You Can Build Better Family Traditions
I know many people who have become Christians from non-Christian family backgrounds. They want to live a life honouring the true God but need to set up new family traditions and ways of living. What does it look like to be a Christian husband? What does it look like to live a single life that is faithful to God? These are questions their parents never asked or attempted to answer, yet they are trying to do these things day by day. And, by God’s grace, they are setting up ways of life that might well not only influence themselves but their families and those around them.
Every family falls into patterns of doing things. It can be something minor, like placing the cups in the cupboard upside down when you have washed and dried them. Or it might be something major, like a pattern of responding to disagreements with anger or resentment with little forgiveness or grace. Some families value sport above all other things, while others value reading with every member of the family engaged in a book of their choice.
There can be something very positive about family traditions. But there can also be something terribly destructive. Following other religions often continues for generations. Big issues like drunkenness and violence also have a tendency to be passed on from parents to children.
If you’ve grown up in a destructive family tradition, or a family who have followed another god than the true God, you might feel negative or despondent about it. All of us are a product, to a significant degree, of the way we have been brought up. Yet there is always hope; you can change the path set before you by your parents.
We see this in the latter chapters of 2 Kings. The family line of kings in Judah was almost entirely negative. Most kings tolerated the high places where people worshipped other gods. Some of the kings went far further than this, actively following other gods and persecuting the prophets of the true God. What hope was there that a child born into this kind of family would end up living a faithful life?
Well, we do see this on a couple of occasions. Hezekiah was the son of Ahaz, a man who built a major altar in the temple to another god.
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Memory is More Important Than Learning
In the Christian life we are called to remember that regardless of how forsaken things might seem to the eyes, the heart knows different. We know that whether we are high or low, safe or in prison, to give glory to the Lord.
Christopher J.H. Wright has described the book of Deuteronomy as the heartbeat of the Old Testament. Along with Isaiah and the Psalms it is the most quoted book by Jesus and the Apostles. It is filled with electric passages that describe the love of Jehovah for His covenant people. There is so much gospel flowing from the fingers of God’s prophet as he writes that the book would not be out of place in the least in the New Testament. Just as Christ has His Beatitudes so too does Moses. With this it also has in its scope a number of warnings from God to the Israelites concerning how they are to behave and believe once they cross the Jordan and go to conquer the Promised Land. Over the next several months we are going to be spending time meditating on what we at Bethany can learn from this portion of Holy Scripture. In the Hebrew the title is literally “These Are the Words”. Our English name comes from the Greek translation of the Old Testament called the Septuagint. There the authors call it, “deuteronomion”, which means the second law. It gets that from the fact that a good portion of it is a retelling of the book of the covenant in Exodus 21-23. There are some added thoughts from Moses to help the generation which had come of age in the Wilderness understand with clearer minds the requirements God provides His people to follow. As we walk through each of the sections every Lord’s Day the goal of the sermon series will be to grow our appreciation for the beauty of God’s law, His wisdom, and how He cares for His Church. Our LORD is as interested in preparing us for our entrance into the Heavens as He was the Israelites to cross the Jordan.
In our first sermon from Deuteronomy we are going to hear a call from Moses to give to the LORD in act of worship the first fruits of the harvests that come from the initial crop which will be produced after the Canaanites, Amalekites, and others are defeated by Joshua and God’s army. As part of his testimony to the Israelites Moses majors on helping the people understand that everything that they now have is a gift of Jehovah. Everything they do in the present and in the future is to be informed by the fact that He has brought their current wealth out of His good will and love for them. There is one particular part of the ceremony of the feast that is worth noting in this morning’s worship and prayer help.
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Why are there Differences in Grace?
Why does the Lord keep or make these gradations and differences in His way of dealing to His people? You would think it would be much better for God to give a large stock of faith, love, patience, etc., to all His people, and that this would be more for their comfort than when they are kept at such a great distance from Him, and with such a scanty measure of gifts and graces.
We may think so, but He is much wiser than we.
To Enhance the Fellowship of the Saints
The Lord has resolved to give out diverse administrations to the body of which He Himself is the Head. He wants His body to have different members, and He wants them to serve Him with different qualifications. In the body He wants eyes, hands, feet, etc. And yet they are only the one complete body! They are still just the one communion of saints. But this would not be possible if they were all alike. “You know more than I do,” says one, “and have greater understanding in the matters of God.” “Well,” says another, “but I love more than you do. You think you would do more for Christ than I would do, but it may be if there was something to do for the cause of Christ I would fight better than you would for all that.”
To Make Us Value Christ’s Intercession More
By this varied manner of His administration, the Lord keeps the ransom still in request, and the intercession of Christ in heaven still in request. For if we had it in our own hand, Christ would soon be out of work for all the employment we would give Him, and we would soon lose respect to the ransom. But now when infirmities appear from day to day it keeps the ransom still precious to the soul. -
The Truth of God’s Word in Judgment
While God can set a specific time for His judgment to come upon certain men or cities (Genesis 7:4; Jonah 3:4); ordinarily, God does not promise a year, a decade, or a lifetime of opportunity to repent and embrace Christ by faith for salvation. The time to repent, believe, and be saved is now (II Corinthians 6:1-2). For those confessing Christ, the time to obey, serve, and be a profitable servant of the Lord is today, not tomorrow. Turn from sin to the savior of sinners Jesus Christ now!
Now the king had appointed the officer on whose hand he leaned to have charge of the gate. But the people trampled him in the gate, and he died, just as the man of God had said, who spoke when the king came down to him.
So it happened just as the man of God had spoken to the king, saying, “Two seahs of barley for a shekel, and a seat of fine flour for a shekel, shall be sold tomorrow about this time in the gate of Samaria.” Then that officer had answered the man of God, and said, “Now look, if the LORD would make windows in heaven, could such a thing be?” And he said, “In fact, you shall see it with your eyes, but you shall not eat of it.”
And so it happened to him, for the people trampled him in the gate, and he died.
II Kings 7:17-20 NKJV
During 2021 these devotionals have been less frequent then in 2020 primarily as the result of our church’s focus in witnessing to the lost at abortion mills in the Atlanta area. Nearly every Saturday and occasionally on weekdays, the Word of God is proclaimed to lost souls in route to murder their own children, to the staff that work at these places, to unbelievers protesting abortion, and to passers-by.
By God’s goodness, mercy, and grace, we have had the delight of seeing many mothers turn from the intentions of their hearts and save their children. Some have come to church. More than a hundred gospel tracts have gone out to parents in route or returning from an abortion.
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