Guest Post - Words of Hope

I am so Spring or pre-Spring slacking!  Oh, I have been busy with projects but I either haven't bothered to take pictures to blog about them or just haven't gotten around to it yet!  I know, some dedicated blogger I am.  Well, as much as I love blogs I love actually living my life too and with all my Hormone Induced Attention Deficit Disorder issues I am lucky to get dressed some days.  Actually blogging with some regularity is akin to climbing Mt. Everest for me these days.

 

Despite my clear lack of focus, Mini continues to write her column for the local paper twice a month.   As promised I will continue to post her work.  Both to promote her and to promote the message.  WARNING....MY TOES ARE A BIT SORE after reading this one, yours could be too!  A great article that will make you check that your priorities are in order.  Enjoy!

 

Words of Hope

 

 

Hello readers! As many of you may already know, I am reading the entire bible, cover to cover, in one year. So far I am in 1^st Samuel, the 9^th book of the bible, and love every word of it. As I was reading the other day, one story really stuck out to me. The story is when the Ark of the Covenant was stolen from Israel.  For those of you who haven’t already read this story (of for those of you who have forgotten (;  ), The Ark of the Covenant is the chest where the laws for Israel were placed. This is a VERY sacred item to the Israelites and is to be handled with care and is even to be concealed from viewing. Well, 1 Samuel 4 describes when the Philistines, who are not under the authority of God, steal the Ark from Israel. They bring this chest to one of their towns, not knowing at all what its purpose is, and set it down in the temple of one of their gods for bedtime. When morning arrives, they wake up to find that their idol they had made, Dagon, was face down before the ark, as if in worship. This happened 2 nights in a row. The Philistines exclaimed in terror that “…His (God’s) hand is heavy on us and on Dagon our god!” They were REALLY quick to send the chest back to Israel then, as you can imagine! After the ark was sent back, the Philistines went on with their daily lives, which included making Dagon their god.  So as I was reading this I started wondering why the Philistines continued to worship Dagon after this happened. I mean, they even acknowledged God afterwards… How could they go back? And then I realized that we are the Philistines. We are constantly making other gods for ourselves, even though we don’t realize it. Common themes here are jobs, money, and relationships. We elevate a spouse or our job or our bank account to God and all goes wrong from there. The bottom line of the story was that the Philistines knew that God existed. What the bible wants you to find between the lines, however, is that knowing God exists isn’t enough. Pagans can know God exists, yet choose not to follow. Over and over again we read “be followers of Christ” not “be knowers of Christ”. The saddest part about reality, however, is that most of us don’t realize we are serving other gods. Jobs these days are very serious things and can easily take up all of our time. Marriages are amazing and beautiful and it takes a lot of energy to keep one up and running. Money is great but it requires your life in order to make lots of it. We see that we’re slaves to things when we realize that these things consume our lives. What we need to do with our jobs and relationships and money is tell God that He’s in control and that our relationship with Him is more important and that He will provide. When we make God the Lord of our lives, things start going right. So my challenge for you this week is to realize that God is first and to hand Him the things that you see are becoming your god. I promise that He will make something beautiful out of it.