I will be spending this week going over one of the most popular verses of all time...a verse crazed Christians stands hold up on cardboard signs at sporting events to bring people to Christ...a verse everybody has memorized from the time they are three years old...Zephaniah 3:17! Oh wait...most people don't even know that there is a book of Zephaniah in the Bible. It is one of the smallest prophetic works in the Good Book. I am practicing the discipline of worship through celebration and thankfulness this week and am going to focus on a different aspect of this passage over the next couple of days.
The verse starts out, "The Lord your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save." That is a short sentence that packs a lot of punch. Think about how beautiful this promise/prophecy is...God is in our midst. God is with us always. God is near. We can celebrate the fact that no matter how crazy and horrible this life gets, we are in the presence of God. That is worth celebrating! God is with me, right now - I love it!
And He is not here just lurking over our shoulder waiting for us to mess up so He can make us feel guilty. He is here to save us. He is mighty and has the power to save us and He wants to save us. That means when you are struggling with temptation, you are not alone and you have a God with you that wants to help you...wants to give you the strength to fight and wants to offer you a way out! I Corinthians 10:13 tells us, "No temptation has seized you except what is common to man. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it." We have a God who is with us...and we have a God who is offering us a way out of our brokenness! If that is not cause for celebration I don't know what is! Go worship Him.
6 comments:
I went over celebration yesterday. Even drew a picture!
(nice new banner by the way)
Very cool! What was the picture of?
B
(I went to a site called wordle and put in my blog address and it made the picture using the words I use most often in the blog...the bigger words are the ones I use the most.)
I'm no artist so the picture probably only makes sense through my eyes. its pretty much a guy looking down the straight and narrow. Off both sides of the path there are cliffs and darker paths that lead to these black holes.
Just tried to draw what was in my head at the time.
thats a cool website
I copied and pasted the entire book of john in there.
http://www.wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/955822/Book_of_John
Love the new header!
Dude that was sweet Matt..your pic of John!
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