MosaicRC

Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. 5 Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. 6 These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. 7 Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. 8 Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. 9 Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates. Deuteronomy 6:4-9

In chapter 18 of Genesis, God tells Abraham that he has been chosen to direct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the LORD by doing what is right and just (Genesus 18:19).  God’s call to Abraham goes out to us today.  Like Abraham, we are to teach, train, direct, or impress God’s ways to our children and/or our household, impressing on them God’s truths.  As a people that follow Jesus, our call is to be salt and light to a dark world - to live before them a life that seeks out goodness and justice.  These instructions to us are found also in Proverbs 22:6 and in Psalm 78:3-7.  It is also scattered through the New Testament.

This must be important if God has chosen to relate it to us a number of times.  If He says it once, notice what He said.  If He says it twice, pay attention.  If He says it a third time, understand it.  If He says it more than that, do all of the above and practice it.  Whether we are parents with kids at home or childless, the call is the same: take the people who are within your influence and train them up in righteousness and justice.  Let those in our influence see what it looks like to live within God’s ways.  In these uncertain times, our actions will speak louder than words.

The way we live our lives around others will impress upon their hearts what we believe.  This is a sobering call for Christians.  Hopefully we are communicating with our actions the same message we proclaim with our mouths.  Remember that God is with us, has chosen us, and will lead us.

Go out and make impressions that last,

Rod

Some say that laughter is good medicine.  Doesn’t it feel good to laugh?  There is nothing like laughing until your belly begins to hurt and your eyes are watering.  It makes all of life’s problems seem to melt away.  No question, laughing is good.  But what about scoffing?

Scoffing is laughing to yourself in disbelief about something that seems too good to be true like Abraham and Sarah laughing to themselves about God giving them a son at the ripe old ages of 90 and 99.  In Genesis 17, God reminds Abraham that a   promised son is coming through his wife Sarah.  Abraham, prostrate on the ground laughs and to himself saying, “Will a son be born to a man a hundred years old?  Will Sarah bear a child at the age of ninety?”  Then in chapter 18, Sarah, listening to the conversation between God and Abraham, hears God tell her husband that in a year he will be a father and Sarah a physical mother.  Sarah’s reply?  She laughed to herself as she thought, “After I am worn out and my master is old, will I now have this pleasure?”

I love God’s reply, “Is anything too hard for the Lord?”  If Abraham knew anything, he knew that God was able.  Was Abraham doubting God?  Maybe.  Remember it was 24 years ago when God first promised him descendants.  So when God’s timing came due, Abraham may have thought God was able but wondered if he was?  I wonder if he may have doubted himself?  I find this to be true for me; that when God calls me to something, I sometimes doubt if I am up to the challenge. But  God doesn’t doubt me for a second.  Because it is all Him.  I am only working through His strength, knowledge, abilities, timing, etc…

Wow!  Did you catch that?  Though I may doubt myself, He never doubts me… when it is His calling on my life.  It is the same for you.  So, who is calling you to whatever your doing in your life, is it working out?  When Abram and Sarai moved on their own strength with Hagar, separate from God, it failed.  But God’s plans never fail.  This will become more obvious in a couple weeks.  Stay tuned.