Today is Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009; Karen's Korner #1582
Excerpts from I Corninthians chapter 10, The Message Bible:
"Remember our history, friends, and be warned.
All our ancestors were led by the providential Cloud
and taken miraculously through the Sea.....
But just experiencing God's wonder and grace didn't seem to mean much--
most of them were defeated by temptation during the hard times in the desert,
and God was not pleased.
The same thing could happen to us.
We must be on guard so that we never get caught up in wanting our way as they did.
And we must not turn our religion into a circus as they did....
We must never try to get Christ to serve us instead of us serving Him;
they tried it;
and God launched an epidemic of poisonous snakes....
These are all warning markers - DANGER - in our history books,
written down so that we don't repeat their mistakes...
we are just as capable of messing it up as they were.
Don't be so naive and self-confident.
You're not exempt.
You could fall flat on your face as easily as anyone else.
Forget about self-confidence, it's useless.
Cultivate God-confidence.
Looking at it one way, you could say,
'Anything goes.
Because of God's immense generosity and grace...
But the point is not to just get by.
We want to live well,
but our foremost efforts should be to
help others live well."
BiBle Commentary: Today's pressures make it easy to ignore or forget the lessons of the past. But Paul cautions us to remember the lessons the Israelites learned about God so we can avoid repeating their errors. The key is to study the Bible regularly so that these lessons become continual reminders of how God wants us to live. We need not repeat their mistakes.
As followers of Christ we must give him our total allegiance. We cannot, as Paul explains eat 'both at the Lord's table and Satan's'. Are we trying to lead two lives, following the desires of both Christ and the crowd? The Bible says we can't do both at the same time.
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A forwarded message yesterday from Darcy Robb:
(minus the 'forward to otherss' and 'deletes')
Look back and thank God.
Look forward and trust God.
Look around and serve God.
Look within and find God!"
*
God closes doors no man can open;
God opens doors no man can close.
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