Day 193
2 Kings 23:1-24:7, Romans 1:1-17, Psalm 84:1-7
I’ll be very honest, Josiah is one of those Biblical names that had slipped my thinking, and yet he was really on fire for God. Today tells us about a massive spring clean of spiritual junk that inhabited the nation. Josiah wasn’t leaving any stone unturned in order to bring the people back to God. Then his son takes over and it all goes very wrong, and on to invasion and exile. Sometimes we run the risk of seeing the Old Testament as merely historical and yet we should always look for the challenges that God might be making for our lives and for the life of the church. We should never be scared of doing a spring clean if it will bring us closer to God.
For Paul, as he starts his letter to the Romans, he instills a real sense of belonging to Christ (v6). In the OT, we have seen so much of a nation who were supposed to belong to God and messed up and now Paul writes to affirm the message that being God's is open to all. All who wish to believe in Christ and put their house in order before him.
So what are the challenges for the church today? God has been continually stretching us and pushing us to be the kind of church whose "faith is reported all over the world". We are called to belong to God and be seen to be His, this might involve being radical and digging deep into our spirituality, changing the way that we do worship, but ensuring that like Josiah, it is God that is at the heart of everything. We can only pray that the church today will have the guts of Josiah and follow the lead that God is giving.
I’ll be very honest, Josiah is one of those Biblical names that had slipped my thinking, and yet he was really on fire for God. Today tells us about a massive spring clean of spiritual junk that inhabited the nation. Josiah wasn’t leaving any stone unturned in order to bring the people back to God. Then his son takes over and it all goes very wrong, and on to invasion and exile. Sometimes we run the risk of seeing the Old Testament as merely historical and yet we should always look for the challenges that God might be making for our lives and for the life of the church. We should never be scared of doing a spring clean if it will bring us closer to God.
For Paul, as he starts his letter to the Romans, he instills a real sense of belonging to Christ (v6). In the OT, we have seen so much of a nation who were supposed to belong to God and messed up and now Paul writes to affirm the message that being God's is open to all. All who wish to believe in Christ and put their house in order before him.
So what are the challenges for the church today? God has been continually stretching us and pushing us to be the kind of church whose "faith is reported all over the world". We are called to belong to God and be seen to be His, this might involve being radical and digging deep into our spirituality, changing the way that we do worship, but ensuring that like Josiah, it is God that is at the heart of everything. We can only pray that the church today will have the guts of Josiah and follow the lead that God is giving.
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