Tag: Children of Israel

Recount your blessings!

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George Whittenby George Whitten

Joshua 23:14 Behold, this day I am going the way of all the earth. And you know in all your hearts and in all your souls that not one thing has failed of all the good things which the LORD your God spoke concerning you. All have come to pass for you; not one word of them has failed.

As Joshua led the children of Israel into the promised land it seemed that God had given them an impossible assignment — to conquer a foreign and hostile land with fortified cities and armies greater than their own. They had to go forth only on the basis of God’s promise. They had to walk by faith and not by sight!

How did Joshua lead them to walk by faith? He reminded them that God has never failed them. And he encouraged them to them focus on the promises of God!

You too can rely on God’s faithfulness today! Are you in the midst of a crisis? Are high mountains facing you today? If so, we want to remind you of all the miraculous ways God has worked in your life in the past! Though we often forget our promises to Him, He will never forget His promises to us! Let’s spend the day recounting God’s victories and determine to exercise faith for the trials we face today!

Your family in the Lord with much agape love

by George Whitten

Are We Learning?

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A.W. Tozerby A.W. Tozer

Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. Matthew 11:29

When we become Christians we enter the school of Christ. We come under the direct tutelage of the Holy Spirit and should move normally upward by stages toward spiritual perfection. But the truth is most of us do not.

When the children of Israel came out of Egypt they became students in God’s school of experience, but they were slow to learn and sometimes they did not learn at all or forgot at critical moments all that they had learned. The Old Testament is helpful reading, not because of any worthy qualities it reveals about Israel but because in it we see the great kindness and long-suffering of God toward a dull and wrongheaded people who managed to go through school without learning anything.

Because Israel could not or would not learn from experience they were at various times defeated, oppressed, dispossessed, and at last they were rejected outright and dispersed throughout the world. The presence of Jews in every corner of the world is a witness to this.

That Israel should have learned and did not is no proof that they were more obtuse than the rest of us; it proves rather that they were very much like us. Instead of smugly condemning a nation for its folly we had better consider ourselves lest we also fall. For the record of the church is no better than that of Israel. Before the last book of the New Testament had been finished the church had started through the same cycle of learning and forgetting, rising and falling, sinning and repenting that had marked Israel in earlier times. And after the passing of 1,900 years we are still at it.

by A.W. Tozer