Leviticus 7:28-9:6, Mark 3:31-4:25, Psalms 37:12-29, Proverbs 10:5
Today is the 19th day of February, welcome to the Daily Audio Bible I am Brian it’s great to be here with you. Coming to you from Ashdod, ancient Philistine stronghold city here in the land of Israel where we will be launching out today on the first day of our pilgrimage. So, super excited about all of that, super excited to share the photos and video and just talk about what we’re seeing and doing as we begin our adventure. But…well…not a lot has happened yet, but we’ll talk about it at the end but we are at the beginning and we have come around this Global Campfire to allow God’s word to wash into our lives and speak to us today. So, we’re reading from the New International Version this week. Leviticus chapter 7 verse 28 through 9 verse 6 today.
Commentary:
Okay, so, in the Gospel of Mark we had the story, a farmer went out to so, right, and he throws seed and it lands on all different kinds of ground and this is a parable that Jesus is telling and we’ve encountered this parable while we were going to the book of Matthew. Matthew, Mark, and Luke are this synoptic Gospels and so there’s a lot of shared material and pretty much all biblical scholars agree that the source material would be Mark, the gospel that we are reading as the earliest of the Gospels. So, Jesus talks about this farmer throwing seed. And, so, we can assume that there’s nothing wrong with seed, like the seed is good seed and it was scattered evenly but it was scattered evenly over different kinds of ground. So…so the seed is good, but the hope of the harvest was in the soil. So, in Jesus parable the seed is the word of God and the soil is the human heart. So, right there we see that a collaboration is required, the human and the divine collaborate in God’s kingdom. So, we’ve been at this, what…seven…are we seven weeks in yet…six weeks…I don’t have a calendar in front of me and I’m still…still trying to keep up with what day this is as we launch this pilgrimage in the land of Israel. But we’ve been at this, we’ve established a rhythm, this is a daily thing we do. So, at this point it’s a good time to take in Jesus message and apply it to ourselves because harvest is a theme throughout the Scriptures and harvest is a theme throughout our lives and we want the harvest in our lives but we can’t expect a harvest that is going to yield 100 times over if the soil of our hearts is…isn’t appropriate for that. So, in this analogy the…the word of God, like this is what we do, this is what we’re here for every day. So, this seed is getting thrown out, the word of God all over this community every day and if it only lands on the surface it’s gonna get snatched away almost immediately. And don’t we know that? Like haven’t it we witnessed that. We might not have thought of it in these terms, but don’t we already know this is true and if our hearts are stony and cold and hard there’s nowhere for the word of God to take root at all. And if we’re just obsessed by the worries of life or we’re just chasing wealth or some kind of goal or desire, well then according to Jesus, the seed has been thrown and it’s good seed but it’s fallen on a thorny ground that will choke out the word of God. So, this is as good a time as any to start thinking about what kind of soil we might be and what kind of soil we might be cultivating in our hearts. It…it might be time to do some gardening.
Prayer:
Jesus, we invite You into that as we hear Your words and consider what kind of soil we are. This was what You wanted us to think about. And, so, we are thinking about it. And it’s interesting because we can probably find patches of all these different kinds of ground as we walk the terrain of our own hearts. It’s likely that we can find places that are thriving. But it’s also likely that we can find places where the word has been snatched away or where it’s rocky ground and there’s no place for it to take hold or we’re…we’re just obsessed with something else and distracted and so it’s choked out. What we want to be is good soil because what we want to experience is the full harvest and to be a laborer for the good harvest in the lives of others. And, so, we invite Your Holy Spirit to cause us to continually come back to this today, to come back to our own hearts, to come back to its terrain. What does it look like? Show us the places that need tending. Come Holy Spirit we ask in the name of Jesus. Amen.
Announcements:
dailyaudiobible.com is the website, home base, where you find out what’s going on around here. And today will be our first day of…of touring in the land of Israel. And I won’t really be able to report back much until things happen. So, I’ll get to tell you about today tomorrow but yeah, I can tell you about yesterday. Yeah….we got in and we went mudding and went out to a Philistine archaeological site called Akron, a place that I’ve been trying to get to over three different seasons. And lots of people were like, “why would you want to go there? Like, there’s nothing to see there. Why would you want to go there?” But…well that started out simply by trying to document and a photograph and take film of the…the Philistine strongholds mentioned in the Bible except for Gaza. And, so, we got three of those which is Gath and Ashdod and Ashkelon out. But the last two are modern cities. So, accessibility is relatively easy. This has been hard to get to. So, yeah once we were thwarted it was like, okay it’s on. And then we were thwarted again in a different year and it was like, okay I don’t care if there’s nothing to see there, I…I am going to see that place. And, so, finally mission accomplished and…and then so we got to Ashdod and got all situated in a hotel and had just a fantastic dinner last night just getting familiar, just getting to see each other. It’s all gonna become a family and so just making that first acquaintance. Jetlagged everybody, you know, just people all over the map. Some have come in early, got acclimated, some are just like, just getting in and delirious with it all but high on adrenaline. But it’s always fun to be there on the Mediterranean coast and just realize “holy moly I’m in the holy land. Like that’s the Mediterranean Sea. This is going to be epic.” And, so, that’s kind of where we are and what we’re feeling and we’ll be heading southward today out into the wilderness, which is where so much of the biblical stories happen. And, so, we’ll be heading into the wilderness today making our way down to the furthest southern tip of Israel, a city called Eilot, which sits on the shores of the Red Sea. So, thank you. Thank you for your continued prayers over everything from the vehicles to the technology to health to whether to…to jetlag and just everything that goes into this. We’ll be kind of setting a rhythm for our days and we’ll fall into that rhythm, but this is kind of day one. And, so, we’re just getting used to the fact that we’re here at all. And, so, we…we…we gratefully, gratefully thank you for your prayers.
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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.