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Tuesday, August 06, 2013

New Cloth & New Wine


Parable #1 — Matthew 9:16 — New Cloth Patch on an Old Coat “No one sews a patch of 16 unshrunk [new] cloth on an old garment, for the patch will pull away from the garment, making the tear worse.”
 
Parable #2 — Matthew 9:17 — New Wine in Old Wineskins 17 “Neither do men pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst, the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved.”

Wineskins would stretch with new wine being put in as it continues to ferment, and then they would harden. If new wine was put into a hardened wineskin, the continued fermentation risked bursting the skin. Similarly, new cloth would be expected to shrink considerably, so using it to patch already-shrunken cloth would be asking for problems.

None of us likes to give up something familiar or comfortable. This is even more true when this “something” has been the controlling point for our view of reality, morality, and religion. So we have a tendency to plug in something we like in a new experience or religion into our old religious context and make it fit.

Monday, August 05, 2013

Your Word Is A Lamp For My Feet, A Light On My Path

"Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light on my path." (Psalm 119:105)

Perhaps even now you are groping in the dark. You seem to have lost your faith. The light has grown dim and you don't know where you are or how you got there. May I make a suggestion? Open the Word. Anywhere. Just open it. Begin to read. Let God speak to you. If you persist, He will turn on the light again. Not only that, He will show you where you are and where you should be and how to get there.
Verse 105 emphasizes the power of God’s Word to illuminate. Have you ever slept in a strange place and had to get up in the middle of the night? If you have, you know what it is like to stumble around in the dark not knowing your way.  This pictures our lives without the illuminating power of God’s Word – we are lost in the darkness of sin. We need the light of God’s Word because without it there is only the darkness of sin (Cf. Psalm 19:8; Proverbs 6:23; II Peter 1:19).  The Word is powerful because it is the inspired, infallible Word of God.
 
The Word illuminates our way in this world. It shows us what we need to know to live as His people. There are four things specifically that the Word of God illuminates:1) temptation and sin. The Word exposes the sins of our hearts and lives. It also shows us the way in which we must not go. 2) The word illuminates the only way of deliverance from sin, which is Jesus Christ. This is true because the central message of the Word is Jesus Christ, Who is the Light of the world. 3) The word illuminates the right way for us to live, which is the way of thankful obedience to God. 4) The word leads in our times of suffering and affliction, showing to us that God has a purpose for this affliction.

The Word is the only guide that we can depend on in this life! The false guides of feelings, reason, the majority opinion, and superstition will only lead into darkness and away from Christ. What a gift God has given to us in His Word.

But this very Word provides spiritual strength to face this opposition. This is true because God’s presence, perspective, peace, and power are found in the Word. In times of affliction and hardship, where do you turn? Do you turn to the Word or to the things of the world?

Because the Word provides illumination and spiritual strength in our lives, this emphasizes the importance of being in the Word. The Psalmist makes the vow before God that he will be in the Word. In the entire Psalm, he is saying that he will study, learn, memorize, and meditate on God’s Word because the Word provides illumination, strength, and joy. Knowing this, may we be a people who love to study the Word. Have you spent time in the Word today? Has your family spent time in the Word? Have we as parents brought the Word to our children? Do we meditate on the Word?
When we are in it, the Word will bear the fruit of lives that are ordered by it, in which we live to serve the One Who died for us and rose again. May our resolution be this: I have inclined mine heart to perform thy statutes alway, even unto the end (Psalm 119:112). May this Word of God remind us of our daily and weekly need for God’s Word to light our way in this life.

"All that I am I owe it to Jesus Christ, revealed to me in His divine book." (David Livingstone)