Hosea 14, Bible Reading and Daily Devotionals

Max Lucado Daily: KEEP FORGIVING

Colossians 3:13 says, “As Christ forgave you, so you also must do.”  Really, God?  Begin the process of healing.  How?  Keep no list of wrongs.  Pray for your antagonists rather than plot against them. Hate the wrong without hating wrongdoers.  Turn your attention away from what they did to you to what Christ did for you.  Outrageous as it may seem, Jesus died for them too.  If He thinks they are worth forgiving, they are.

Does that make forgiveness easy?  No.  Quick?  Seldom.  Painless?  Forgiveness vacillates.  It has fits and starts, good days and bad.  Anger intermingled with love.  Irregular mercy.  We make progress only to make a wrong turn.  Step forward and fall back.  But it’s okay.  As long as you’re trying to forgive, you’re forgiving.  It’s when you no longer try that bitterness sets in.  So keep trying.  Keep forgiving.

Hosea 14

Come Back! Return to Your God!

O Israel, come back! Return to your God!
    You’re down but you’re not out.
Prepare your confession
    and come back to God.
Pray to him, “Take away our sin,
    accept our confession.
Receive as restitution
    our repentant prayers.
Assyria won’t save us;
    horses won’t get us where we want to go.
We’ll never again say ‘our god’
    to something we’ve made or made up.
You’re our last hope. Is it not true
    that in you the orphan finds mercy?”

4-8 “I will heal their waywardness.
    I will love them lavishly. My anger is played out.
I will make a fresh start with Israel.
    He’ll burst into bloom like a crocus in the spring.
He’ll put down deep oak tree roots,
    he’ll become a forest of oaks!
He’ll become splendid—like a giant sequoia,
    his fragrance like a grove of cedars!
Those who live near him will be blessed by him,
    be blessed and prosper like golden grain.
Everyone will be talking about them,
    spreading their fame as the vintage children of God.
Ephraim is finished with gods that are no-gods.
    From now on I’m the one who answers and satisfies him.
I am like a luxuriant fruit tree.
    Everything you need is to be found in me.”

9 If you want to live well,
    make sure you understand all of this.
If you know what’s good for you,
    you’ll learn this inside and out.
God’s paths get you where you want to go.
    Right-living people walk them easily;
    wrong-living people are always tripping and stumbling.

Our Daily Bread reading and devotion   
Wednesday, July 08, 2020
Today's Scripture & Insight:

Acts 15:36–16:5

Disagreement Between Paul and Barnabas
36 Some time later Paul said to Barnabas, “Let us go back and visit the believers in all the towns where we preached the word of the Lord and see how they are doing.” 37 Barnabas wanted to take John, also called Mark, with them, 38 but Paul did not think it wise to take him, because he had deserted them in Pamphylia and had not continued with them in the work. 39 They had such a sharp disagreement that they parted company. Barnabas took Mark and sailed for Cyprus, 40 but Paul chose Silas and left, commended by the believers to the grace of the Lord. 41 He went through Syria and Cilicia, strengthening the churches.

Timothy Joins Paul and Silas
16 Paul came to Derbe and then to Lystra, where a disciple named Timothy lived, whose mother was Jewish and a believer but whose father was a Greek. 2 The believers at Lystra and Iconium spoke well of him. 3 Paul wanted to take him along on the journey, so he circumcised him because of the Jews who lived in that area, for they all knew that his father was a Greek. 4 As they traveled from town to town, they delivered the decisions reached by the apostles and elders in Jerusalem for the people to obey. 5 So the churches were strengthened in the faith and grew daily in numbers.

Insight
Why does the detail about circumcision appear in Acts 16:3? To the Jewish people, the circumcision of all males was a symbol of their identification as God’s chosen people (see Genesis 17:9–14). It’s vital to note, however, that Paul didn’t have Timothy circumcised because of his identification as a believer in Jesus. Elsewhere Paul wrote, “For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision has any value. The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love” (Galatians 5:6). In this instance, Paul had Timothy circumcised so that he wouldn't offend the Jewish people residing in southern Galatia (now part of Turkey). Paul was displaying great cultural sensitivity so that the good news about Jesus could reach more people.

A Friend in Failure
Paul did not think it wise to take him, because he had deserted them. Acts 15:38

On November 27, 1939, three treasure hunters accompanied by film crews dug through the asphalt outside of the Hollywood Bowl amphitheater in Southern California. They were looking for the Cahuenga Pass treasure, consisting of gold, diamonds, and pearls rumored to have been buried there seventy-five years earlier.

They never found it. After twenty-four days of digging, they struck a boulder and stopped. All they accomplished was a nine-foot-wide, forty-two-foot-deep hole in the ground. They walked away dejected.

To err is human—we all fail sometimes. Scripture tells us that young Mark walked away from Paul and Barnabas on a missionary trip “and had not continued with them in the work.” Because of this, “Paul did not think it wise to take him” on his next trip (Acts 15:38), which resulted in a strong disagreement with Barnabas. But in spite of his initial failings, Mark shows up years later in surprising ways. When Paul was lonely and in prison toward the end of his life, he asked for Mark and called him “helpful to me in my ministry” (2 Timothy 4:11). God even inspired Mark to write the gospel that bears his name.

Mark’s life shows us that God won’t leave us to face our errors and failures alone. We have a Friend who’s greater than every mistake. As we follow our Savior, He’ll provide the help and strength we need.

By:  James Banks

Reflect & Pray
What mistakes or failures have you faced recently? In what ways have you discovered God’s strength as you shared them with Him in prayer?

Jesus, thank You for being there whenever I want to talk to You. I praise You for the comfort and hope only You can give!

My Utmost for His Highest, by Oswald Chambers
Wednesday, July 08, 2020
Will To Be Faithful
…choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve… —Joshua 24:15

A person’s will is embodied in the actions of the whole person. I cannot give up my will— I must exercise it, putting it into action. I must will to obey, and I must will to receive God’s Spirit. When God gives me a vision of truth, there is never a question of what He will do, but only of what I will do. The Lord has been placing in front of each of us some big proposals and plans. The best thing to do is to remember what you did before when you were touched by God. Recall the moment when you were saved, or first recognized Jesus, or realized some truth. It was easy then to yield your allegiance to God. Immediately recall those moments each time the Spirit of God brings some new proposal before you.

“…choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve….” Your choice must be a deliberate determination— it is not something into which you will automatically drift. And everything else in your life will be held in temporary suspension until you make a decision. The proposal is between you and God— do not “confer with flesh and blood” about it (Galatians 1:16). With every new proposal, the people around us seem to become more and more isolated, and that is where the tension develops. God allows the opinion of His other saints to matter to you, and yet you become less and less certain that others really understand the step you are taking. You have no business trying to find out where God is leading— the only thing God will explain to you is Himself.

Openly declare to Him, “I will be faithful.” But remember that as soon as you choose to be faithful to Jesus Christ, “You are witnesses against yourselves…” (Joshua 24:22). Don’t consult with other Christians, but simply and freely declare before Him, “I will serve You.” Will to be faithful— and give other people credit for being faithful too.

WISDOM FROM OSWALD CHAMBERS

The Bible is a relation of facts, the truth of which must be tested. Life may go on all right for a while, when suddenly a bereavement comes, or some crisis; unrequited love or a new love, a disaster, a business collapse, or a shocking sin, and we turn up our Bibles again and God’s word comes straight home, and we say, “Why, I never saw that there before.” Shade of His Hand, 1223 L

Bible in a Year: Job 36-37; Acts 15:22-41

A Word with You, by Ron Hutchcraft
Wednesday, July 08, 2020
Say It In My Language - #8738

So I'm settling into my hotel room. I'm out of town, and I'm going to turn on the TV probably to get a little of the local flavor. I especially like to watch the local weather and the local news. That's pretty much what I do at home. Now, if I'm in the U.S. listening to the local news and weather, that's easy. It gets kind of frustrating in another country sometimes .

Like I was in Amsterdam for a major conference, and I did what I just described there. I turned on the TV as I was unpacking in my hotel room, and I saw a man communicating very earnestly. He was telling viewers everything they should know: the local news, the weather for tomorrow. Of course I couldn't understand a word he was saying; it was all in Dutch, and it was frustrating. He knew it, I wanted to know it, but the information was not in a language I could understand. You may know some folks who feel the same way toward you.

I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "Say It In My Language."

Our word for today from the Word of God; it's in Acts 2, where we have a communications miracle called Pentecost. The Holy Spirit comes to dwell in Christians beginning at this point, and the disciples are preaching on the street corner in Jerusalem. The problem is that the disciples don't speak many languages; they have their own language they speak. The audience is very multilingual, representing many language groups, and Hebrew just isn't going to "cut it" to get across to most of them. Listen to what happened.

In verse 1: "When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place." Verse 4: "All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them. Now there were staying in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven. When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment, because each one heard them speaking in his own language." And then it says later in verse 11, the people say, "We hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own languages."

Well, that was the key. They were impressed that they heard the Good News in their own language. In one sense, that was a special miracle for a special occasion. But it's still true that our message has no effect until a person hears it in a language he can understand.

We have people right around us that we're trying to share Christ with, but we might be like that Dutch newsman I heard. We're giving the information, but the person who needs it just doesn't understand it in the language we're giving it in.

Maybe we've got a language problem. See, when you become a Jesus follower, right away you start hanging around the church and picking up a wonderful Christian vocabulary. We get used to expressing Christ in religious terms. I call it Christianese. But they're terms that a lost person just doesn't understand.

There might be someone close to you right now and they're rejecting Christ. Maybe they've never heard about Him in words they can understand. They don't understand all our church talk. They need to hear the Gospel expressed in the language of sports, or business, or music if that's their thing, or gardening, or parenting, or computers, or the language of the medical profession, or whatever they can relate to. It's lazy just to say it in the religious jargon I'm most comfortable with. Think about that lost person. Learn to think "lost."

Walk a mile in his shoes, actually in his vocabulary. Look at his interests. Look at how the truth of the Gospel could be communicated and illustrated in his or her terms. When a missionary goes to the mission field, they don't just transmit the Gospel, they translate the Gospel. That's why they go to language school before they go to the mission field. We need to translate our message. This is information that a person's eternity depends on.

I sat in that Dutch hotel room and I murmured, "Say it in my language, will you?" Well, there's someone near you who doesn't have Christ who's waiting for words they can understand. Do what you have to do. Leave your comfort zone to say it in their language.