I share from my time in the word and prayer for these two aims: first, that what I experienced of God this morning would encourage you in how you could experience him as well. Second, that you would be encouraged to get into God’s word and prayer for your own daily experience of God speaking to you, showing you what he is doing, and leading you to join him in his work.
I started here:
“Thus says Yahweh who made the earth, Yahweh who formed it to establish it – Yahweh is his name: Call to me and I will answer you, and will tell you great and hidden things that you have not known.”[1]
The primary focus was the wonder that Yahweh keeps urging an idolatrous and adulterous people to call on him so he can show them his goodness. He WANTS these sinful prodigals to come home and can hardly wait for someone to take him up on his invitation.
To show that this is for us as much as Israel, God includes a parallel expression in the book of James:
Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.[2]
This is addressing the church as an “adulterous people” who preferred being “a friend of the world” and an “enemy of God” to knowing God as Father, Savior and Friend.[3]
Again, the fact that this is in God’s Book means it is God initiating restored relationship with people who were committing adultery against their relationship with him by giving their attention to a love-relationship with the world instead of a love-relationship with God.
Which brings me back to the central text of this last month or so:
“And without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.”[4]
Without faith, we have no desire to draw near to God, so we can’t please him because we don’t want to be with him. And, while he looks on us in our idolatry (we have so many other things we turn to), he gives us the whole chapter 11 of Hebrews to show us how much better it is to walk with him by faith.
Which reminded me of one more verse God ministered to my heart this week:
I will take you to be my people, and I will be your God, and you shall know that I am Yahweh your God, who has brought you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians. (Exodus 6:7)
God constantly showed his people his supremacy over the gods of the nations. In this case, he announced to Moses and the people that he would “take” Israel out of Egypt. None of the Egyptian gods would be able to stop him, and Pharaoh himself would not be able to stand in his way.
The aim in this was that God’s people would “know that I am Yahweh your God”. They didn’t know him that way because the whole generation had grown up in Egyptian slavery with no evidence of the activity of God among them. But when they finally cried out to Yahweh for help, God acted on the covenant he had made with Abraham their father, just as he promised.
Together, all these things urge me to trust the Only True God, Yahweh, through faith in his Only True Son, Jesus, no matter how many powers or names or governments seek to stand against them. I only have to call out to God our Father in heaven through faith in Jesus and the Triune God will lead me into the wonders of their will and their work.
And that is exactly why I
feel I have something to share today.
© 2020 Monte Vigh ~ Box 517, Merritt, BC, V1K 1B8
Email: in2freedom@gmail.com
Unless otherwise noted, Scriptures are from the
English Standard Version (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. ESV® Text
Edition: 2016. Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of
Good News Publishers.)
[1] Jeremiah 33:2-3 (I use “Yahweh” instead of “the LORD” since God is
very deliberately giving us his personal name, not a title).
[2] James 4:7-8
[3] James 4:1-6
[4] Hebrews 11:6
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