I've been to the Impact Worship Workshop tonight which has a lot of potential certainly. It'd be good to see some folk wanting to do drama there too though! Onto business then,
Today's readings
Exodus 35:1-36:38
Mark 7:31-8:13
Psalm 25:16-22
So Moses tells the people what God wants of them. I like how he does it though. He starts by making sure people realise that even though this will be a big task requiring a lot of effort, the people must ensure that they have time to rest and refocus on God. I know that sometimes I get caught up in work and especially something that I'm passionate about for God, and then I lose track of Him because I'm working so hard myself. God will honour our time spent just with Him as well as working for Him. And in fact look at the rest of chapter 35 and 36. The Israelites have this huge shopping list of needs and God meets those needs through moving His people to action so much so that Moses has to tell people to stop giving! Only by taking the time to spend with God can He work through us and make us do more than we ought to be capable of.
Into the New Testament we barge and Jesus is being the action man again. There's some discussion among Bible scholars as to whether the 4000 people being fed was just someone retelling the feeding of the 5000. It certainly has a very similar pattern. Most scholars think that Mark's gospel was written as Peter the disciple's recollection of his time with Jesus and so it is very brief and full of spectacular moments. Does this mean Peter got confused and told the same story twice? It's possible certainly but I think that getting hung up on that misses the fact that Jesus one way or another did this incredible thing! It's interesting to me that His miracles sometimes come easily and sometimes come with strain but always involve prayer. Jesus knows that the power He has to perform miracles is from that reflection of God we all have but His is so much brighter thanks to Him being completely God Himself.If we tap into our reflection we can also achieve the unbelievable. God can multiply our work into massive blessings or can make our lives richer with the love and happiness that comes from loving other people and living for peace. This is fantastic news surely!
Finally our Psalm finishes and it finishes with a plea for help. Usually David ends his Psalms with resolution but to me this shows that sometime our devotion and time doesn't seem to produce any end result. What we shouldn't do though is give up trying. There's 125 Psalms to go so it's clear David still had reasons to talk to God even though sometimes there didn't seem a point.
And that's your lot for today. Yesterday's song was correctly identified by Jame-us as the horrific Melanie Chisolm and is here. Questions, criticisms and comments welcome as always
Jon
facebook.com/british.hedgehog
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