Zechariah, Coming alive in 2025

 

Matthew 23:35 

• "So that upon you will fall the guilt of all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah, the son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar."   

Waking up to our condition in and under judgment and making our confession before God to undergo the changes that need to take place in our hearts is essential.   How shall we not escape if we neglect so great a salvation?  Jesus paid it all and we need to access the health and redemption and restoration that is available through grace, by faith!   Halleluia, What a Savior.

God is satisfied in His wrath, by the blood of Jesus and we are able to access that redemption. 

There is no greater resolution than to access redemption not just for a couple of days, into the new year but for eternity.   Accessing fellowship with God's people in the local church and letting God work through your personal life out into the culture in your work-life, the Church of Jesus is working and changing the world around it, one soul at a time.   

I used to be lost, now I know where I am going.  I am now running headlong into Heaven and into a Heavenly mindset.   The lostness is dissipating into the fog of yesterday and our culture is growing to reflect the new inhabitants and their new mindset!  Halleluia that God exalts His word above all His name!   Create a new spirit in me, Lord.  

Bring us alive and breathe upon the dead bones to raise them to new life for Your glory!!!

Abide with me, Lord

 Ezekiel 37  

 was, by God’s providence, part of my devotional reading today.   Tuesday, December 10, 2024.  It has the cornerstone providence of being a tremendously enigmatic passage for many reasons and I simply can’t say how many times I have referred to it, without knowing its address or context, too specifically and when I have read it I had no time to unpack it with any real profit to my soul. 

I love imagining the prophetic power of raising dead bones to life.  The relationship between the drybones arising and the life of the tribe of Judah combining with Ephraim in the renewal and restoration, struck me deeply this morning.   Somewhat, because of the turbulence and unrest in that region at present and somewhat because of the birthday of my dear Grandma being today and the remembrance of the things she suffered in cancer and early death has been a grief in my soul all these 41 years.  Couldn’t you have let her live just a couple more days to see her grandchild wed?  I ask the Lord, with no answer.  I know that “Whate'er’ My God Ordains Is Right!”  I know that God knows all and sees the beginning from the end, but it has been a haunting question, nevertheless.   Her death drove me to devour the hymnal, nearly in its entirety.

That was the last hymn that we sang together.  God didn’t let me sing to her, in her suffering to exalt her as the “wind beneath my wings”.   We were a sentimental family and her life ending was an enormous blow.  God had said a declarative NO.  She wasn’t there, at the wedding in the flesh.  I couldn’t sing to her in private after that moment and my last encounter with her was her frown of disdain that someone could consider themselves a real Christian who had no knowledge of the words of any hymn to comfort the dying soul.  I had indeed disappointed her in multiple ways.   And I would rise to the occasion and never let that be said of me again, with many friends who coached and assisted me swimming that deep channel of my soul, through a lifetime.

As friends, we sat in the pew together and sang in congregational singing and talked about the blessing of that hymn in our life situations.  As we traversed the winding paths of young married life and mothering, with numerous trials of health and finance, etc. we found comfort in the hymns and committing them to memory.  

One dear friend had an infirmity that was affecting her sight and she was finding comfort that she would be able to sing the hymns, just the same, if it were God’s good pleasure to render her blind.   That was just one example of the faith that we enjoyed and the unity of the Spirit, to feel God knitting our hearts through a common love of the historic hymns of the Church.

Today’s devotions showed me my place in those dry bones being raised to life by the breath of God being blown into them, to glorify God in this short sojourn.

Thank you God, for your entering into my grief walk and growing my soul’s resolve to be strengthened to know You in the vicissitudes. Amen! 

Book reading. the Life of John Flavel

 41 minutes of the book The life of John Flavel.

John Flavel

God sees

 Borrowed Breath

Borrowed Sight

I Sing the mighty power of God…

Mountains rise by his power

All of the people who borrow breath from the Lord has been my meditation, but the borrowed other portions of life have illuded my meditation in that hymn until this morning when it sounded like the Apelridge group sounded like they said sight instead of breath.

We do borrow sight from you Lord.

Breath seems so essential and it most certainly is but sight and the other senses are also borrowed from God.

Ezekiel reading today was God taking him into the secretest of places.  A hole in a tree and a door behind that, that he had to use effort to open to see the reasons for the very drastic measures it seemed that God had taken and was about to take against his beloved children of Israel.   He loves them and it looked like a very public rebuffing of their relationship.   Look at the walls, Ezekiel.  God told him.  God never does anything without clearly relating his reasons to his people.  God does not cast off his dearest forever, but he does take very strict measures to reprove and correct the errors. 

This was Ezekiels discovery and he had to find the words to express God’s intention to correct very drastically, but also to reconcile.   Amazing grace of God for his covenants that he takes very seriously.  He sees that which is above the lines of vision and that which is behind closed doors and inside a tree, under the ground and deep in a cave.   My heart and mind carry crevices of despicable thoughts and intentions and Jesus paid the price for my sins, but my behaviors will be reproved and God is always reconcilable, in our souls dirtiest state.  He is reaching for us to clean us up!  Hallelujah, what a Savior.

Meditations

 Waking up to the new aggressiveness of Satan to plan out our thinking.

Who tells me to do what I do?   God’s word is my authority, but the world is directing me to maximize time constraints.

Is efficiency the constant connection to information?

Is your thinking impeded by 16 seconds or a whole day apart from the media, whether right or left leaning?

Can you take thoughts captive if you are always engaged?  Wake up to your own captivity.  Wake up to your sleeping at the wheel.   You are a robovehicle, directed by the great unseen “ISH”.  SqueemISH, are you about your attachment?  Try to disconnect and see what happens.

WHo is the Nebby, pulling the strings of your anticipations and of your heart throbs?   Are you submitting to God in your knowledge?  Do you start your day in His care?  Is your computer and your social media posts your first thought?   Who is hearing me?   Who am I needing to hear from?   What do “they” think about what I am in my profession, etc.?

Is that my earliest thought in the morning?  It is so hard to get away from it.   I must chase the carrot that is everybody’s agreed priority.   I must teach myself to follow what is acceptable.  I say these things to myself to fit in.   God lets us fit in and then he takes us off the beaten path in front of our friends to test us.  Who cracks the whip over our souls?  Do we even know?

He is mighty to deliver us from our own predispositions to conformity.  If we are not conforming to Christ it is easy to slip into the conformity of the world without even recognizing it.  There are acceptable Christian paths that are not even Biblically based.  Many online stores and social media paths that are building the coffers of who knows who?  God is shaking us so that we know who we are attached to.  In Jeremiah, I can see how the worldly takeover of the children of God in the captivity was so very confusing.  God was judging and showing them that He will not share his allegiance.  It is Him or you?  If you are connected to Christ and His people, he is guiding you.   When Nebuchadnezzar came in, God gave some people their own lives as their ransom in the midst of complete devastation.  They couldn’t stay where they were, God was turning things upside down and showing Himself as the Sovereign.  Not human reasoning.  Some prophets thought God was going to deliver them, some thought it was time to go back to Egypt, some thought it was stand and deliver.  God said prepare to live in captivity to the Babylonians.   What? The Babylonians?  They were the lowest of the low to everybody,  they weren’t like Egypt.   They weren’t pretty?  They weren’t part of the history.  They were a new commodity and they almost killed Jeremiah for suggesting that God was going to do such a thing. 

Can we set up shop and live in a new season?  Can we find godliness and use technology for God’s glory?  It is indeed a new land and a new thinking pattern.  It is a new boss over our conscious thought.  Do we need to communicate in that way? 24/7 accessibility to our own minds and thinking?  Do we have limits that we have set on our communications?   Do we have places in cyberspace that we won’t go?  Do we ever take a break or is it completely controlling us?

I love God that He knows our frame and he remembers that we get tangled in the barbwire of our own making.  He knows we don’t have self control.

How?

Why?

What step comes first?

Obedience is! sermon from Pastor Walden

https://www.sermonaudio.com/sermons/915241620461167?autoplay=1

https://www.sermonaudio.com/sermons/915241620461167?autoplay=1

AW Pink