Deuteronomy 23:1-25:19, Luke 10:13-37, Psalms 75:1-10, Proverbs 12:12-14
Today is the 3rd day of April welcome to the Daily Audio Bible I am Brian and today and every day it’s a wonderful to be here with you as we gather around the Global Campfire and settle in get cozy and let the Scriptures wash into our lives. We have this little oasis that we create or each other every day known as the Global Campfire. This is a safe place. There’s all kinds of things going on in the world, all kinds of things to make us anxious, depressed, or any other kind of thing that is unpleasant, but this is a place that we can come and leave all that outside the circle. We…we can go get it. We can have all…of all of it. It’s there waiting for us, but when we come into this place and exhale and know that this is a good place and that this is a safe place, we can relax and allow God to speak into our hearts, which may change our perspective when we go to pick all that stuff up. So, it is wonderful to have this place and it’s wonderful to be in it with you today as we take the next step forward. And our next step always leads us back to where we left off. And today we will move forward in the book of Deuteronomy with chapters 23, 24 and 25 today.
Commentary:
Okay. Let’s go into the gospel of Luke for a couple of minutes. When we were reading through the gospel of Luke yesterday we learned that there is a cost that…that it is a sacrifice to follow Jesus and we were informed that we are like lambs among wolves and that we have to learn to shake the dust off and move forward because we are light in the darkness and the darkness doesn’t really want anything to do with the light. And, so, that can kind of leave us looking at our…our spiritual faith journey and realizing this is a losing game, like I am signing up for rejection. I am signing up for persecution. I am signing up for what I’m not prepared for. But as we move in today…into today’s reading from the gospel we kind of begin to get perspective. So, Jesus says in our reading from today, “the person who hears you hears Me and the person who rejects you rejects Me and the person who rejects Me rejects the One who sent Me.” The way that this brings some perspective to us is that as we carry the light within and as the message of the gospel spills out of our lives with words and with deeds and this is met with rejection it’s not about us. We are not the ones being rejected. We’re not going around the countryside asking people to accept us as their personal savior. We’re not asking anybody to follow in our footsteps. So, when the message of the light in the darkness, the gospel is rejected or scorned, made fun of or ridiculed the rejection isn’t about us. According to Jesus, the person who rejects the light is rejecting God. And, so, when we find ourselves having put ourselves out there to do the right thing and be Jesus in a situation and that gets met with rejection or scorn or ridicule or marginalization or anything. Like a typical…typical response for us would be to go lick our wounds, to go get quiet in a quiet depressing sort of place and lick our wounds and cry out to God, I did what you asked me to do and all they did was make fun. All they did was marginalize. I did what you asked me to do, and I got rejected. What Jesus is saying is that they are rejecting God, not you. It’s not about you. And, so, while we’re licking our wounds and crying out to God about what we had to face because we did the right thing we should, at the same time understand that there is one and it’s the one that we’re talking to that actually has to face the sting of rejection. So often we are in the presence of the Lord, asking Him to fix something, make something better for us. Have we ever gone into the Lord’s presence with empathy, understanding what He faces with humanity on a daily basis in terms of being rejected. I mean think about it for a minute. God gets rejected millions of times on any given day. Many of those times by His own people, and then His own people come crying to Him for Him to make their lives better while He sits being rejected continually. An I’m not trying to draw a picture of a depressed God up in heaven who’s all…like I’m not trying to do any of that. I’m trying to open up our own hearts because we use God in all kinds of situations but have we ever thought that He has a heart, that He actually has feelings towards us and He loves us? We preach this all day every day, He loves us. If you love somebody you feel something toward them. You are committed and loyal to them and in this case you’re willing to die for them. He cares for us. Do we care for Him? I mean this is an act of worship, obviously, but even so often in our worship we are worshiping and telling the story of how big and powerful our God is and how He’s going to destroy whatever is in our way. So often our view of God is that He’s all-powerful and we’re His children and He loves us and all He wants to do is be Santa Claus when in truth, He loves the children of the earth and we are His children and we are to reveal Him to the children who do not know Him. And if that is met with rejection it’s not rejection of us, its rejection of the one who sent us. Let’s take that on board. Let’s take that with us today. In fact let’s take that with us from now on because it brings us perspective in a world full of darkness.
Prayer:
Holy Spirit, come into that. We begin by first apologizing. It’s true. We have often cried out to You in our pain when it was You who were suffering rejection, and we just personalized it and made it about us and that makes us realize how often we really do that, how much of our conversation is about how we need something from You. And You seem to love that we would come to You with our needs, but so often we don’t come to You with gratefulness and a grateful heart, understanding, we signed up for this and that we are about Your work in this world revealing light in dark places. And, so, come Holy Spirit and certainly minister to our hearts, but also change our perspective and may we minister to Your heart. We love You, Lord. We don’t want to be the person that rejects what You are doing. We don’t want to be the person that just uses You. We want to be the person that is Your child and collaborates in Your work in this world. Show us how to do that by changing the way that we see things. We ask this in the name of Jesus. Amen.
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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.
Community Prayer and Praise:
Coming soon…