Psalms 34:1 I will bless the LORD at all times: his praise shall continually be in my mouth.
In Budapest, a man goes to the rabbi and complains, "Life is unbearable. There are nine of us living in one room. What can I do?"
The rabbi answers, "Take your goat into the room with you." The man in incredulous, but the rabbi insists. "Do as I say and come back in a week."
A week later the man comes back looking more distraught than before. "We cannot stand it," he tells the rabbi. "The goat is filthy."
The rabbi then tells him, "Go home and let the goat out. And come back in a week."
A radiant man returns to the rabbi a week later, exclaiming, "Life is beautiful. We enjoy every minute of it now that there's no goat -- only the nine of us."
This is a funny story but how many of us know how to be truly thankful in the face of trial? Many powerhouses of the faith who preceded us realized the importance of mastering thankfulness. How much more should we who have so much more than they!
We have an opportunity this Thanksgiving week, to practice being thankful! If we’re struggling today, let’s practice paising God in thankfulness for all the good things He's done! He deserves all of our praise regardless of our circumstance!
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[worthy_plugins_devotion_single_body]For years, when I visited my father-in-law’s home in Jerusalem on the Sabbath, we would break bread and bless the bread with the traditional blessing – “Baruch Ata Adonai Eleheynu Melech HaOlam Ha-Motzi Lechem Min Ha’aretz” – which translated means,”Blessed are You Lord our God, King of the Universe, Who has given us bread from the earth”. After the blessing, my father-in-law would take salt and sprinkle the challah bread as he broke and passed it to everyone at the table.
One day a passerby saw a homeless man on the roadside. He stopped for a moment to hand him some loose change and casually said “God bless you, my friend”.
“I thank God,” said the homeless man, “I am never unhappy.”
Here in Israel we have an interesting geographical phenomenon – there are two landlocked seas. One is alive and one is dead. The sea full of life is the Kinneret, better known as the Sea of Galilee. The dead sea is…….you guessed it, the Dead Sea. Now the Kinneret is constantly emptying as it flows through the Jordan River valley…. into the Dead Sea. But the Dead Sea does not empty its water at all. Instead, the Dead Sea is continually shrinking, because the intense heat at this lowest place on Earth actually evaporates more water than is flowing in. Do you see a parable here?
One of my passions is studying history, especially the American Civil War. Here is an amusing story about General Stonewall Jackson’s famous Valley Campaign. During the war, Jackson’s army found itself on one side of a river when it needed to be on the other.
We tend to focus on the part of that scripture where God does the blessing — but why did He bless Him? The answer lies in the passage! The Lord told Abraham: “I will bless you — and you shall be a blessing.” Abraham was blessed so that he could be a blessing!
In the Olivet discourse recorded in Matthew 24, Yeshua prophesied that “… nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom.” The word “nation” in Greek is the word “ethnos”, from which we get the English word “ethnic”. All of this polarization and ethnic warfare which the media feed upon and incite is the work of the enemy as he stirs up the sinful nature of men.
Several hundred years before Jesus was born, a plague broke out in Athens, Greece. In an effort to stop the plague and appease the ‘gods’, the Athenians sought counsel from a wise man named Epimenides from the island of Crete.