October 13

 Jeremiah 22:1-23:20, 2 Thessalonians 1:1-12, Psalm 83:1-18, Proverbs 25:11-14 

Pray: Heavenly Father, renew our minds, hearts, and spirits so that we may serve You and worship You daily. Bless us with discernment to see Your ways and dismiss and reject anything that gets in the way of a relationship with You. 

Read:(Jeremiah 23:16-18) "This is what the Lord of Heaven's Armies says to his people: "Do not listen to these prophets when they prophesy to you, filling you with futile hopes. They are making up everything they say. They do not speak for the Lord! They keep saying to those who despise my word, 'Don't worry! The Lord says you will have peace!' And to those who stubbornly follow their own desires, they say, 'No harm will come your way!' Have any of these prophets been in the Lord's presence to hear what he is really saying? Has even one of them cared enough to listen?" 

Edify: Listening to God and His ways and promises bring life. Listening to any other voice will bring darkness and death. These verses sound so much like those we find in Genesis 3:1-7 where the serpent is deceiving Eve (with Adam by her side). When most people think of the Old Testament they think of an angry and harsh God. We fail to see the truth though that the people of Israel have rebelled, they had stopped listening to God's word. They had turned their ears to the voices of false prophets and "....They encourage those who are doing evil so that no one turns away from their sins." (Jeremiah 23:14) God loves His children and is determined to pursue them with a lavish and truth filled love. That's the God we see in the Old Testament. 

Practice: Don't spend time thinking about how good you are and how angry and harsh God is, we get this backwards every time. Think about how good God is and how rebellious we are. Learn and apply the Gospel to your life. In the beginning there was Good News, God created us in His image and we had a perfect relationship with Him. Then there was bad news, in the Garden of Eden we rebelled and sinned - breaking that relationship with God. God in His divine wisdom knew we could not work our way back to Him. So He sent Jesus to live a perfect life, die for our sins, and on the third day Jesus rose from the dead so that we may once again regain a right relationship with God. Good News, bad news, and Good News. That is the Gospel, and the Gospel is a person - Jesus Christ.