Day 6
Devotional Point 4 today: there can be no lasting success and significance without Him…
Scripture 4 today: “be careful that you do not forget the Lord, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.” Deuteronomy 6:12 NIV
Reflection 4 today: this whole 6th chapter of Deuteronomy is about the process of entering the land of Canaan and all the things that would happen to them, but the issue for them would be remembering what they had been rescued from. Often we fail to remember what like was like trying to make sense of a world without Jesus. Without Him, it doesn’t make sense and never will. Because we do forget, we need to establish disciplines of remembering, which leads to praising…
Question for the day: what are you doing today to remember?
Other Notes: I hope you have enjoyed this quick trip through the Holy Land, nest we want to look at the words we speak for a series called “Speak To Your Mountain” invites out this morning…
Day 5
Day 5 gives us insight into the very first missionary outpost of the young church, Antioch…
Devotional Point 4 today: God “does not show favoritism but accepts from every nation the one who fears him…
Scripture 4 today: “When he arrived and saw what the grace of God had done, he was glad and encouraged them all to remain true to the Lord with all their hearts.” Acts 11:23 NIV
Reflection 4 today: Antioch was the first actual city where the first actual mission of the gospel landed. It is the present day site of Antalya in Turkey and is right on the border with Syria. It was at the center of all the trade routes East, and became the center of all moral decadence in the ancient world. To that the first missionaries were sent. They had no Bible, no backing from the “home church”, nothing, “just” the Holy Spirit, God’s grace, and the teaching of the early Apostles. They didn’t need much else…
Day 4
Day 4 gives us the foundation for making every-day work: pray always…
Devotional Point 4 today: as long as we have Christ, we always have something for which we can be grateful
Scripture 4 today: “give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.” 1 Thessalonians 5:18 NIV
Reflection 4 today: like so many Christian disciplines, prayer is something that we seem to want to turn into a process we control. Jesus gave us the template for her to pray every day, we just need to stick through that and follow it. However, once you understand that we have been instructed to pray “constantly“, it makes it into a very different thing. Always is always. We don’t need a special meeting or a special circumstance just get on with it “always“…
Day 3
Day 3 delivers the most basic foundation of our walks with God, He does not do sharing…
Devotional Point 4 today: We serve a God who is not interested in sharing His throne…
Scripture 4 today: “For if, while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!” Romans 5:10 NIV
Reflection 4 today: we were fully reconciled when we became Christians, but there is a lot of life to be lived between then and our final reconciliation when we go to heaven. So, the language here is extremely important in that we are not just “saved“, but we are being saved daily from all of the things around us that want to destroy us. He is saving us daily to be “like him“, “with him”, and to “do what he did”; the three stages of Talidim, what we were called to…
Day 2
Day 2 digs into the spirit that empowers the return from exile…
Devotional Point 4 today: the same Spirit who empowered Ezekiel stands ready to empower you as well…
Scripture 4 today: “I came to the exiles who lived at Tel Aviv near the Kebar River. And there, where they were living, I sat among them for seven days—deeply distressed.” Ezekiel 3:15 NIV
Reflection 4 today: for Ezekiel, becoming promoted to the role of “prophet “was not exactly a promotion, the end fate of almost all the prophets in the Bible was quite violent death and destruction. The priests had to take care of the day-to-day ministry to the people and the prophets were held up to tell the actual truth about what people were actually doing. I have repeatedly learned the lesson that most of the world is not very interested in the actual truth about what they are actually doing.
Day 1
Day 1 starts out with the geographical reference to Jerusalem, where it all begins for us…
Devotional Point 4 today: He’s not here, He is risen…
Scripture 4 today: ““This is what the Sovereign Lord says: This is Jerusalem, which I have set in the center of the nations, with countries all around her.” Ezekiel 5:5 NIV
Reflection 4 today: this story in Ezekiel starts out as a long prophecy that he received as a captive along with all Israel in Babylon. They had committed, as a nation, the most hideous of crimes and abominations, but God still loved them and still wants the re-shape them and bring them back to His own home for them. And Jerusalem will be at the center of that home. We are pretty much like the symbol of Israel, we are being called back to the home God has for us…
