Old Sandals

The work of righteousness will be peace, and the effect of righteousness, quietness and assurance forever.

This quietness, this assurance is ours in Christ Jesus, the One to whom all the prophets point.

For in that day every man shall throw away his idols of silver and his idols of gold—sin, which your own hands have made for yourselves.

Let us—you and me—do it today.  We only have today.  Tomorrow is not promised.

Therefore the Lord will wait, that He may be gracious to you; and therefore He will be exalted, that He may have mercy on you. For the Lord is a God of justice; blessed are all those who wait for Him.

The Lord waits, because He is longsuffering, not willing that any should perish.  And we wait, because we need divine direction.  The way is too steep, too fraught with danger, to go by ourselves.

The Lord says: “These people come near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Their worship of me is based on merely human rules they have been taught.”

It is a matter of the heart.  It always has been.  It always will be.

All this also comes from the Lord Almighty, whose plan is wonderful, whose wisdom is magnificent.

We are never going to understand it all, but we can trust on what we do understand, on what has been revealed to us. Trust and obey.

For this is a people without understanding; so their Maker has no compassion on them, and their Creator shows them no favor.

There is only so much God can do.  He works with us, by his Holy Spirit, to awaken us, to convict us, to renew us. If we resist, we do so to our own destruction.

We were with child, we writhed in labor, but we gave birth to wind. We have not brought salvation to the earth, and the people of the world have not come to life.

God’s plans for us are always greater than anything we can come up with. God’s plan for Israel was to be a shining city on a hill. An example, a witness to the nations. They failed miserably.

In God’s providence, the nation did bring salvation to the earth, but in a way they could not have possibly imagined.

Behold, this is our God; we have waited for Him, and He will save us. This is the Lord; we have waited for Him; we will be glad and rejoice in His salvation.

We have waited for Him. You can’t wait for God if you are constantly distracted by things all around you.  It is not that God is not in those things; God is God.  He fills  heaven and earth. But what about your heart? My heart. Does he fill that?

Those in the west praise the Lord’s majesty.  In eastern lands, give glory to the Lord.  In the lands beyond the sea, praise the name of the Lord, the God of Israel. We hear songs of praise from the ends of the earth, songs that give glory to the Righteous One!

There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism.  I feel a divine connection with all those who attest to that truth, be they Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic,  Wesleyan Methodist or Reformed Presbyterian.

And it shall be…that the Lord will deal with Tyre.

The world seems to rush past us.  So many events.  So many people.  So much sin.  Yet this is just our perspective.  It is not God’s perspective.  God sees all of us—each of us.  And He will deal with each of us, providentially in this life, ultimately in the next.