Comments on April 5th One Year Bible ReadingsTypePad2017-04-05T05:40:44ZOne Year Biblehttps://www.oneyearbibleblog.com/tag:typepad.com,2003:https://www.oneyearbibleblog.com/2017/04/april-5th-one-year-bible-readings/comments/atom.xml/Ramona commented on 'April 5th One Year Bible Readings'tag:typepad.com,2003:6a00d8341c5ebf53ef01b8d27430ba970c2017-04-05T05:44:04Z2017-04-05T06:12:05ZRamonaDeuteronomy 28:1-68 Jesus said in Matthew chapter 7, 14 but the gateway to life is small, and the road is...<p>Deuteronomy 28:1-68</p>
<p>Jesus said in Matthew chapter 7, 14 but the gateway to life is small, and the road is narrow, and only a few ever find it.</p>
<p>Reading this chapter one can see that in the total number of verses, 68 with 14 (20%) dedicated to blessings and the remaining verses, all fifty-six of them (80%) focusing on the curses that will come upon you and overtake you if you don’t obey. WOW!</p>
<p>You can see why God constantly reiterates the Laws and the blessings of obey or the consequences of disobeying. Failure to listen carefully and take heed takes an enormous toll on the law-breaker and the descendents.</p>
<p>Let him who has ears to hear let him hear!</p>
<p>Luke 11:14-36<br />
24 "When an evil spirit leaves a person, it goes into the desert, searching for rest. But when it finds none, it says, `I will return to the person I came from.' 25 So it returns and finds that its former home is all swept and clean. 26 Then the spirit finds seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they all enter the person and live there. And so that person is worse off than before."</p>
<p>I’m not sure if my understanding and the application of that understanding is correct with this text but I see each and every person going through the Bible in a year with Mike as one who is filling their “home” with the Word of God so that the evil spirit that has been swept out of the house will not find it empty when it returns with his friends.</p>
<p>When we desire the Word of God more than our necessary food, I believe nothing but nothing can enter us that is not of God because there is no space for anything else to enter. Think “stuffed.”</p>
<p>Psalm 77:1-20</p>
<p>This Psalmist poured his heart out to God telling God what he thought, that he had been forgotten. But at each interlude or at each “selah” the writer takes time to reflect and then remembers what God has done in the past and states in the closing verse,<br />
20 You led your people along that road like a flock of sheep,<br />
with Moses and Aaron as their shepherds.</p>
<p>This sets him up to raise the level of his expectation to receive from God.</p>
<p>So often we get caught up in the battlefield of living that we forget what God has done in the past. We forget that God doesn’t change and what He did then He will do now, for us. It is good to rehearse in our own hearing the things of God because faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God. (Romans 10:17) This sort of ties into Deuteronomy 28.</p>
<p>Proverbs 12:18</p>
<p>I think this little Proverb must really be studied because this seems to say at first glance that if hurtful words are spoken they must be bad. The last word in the Proverb, in the NLT, is the word healing. Hmmm, I’ve been hospitalized, five times, two for childbirth, one to have an ovarian cyst removed, once for a bad spider bite that became infected almost to the bone, and once to have the procedure that Condoleezza Rice just had a couple of months ago.</p>
<p>Some of the procedures that had to be done to get to the problem were painful. When someone has open-heart surgery, they take a saw and cut through your chest, pull the back the bone they just cut through, and then work on your heart. The process to get to your heart can be more painful and more dangerous than what they have to do to your heart to fix it. In the hands of a skilled Physician the risk of surgery is decreased and the more the surgeon operates the more skillful he or she becomes. However, if the auto mechanic performs the operation, well, your dead.</p>
<p>I guess I’m saying that cutting remarks may not be so cutting if they are directed by the Holy Spirit to fix an underlying problem. There are words that have been spoken to me that caused great pain because the words spoken pointed to truth about myself that I didn’t want to deal with. Cutting to get to the truth always hurts.</p>
<p>All truth is confrontational, especially the truth about oneself. I think this Proverb is speaking about the motivation behind the words that are spoken into a person’s life and the life skills wisdom has given the speaker to bring healing with the use of their words.</p>
<p>Grace and peace,<br />
Ramona<br />
</p>