bible shop.
If you want to partner with the Daily Audio Bible, you can do that at dailyaudiobible.com as well. There is a link that lives on the homepage and I thank you profoundly for your partnership, profoundly and humbly. We would not be here. We would not be doing any of this if we do not do this together and I thank God that…that we do…that we do every day. So, there’s a link on the homepage. If you’re using the Daily Audio Bible app you can press the Give button in the upper right-hand corner or, if you prefer, the mailing address is PO Box 1996 Spring Hill Tennessee 37174.
And, as always, if you have a prayer request or comment, you can press the Hotline button in the app, the little red hotline button up at the top right next to the Give button between the words Daily Audio Bible and Give, that’s where the little Hotline button. So, you can press that no matter where you are in the world and reach out or there are a number of phone numbers that you can use if that’s what you prefer depending on where you are in the world. If you’re in the Americas, 877-942-4253 is the number to dial. If you’re in the UK or Europe 44-20-3608-8078 is the number to dial. And if you are in Australia or that part of the world 61-3-8820-5459 is the number to call.
And that’s it for today. I’m Brian I love you and I’ll be waiting for you here tomorrow.