Sunday 10/6/2013 7:36 AM
Last night the people who attended my forty-year high
school reunion had a dinner. We
remembered the good old days, reflected on the lives of our classmates who have
since died and some of my classmates shared what happened in their lives over
the course of the years since we last met.
Three of my classmates had come to a renewed faith over the past few
years, moved by the Spirit of God and the events in their lives to acknowledge
their need for God. Each of them
expressed how the emptiness and futility of their lives had been replaced with
fullness and purpose and it reminded me of the great patience and mercy of God.
Today my assigned passage includes Isaiah 48. In this chapter Isaiah reveals that God will
send the Babylonians and take Israel into captivity. Verses 17-18 are the words of God to his
people. “I am the Lord your God, who
teaches you what is best for you, who directs you in the way you should
go. If only you had paid attention to my
commands, your peace would have been like a river, your well-being like the
waves of the sea.” God does the same for
me. He wants what is best for me and
shows me the way I should go to attain it.
Unfortunately, too often, like the Israelites, I do not pay attention,
choosing instead to do things my own way.
Thankfully God does not deal with my lack of attention or outright
defiance by completely writing me off as a lost cause; he simply withholds the
peace I so desperately long for until I turn back to him. I pray that as I continue to age I will
become better at paying attention to what God says and more obedient in
following the path he lays out before me.
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