SUNSHINE!! In our neck of the woods!  Today!  Bright and spritely!  It has banished all the clouds and lightened up the moods of the people here abouts.  Well some of them are coming back, but they are the light fluffy cumulus that just add a dot of beauty to the sky.

Carla was looking forward to this today, alas, she has to work.

She is working to help out a co-worker who is on doctor’s restrictions.  This is the same person that suffered in the Rajneesh attacks in 1984 and spent several weeks in the hospital and has never fully recovered.  How much of her weakness is due to the poisoning and how much from other sources I don’t know, but I do know that it has an impact on her.

I won’t get on my soap box, but you know my feelings about unfettered individuals that think they are above our laws and will go to all lengths to get their way!  AND the foolish people that enable them.

Getting the snow tires off the Toyota today.  Because of the huge amounts of snow we had this year it lied buried under several feet of snow.  We used the “Family” 4X4 exclusively, so it was almost not worth the changing into winter tires – but ya never know and those cars have front wheel drive and under most winter conditions in our area work very well in the snow and ice.

But when the snow is above the bumper, they don’t do so well.

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“May our Lord’s sweet hand square us and hammer us, and strike off all kinds of pride, self-love, world-worship, and infidelity, so that He can make us stones and pillars in His Father’s house.”  Samuel Rutherford

Colossians 3:12 “Put on therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, longsuffering;”  KJV

There are 31,173 verses in the Bible.  In one way or another they deal with Holiness before God.  It is all about Him in the form of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, the Great three in one.  It is God’s promises of redemption through Jesus Christ – whether looking to the future as in the Old Testament, or showing the promise has been fulfilled in the New Testament.

They tell us what we can do when we turn our hearts over to our Lord, and they tell us what will happen if we do not.

There are uplifting verses, which give us great joy.

There are warning verses, which should scare the socks off of us.

There are examples of those that followed God and accomplished great things as well as those that followed God and were murdered for their faith.

There are examples of those that refused to acknowledge God and suffered the consequences of that denial.

Many of us have read the bible through, multiple times. 

Many read devotionals and the verses they are based on and try to apply that to our daily lives.

We attend Sunday School, Worship services, Bible studies and we gain new insights into God’s expectations on how we should live for Him.

Many spend hours, daily, in His Word, meditating and absorbing; talking to Him, seeking guidance and trying to focus on what He is telling us to make us better Ambassadors for Him.

Many spend hours in prayer for loved ones, those in need of prayer and the nation and world in general.

As we study His Word through the years we may read over some verses that are important but do not strike into our hearts, while at the same time other verses strike like an arrow burrowing deep and causing us to re-evaluate our life in Him.

Verses that had little relevancy in good times, or younger times take on new importance as we read them in the bad or adverse times.

Sometimes there is a theme that God is showing us, over and over again as we find ourselves, each day, studying verses that are the same pattern, the same revelation of how we should be living our lives.

When that happens we need to listen, we need to open our hearts and commune with His Holy Spirit and we need to yield to His wisdom.

It is amazing how God will use those studies – in whatever form – to get our attention and to help us become Holy before Him.  If we find we are reading the same theme, same type verses, over and over again, He is telling us that we need to strive to attain that position, that lifestyle, that obedience to God so that these expectations we read and hear can be fulfilled.

No one is perfect.

We must continually desire to improve our relationship with God and His people.

It is an act of our will.

We must continually strive to be the best follower of Him we, or anyone else, could possibly be.  (We are not in a contest with others, but all of us should strive to attain the highest level of dedication and service we are capable of having.  God is not keeping count one against another, we are not trying to score against another person, we should be striving to be at our utmost height of obedience to Him.  AND help others do the same thing.)

Our entire life is one of living for Him and there is no time to sit back on our laurels and feel we have fulfilled our responsibility to Him and can now coast.

Our missions change as our relationship with God changes, as our abilities – either physical or mental – change, but our duty to Him never changes.

The message He has been giving me the past few days all deal with the issues in this verse, “Put on therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, longsuffering;” 

And for good reason, I have a long way to go to accomplish any of it with any semblance of truly following Christ.

Lord, help me.  Remind me that as a Christian I need to take on the mantel that Christ has given all of us and show kindness, humbleness of mind and spirit, meekness and longsuffering as I deal with the things and people that come to me each day.

Later, Art (-: