Saturday, August 13, 2022
           (click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Breaking bread with Jesus
Fathers have eaten green grapes, thus their children’s teeth are on edge.
Family problems are nothing new. Fathers bless and nurture their children, but they also cause problems for them. Since Adam, we’ve had to accept this. Family fail as much as they flourish. And so do all of us, products as we are of … families.
My friend, who has some important issues with her own dad, talked to God in the middle of the night a couple of weeks ago, in a hotel room. She had put an unfinished loaf of bread in the refrigerator.
She turned over, and awoke. She felt God’s presence in the room, along with her children and husband, sleeping.
Come. Wake up and eat from the loaf of bread. And let’s talk.
But if I open the refrigerator the noise will wake someone up.
She opened it anyway and no one awoke, and she ate some of the bread. She began to speak in her mind of her fear and jealousy, and the guilt she felt about them. She felt unworthy and broken.
God, why am I so messed up?
You have gifts you aren’t using. Satan is after your soul.
Well, that is very scary!
I have you in the palm of my hand. I have called you by name. You are mine.
Okay. What can I do?
Tell of your forgiveness.
This command frightened her. She didn’t want to talk about this stuff. And did she even feel God’s forgiveness?
How?
Read Psalm 32. You are my hiding place. You will protect me from trouble and surround me with songs of deliverance. I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will counsel you with my loving eye on you.
Is it really you, God?
I have all you need.
Reading through the Bible in a year, she remembered verses she read recently in Isaiah 55. “My thoughts are not your thoughts, says the Lord.” She knew God’s thoughts about her were not the thoughts she had about herself. God’s thoughts “yield seed for the sower and bread for the eater.”
Bread for the eater!
“You will go out in joy and be led forth in peace.
Be led forth!
She felt safe, but in the morning she was afraid to speak. And so she felt guilty again.
Later she had an insight, another word about the dilemma she seemed to be in.
Your sin is no big deal, but your forgiveness is. Like the woman bleeding for eight years: in the moment she was forgiven, none of that mattered. Only the moment of her healing ever mattered again. Let your forgiveness be unto you like her healing. Nothing else has any power over you.
Cast away from you all the crimes you have committed, and make for yourselves a new heart and a new spirit. Why should you die? For I have no pleasure in the death of anyone who dies, says the Lord God. Return and live!
As David prayed, so did she. And so do I:
Create in me a clean heart, O God. And renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from your presence, and take not your Holy Spirit from me. Restore unto me the joy of your salvation. Create in me a clean heart, O God.
My friend has several children, including a young baby girl. She holds her baby close, and the baby sleeps. She nurses her, and the baby is satisfied.
Children were brought to Jesus that he might lay his hands on them and pray.
She knows how much Jesus loves her baby, even as she struggles to remember how much He loves her. But in moments like these, her faith is renewed. God’s love pours over her like a waterfall, as she steps under it at last.
Blessed are you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, you have revealed to little ones the mysteries of the Kingdom. Alleluia!
(Ezekiel 18, Psalm 51, Matthew 11, Matthew 19)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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