THE ONE YEAR BIBLE CLUB

I was reading Proverbs today with a little trepidation. Thinking, "I hope I'm not a fool?".  What a negative discourse this is. If the first four books of the New Testament are called "The Gospels" ie: Good News, what would we call Proverbs 26?  As you are reading through this proverb, you don't get the sense that there is much hope for a fool. It's sad because I know a few fools and so do you! Not only does it pretty accurately describe a fool, it also describes or alludes as to how we may try to work with a fool and you know what, I have tried them all and true to this proverb, the results have been as stated in the scripture. Let's look at the idea of "honoring a fool". Verse 8 deals with that. You may ask "who would honor a fool?", I have!  And obviously others have too; otherwise it would not be addressed in our text. I honored a fool in hopes that in honoring them, it would encourage them to change and just like it says, it ...

 Wow, I wish I felt like that in the morning! Somebody has had way too much Java this morning. "It is good to give thanks to the lord, to sing praises to the Most High. It is good to proclaim your unfailing love in the morning, your faithfulness in the evening, accompanied by a ten-stringed instrument, a harp, and the melody of a lyre. You thrill me,Lord, with all you have done for me! I sing for joy because of what you have done." Somebody got off to a good start this morning, was it you? We're waking up tired, very tired. We're thinking about that dead end job we have to go to everyday, wishing we would win the lottery so we could quit, oh but we don't play the lottery, great, then we'll never get out of that dead end job. We still don't know how the rent is going to get paid, who's going to be able to fix the car, how our daughter is going to get out of this crazy relationship, how you’re going to deal with your husband being laid off, etc..etc…and ...

Certainly, many of life's tragedies we are not going to get an explanation on. We will have to wait until we get on the other side of eternity before we can any reasonable explanation. Right now, all we can do is grieve and maintain our faith in God, when it seems hard, in the midst of tragedy. The end of the story that we read today is that Gedaliah is murdered and the rest of the Jews that are with him are slaughtered. First question we are going to ask is going to be, "where was God?", not "why did Ishmael do such a wicked thing?" No, the 1st question is always, "where was God?" However this is one story that we do get privy insight into, unlike most other tragedies, in this story we get to see the whole story unfold. It starts with a solemn warning to Gedaliah. Johanan is able to find out (now how was Johanan able to find out except by divine orchestration or you can say "coincidence" but I won't). So Johanan is able to find out, by d...

 This is only proof to me, for what I've often thought was the case; and that is, often we don’t offer the same common courtesies to one another, that we often offer to those whom we are not even that close with. Why is that? Is it because we take each other for granted? What Paul is saying almost doesn't make sense, “if the masters are believers that is no excuse for being disrespectful….they should work “all the harder” because their masters are believers” I definitely would agree with that. How about you? Why is it that sometimes are poorest performance is what we do for one another or what we do for the church. Often someone has to come in behind the previous person and re-do what that person did because it was done with such a poor effort. We are short with each other, rude and inconsiderate. Paul notices this, he realizes that sometimes the fact that we are dealing with another Christian will not bring the best out of us, but the worse. If we were dealing with a sinner or...

 We know Jeremiah as The Prophet, but we don’t know Jeremiah, as The Trickster! Jeremiah is entering into some under cover work here, for God. Jeremiah is being used by God to try to trick this good folks into drinking some wine. These believers really have something solid working in their lives that we would be wise to envy and want for ourselves and our families. This is my personnel opinion, but who cares about my personnel opinion. What’s even more note worthy, is that this is God’s opinion too! Can you imagine yourself sitting in the presence of the great prophet Jeremiah and he says, “come now, sit and have a cup of wine”.  Unless Jeremiah is acting very odd or suspicious, I would think, “this must be okay” after all, Jeremiah is a man of God if there ever was. If Jeremiah says, it’s okay, let’s drink up!! These people, the Recabites have an amazing ability to not allow themselves to be influenced by others, no matter how much clout or status, those people have or in thi...

    There's nothing wrong with being moved by emotion and then making pledges, promises or commitments based off of that. Is it possible that we could be manipulated by others, of course, there's always that chance. Are some people mentally or emotionally week and very susceptible to people with strong personalities, of course, that's where we get cults from. You have one strong, charismatic, type-A personality who preys and draws upon the weaker to follow him by his manipulation. So now that we got all that out of the way, for the rest of us, that are able to guard ourselves, and make sensible decisions, while being moved with emotion, we have an obligation to follow through on those. Even more so when we have been moved upon to "do good" and we do it not. For one reason or another, the people make a decision to release the Hebrew slaves and not for no apparent reason either. God had established the year of Jubilee, where all slaves and debts were released. Bankr...