2 Chronicles 12 Bible Reading and Daily Devotionals

Click here to listen to God's word to you.

Max Lucado: A Better Family

Now we do not live
following our sinful selves,
but we live following the Spirit.
Romans 8:4

Perhaps your childhood memories bring more hurt than inspiration. The voices of your past cursed you, belittled you, ignored you. At the time, you thought such treatment was typical. Now you see it isn’t.

Now you find yourself trying to explain your past. Do you rise above the past and make a difference? Or do you remain controlled by the past and make excuses?

Think about this. Your parents may have given you genes, but God gives you grace. Your parents may be responsible for your body, but God has taken charge of your soul. You may get your looks from your mother, but you get eternity from your Father, your heavenly Father. God will give you what your family could never give you!

2 Chronicles 12
Shishak Attacks Jerusalem

12 After Rehoboam’s position as king was established and he had become strong, he and all Israel[b] with him abandoned the law of the Lord. 2 Because they had been unfaithful to the Lord, Shishak king of Egypt attacked Jerusalem in the fifth year of King Rehoboam. 3 With twelve hundred chariots and sixty thousand horsemen and the innumerable troops of Libyans, Sukkites and Cushites[c] that came with him from Egypt, 4 he captured the fortified cities of Judah and came as far as Jerusalem.

5 Then the prophet Shemaiah came to Rehoboam and to the leaders of Judah who had assembled in Jerusalem for fear of Shishak, and he said to them, “This is what the Lord says, ‘You have abandoned me; therefore, I now abandon you to Shishak.’”

6 The leaders of Israel and the king humbled themselves and said, “The Lord is just.”

7 When the Lord saw that they humbled themselves, this word of the Lord came to Shemaiah: “Since they have humbled themselves, I will not destroy them but will soon give them deliverance. My wrath will not be poured out on Jerusalem through Shishak. 8 They will, however, become subject to him, so that they may learn the difference between serving me and serving the kings of other lands.”

9 When Shishak king of Egypt attacked Jerusalem, he carried off the treasures of the temple of the Lord and the treasures of the royal palace. He took everything, including the gold shields Solomon had made. 10 So King Rehoboam made bronze shields to replace them and assigned these to the commanders of the guard on duty at the entrance to the royal palace. 11 Whenever the king went to the Lord’s temple, the guards went with him, bearing the shields, and afterward they returned them to the guardroom.

12 Because Rehoboam humbled himself, the Lord’s anger turned from him, and he was not totally destroyed. Indeed, there was some good in Judah.

13 King Rehoboam established himself firmly in Jerusalem and continued as king. He was forty-one years old when he became king, and he reigned seventeen years in Jerusalem, the city the Lord had chosen out of all the tribes of Israel in which to put his Name. His mother’s name was Naamah; she was an Ammonite. 14 He did evil because he had not set his heart on seeking the Lord.

15 As for the events of Rehoboam’s reign, from beginning to end, are they not written in the records of Shemaiah the prophet and of Iddo the seer that deal with genealogies? There was continual warfare between Rehoboam and Jeroboam. 16 Rehoboam rested with his ancestors and was buried in the City of David. And Abijah his son succeeded him as king.


Our Daily Bread reading and devotion

Read: Isaiah 40:1-8

Comfort for God’s People

40 Comfort, comfort my people,
    says your God.
2 Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,
    and proclaim to her
that her hard service has been completed,
    that her sin has been paid for,
that she has received from the Lord’s hand
    double for all her sins.
3 A voice of one calling:
“In the wilderness prepare
    the way for the Lord[a];
make straight in the desert
    a highway for our God.[b]
4 Every valley shall be raised up,
    every mountain and hill made low;
the rough ground shall become level,
    the rugged places a plain.
5 And the glory of the Lord will be revealed,
    and all people will see it together.
For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”
6 A voice says, “Cry out.”
    And I said, “What shall I cry?”
“All people are like grass,
    and all their faithfulness is like the flowers of the field.
7 The grass withers and the flowers fall,
    because the breath of the Lord blows on them.
    Surely the people are grass.
8 The grass withers and the flowers fall,
    but the word of our God endures forever.”

A Lasting Letter

December 30, 2012 — by Dennis Fisher

The grass withers, the flower fades, but the Word of our God stands forever. —Isaiah 40:8

The family members who founded Hobby Lobby craft stores are born-again believers. The president, Steve Green, is passionate about the Scriptures and plans to establish a Bible museum that will display rare books and manuscripts from around the world. He said, “We are interested in . . . encouraging people to consider what [the Bible] has to say. . . . The goal is to create a museum around the story of the Bible. No book has been persecuted as much or loved as much. Its incredible story needs to be told.”

The Bible has been preserved through time in remarkable ways, and the museum will tell that story. The oldest copies we have of the New Testament are more numerous and closer to the date of the eyewitness events recorded than any other ancient document from that time. Their reports on Christ are more reliable than anything we know about Socrates or Caesar. It should not surprise us that God is behind the scenes using people and circumstances to pass on His inspired text of redemption. Isaiah eloquently proclaimed: “The grass withers, the flower fades, but the Word of our God stands forever” (Isa. 40:8).

As we read the Bible with an open heart, we long to share its message. It’s God’s lasting letter to all.

The Bible stands and it will forever,
When the world has passed away;
By inspiration it has been given—
All its precepts I will obey. —Lillenas
In all literature there is nothing that compares with the Bible.


My Utmost for His Highest, by Oswald Chambers
December 30, 2012

“And Every Virtue We Possess”

. . . All my springs are in you —Psalm 87:7

Our Lord never “patches up” our natural virtues, that is, our natural traits, qualities, or characteristics. He completely remakes a person on the inside— “. . . put on the new man . . .” (Ephesians 4:24). In other words, see that your natural human life is putting on all that is in keeping with the new life. The life God places within us develops its own new virtues, not the virtues of the seed of Adam, but of Jesus Christ. Once God has begun the process of sanctification in your life, watch and see how God causes your confidence in your own natural virtues and power to wither away. He will continue until you learn to draw your life from the reservoir of the resurrection life of Jesus. Thank God if you are going through this drying-up experience!

The sign that God is at work in us is that He is destroying our confidence in the natural virtues, because they are not promises of what we are going to be, but only a wasted reminder of what God created man to be. We want to cling to our natural virtues, while all the time God is trying to get us in contact with the life of Jesus Christ— a life that can never be described in terms of natural virtues. It is the saddest thing to see people who are trying to serve God depending on that which the grace of God never gave them. They are depending solely on what they have by virtue of heredity. God does not take our natural virtues and transform them, because our natural virtues could never even come close to what Jesus Christ wants. No natural love, no natural patience, no natural purity can ever come up to His demands. But as we bring every part of our natural bodily life into harmony with the new life God has placed within us, He will exhibit in us the virtues that were characteristic of the Lord Jesus.

And every virtue we possess
Is His alone.