Isaiah 23 Bible Reading and Daily Devotionals

(Has God spoken to you lately if not click to listen to God’s teaching?)

Max Lucado Daily: God Never Gives Up

God’s people often forget their God, but God never forgets them.  When Joseph was dropped into a pit by his own brothers, God didn’t give up. When Moses said, “Here am I, send Aaron,” God didn’t give up. When the delivered Israelites wanted Egyptian slavery instead of milk and honey, God did not give up. When Aaron was making a false god at the very moment Moses was with the true God, God did not give up.

And when human hands fastened the divine hands of Jesus to a cross with spikes, it wasn’t the soldiers who held the hands of Jesus steady.  It was God, the God who never gives up on his people, who held them steady. He held them to the cross where, with holy blood, the divine hand wrote these words, “God would give up His only son before He’d ever give up on you!” (John 3:16)

from Six Hours One Frid

Isaiah 23

A Prophecy Against Tyre

23 A prophecy against Tyre:

Wail, you ships of Tarshish!
    For Tyre is destroyed
    and left without house or harbor.
From the land of Cyprus
    word has come to them.
2 Be silent, you people of the island
    and you merchants of Sidon,
    whom the seafarers have enriched.
3 On the great waters
    came the grain of the Shihor;
the harvest of the Nile[a] was the revenue of Tyre,
    and she became the marketplace of the nations.
4 Be ashamed, Sidon, and you fortress of the sea,
    for the sea has spoken:
“I have neither been in labor nor given birth;
    I have neither reared sons nor brought up daughters.”
5 When word comes to Egypt,
    they will be in anguish at the report from Tyre.
6 Cross over to Tarshish;
    wail, you people of the island.
7 Is this your city of revelry,
    the old, old city,
whose feet have taken her
    to settle in far-off lands?
8 Who planned this against Tyre,
    the bestower of crowns,
whose merchants are princes,
    whose traders are renowned in the earth?
9 The Lord Almighty planned it,
    to bring down her pride in all her splendor
    and to humble all who are renowned on the earth.
10 Till[b] your land as they do along the Nile,
    Daughter Tarshish,
    for you no longer have a harbor.
11 The Lord has stretched out his hand over the sea
    and made its kingdoms tremble.
He has given an order concerning Phoenicia
    that her fortresses be destroyed.
12 He said, “No more of your reveling,
    Virgin Daughter Sidon, now crushed!
“Up, cross over to Cyprus;
    even there you will find no rest.”
13 Look at the land of the Babylonians,[c]
    this people that is now of no account!
The Assyrians have made it
    a place for desert creatures;
they raised up their siege towers,
    they stripped its fortresses bare
    and turned it into a ruin.
14 Wail, you ships of Tarshish;
    your fortress is destroyed!
15 At that time Tyre will be forgotten for seventy years, the span of a king’s life. But at the end of these seventy years, it will happen to Tyre as in the song of the prostitute:

16 “Take up a harp, walk through the city,
    you forgotten prostitute;
play the harp well, sing many a song,
    so that you will be remembered.”
17 At the end of seventy years, the Lord will deal with Tyre. She will return to her lucrative prostitution and will ply her trade with all the kingdoms on the face of the earth. 18 Yet her profit and her earnings will be set apart for the Lord; they will not be stored up or hoarded. Her profits will go to those who live before the Lord, for abundant food and fine clothes.


Our Daily Bread reading and devotion


Read: Luke 5:27-35

English Standard Version (ESV)
Jesus Calls Levi

27 After this he went out and saw a tax collector named Levi, sitting at the tax booth. And he said to him, “Follow me.” 28 And leaving everything, he rose and followed him.

29 And Levi made him a great feast in his house, and there was a large company of tax collectors and others reclining at table with them. 30 And the Pharisees and their scribes grumbled at his disciples, saying, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?” 31 And Jesus answered them, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. 32 I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.”

A Question About Fasting

33 And they said to him, “The disciples of John fast often and offer prayers, and so do the disciples of the Pharisees, but yours eat and drink.” 34 And Jesus said to them, “Can you make wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them? 35 The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast in those days.”

Jesus’ Team

March 8, 2013 — by David C. Egner

He . . . saw a tax collector named Levi . . . . And He said to him, “Follow Me.” —Luke 5:27

In 2002 the Oakland Athletics built a winning baseball team in an unorthodox way. They had lost three top players after 2001, and the team didn’t have money to sign any stars. So Oakland’s general manager, Billy Beane, used some often-neglected statistics to assemble a group of lesser-known players either “past their prime” or seen by other teams as not skilled enough. That ragtag team ran off a 20-game winning streak on the way to winning their division and 103 games.

This reminds me a little of the way Jesus put together His “team” of disciples. He included rough Galilean fishermen, a zealot, and even a despised tax collector named Levi (Matthew). This reminds me that “God has chosen the weak things of the world to put to shame the things which are mighty” (1 Cor. 1:27). God used those dedicated men (minus Judas) to ignite a movement that affected the world so dramatically it has never been the same.

There’s a lesson here for us. Sometimes we seek out the familiar, the influential, and the rich. And we tend to ignore people with less status or those with physical limitations.

Jesus put some of society’s less desirable people on His team—treating everyone the same. With the Spirit’s power and guidance, we too can honor all people equally.

In Jesus Christ we all are equal,
For God’s Spirit makes us one;
As we give each other honor,
We give glory to His Son. —Fitzhugh
There are no unimportant people in the body of Christ.


My Utmost for His Highest, by Oswald Chambers
March 8, 2013

The Surrendered Life

I have been crucified with Christ . . . —Galatians 2:20

To become one with Jesus Christ, a person must be willing not only to give up sin, but also to surrender his whole way of looking at things. Being born again by the Spirit of God means that we must first be willing to let go before we can grasp something else. The first thing we must surrender is all of our pretense or deceit. What our Lord wants us to present to Him is not our goodness, honesty, or our efforts to do better, but real solid sin. Actually, that is all He can take from us. And what He gives us in exchange for our sin is real solid righteousness. But we must surrender all pretense that we are anything, and give up all our claims of even being worthy of God’s consideration.

Once we have done that, the Spirit of God will show us what we need to surrender next. Along each step of this process, we will have to give up our claims to our rights to ourselves. Are we willing to surrender our grasp on all that we possess, our desires, and everything else in our lives? Are we ready to be identified with the death of Jesus Christ?

We will suffer a sharp painful disillusionment before we fully surrender. When people really see themselves as the Lord sees them, it is not the terribly offensive sins of the flesh that shock them, but the awful nature of the pride of their own hearts opposing Jesus Christ. When they see themselves in the light of the Lord, the shame, horror, and desperate conviction hit home for them.

If you are faced with the question of whether or not to surrender, make a determination to go on through the crisis, surrendering all that you have and all that you are to Him. And God will then equip you to do all that He requires of you.


A Word with You, by Ron Hutchcraft

Clone or Original - #6825

Friday, March 8, 2013

My next door neighbor in our dorm in college always wanted to preach like Billy Graham. I mean he really wanted to preach like Billy Graham. He would tape Billy Graham on his radio program, and then he would listen to the tapes over and over again. He would copy everything, including even the inflections of Billy's voice. And then he would watch Billy Graham. He studied his gestures; he'd try to get them down and gesture just when Billy Graham would. He'd hold his Bible like Billy Graham. Now you are going to think he was really a fanatic, but this really is true. He told me he even counted the words per minute that Billy Graham averaged and tried to get the same pace. Wow! That's a crazy way to approach ministry, huh? Well, it's more common than you might think.

I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "Clone or Original."

Our word for today from the Word of God - one of the most challenging, exciting statements in all of the New Testament - is in Ephesians 2:10. This is about you now. "For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works which God prepared in advance for us to do." Wow! God has created you as a unique, one-of-a-kind servant, uniquely prepared, uniquely wired by Him for a very unique set of plans which He prepared in advance for you to carry out.

The problem comes when we start to compare ourselves with other people. You really can't compare yourself because you are a category all by yourself. You might never count the words per minute in somebody's sermon to copy them, but maybe you are looking at someone else God is using and you're saying, "You know, I can't talk like that. I don't know what they know. I'm sort of shy; I'm not that outgoing. You know, I don't have the training they have. I could never serve God like that; I'm not like that person." You're right! You're not like them. Hurray! You weren't meant to be. You were created for works only you can do.

I think we should look for models and learn from their values and their thinking and their ways of working, but not to become clones. The Mona Lisa is an original, it's priceless, but you can buy a postcard of the Mona Lisa for like twenty-five cents at the museum, because copies are cheap. Originals are priceless. Don't devalue yourself by copying someone else; trying to be like someone else. That's an awful, unnatural bondage to all of that.

You see, everything you need - to do what God put you here to do - you have. And all those things that you don't have? Guess what? You don't need. You've got the right hair, you've got the right height, you've got the right body, you've got the right voice, you've got the right intelligence, you've got the right talents, and you've got the right limitations - even your background. See, God is using your background to make you into that unique servant of His. He's weaving a tapestry, and putting into that tapestry the people and experiences that will make you the man or woman you were designed by Him to be.

So be yourself! Relax! Be the person that God made for a unique role that you are destined to fulfill. You compare with somebody else? You'll never get off the ground. You try to copy someone else, and you will never be the person you were created to be.

I think you can say as you look at your life and the plans that God has for it, "God, you know what You're doing." He sure does. Thank Him for making you the only you there is, and don't try to be a Christian clone. You are an original.