Isaiah 60:1-3 Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the LORD has risen upon you. For behold, darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but the LORD will arise upon you, and his glory will be seen upon you. And nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your rising.
On January 1st 1863, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation which proclaimed freedom for all slaves in the ten states which were in rebellion. At the time, when U.S. Secretary of State Seward took the document to the President to sign, Lincoln took a pen, and held it for a moment. He then removed his hand and dropped his pen. Lincoln turned to Seward and said, “I have been shaking hands since nine o’clock this morning and my right arm is almost paralyzed. If my name ever goes into history, it will be for this act, and my whole soul is in it.” He hesitated, then took the pen, and without wavering, took the document and boldly signed it!
When you do something for history, you want to do it right and with your whole heart! As children of God, what we do on this earth will redound to our eternal existence. As Abraham Lincoln recognized his quintessential moment in history — we too must recognize our “moment in time”. The season we are in seems filled with portent, and many of us may be making critical decisions and choices now. Like Esther, we were born “for such a time as this”. We will need prayerful, scripturally based discernment, and then, resolute boldness to stand where the Lord has placed us, say what He wants us to say, and do what He wants us to do.
While untold millions have been waiting for the promised return of our Messiah for centuries– the one sign they lacked was the restoration of Israel. Through all those past generations it was only in our own that the Jewish people have returned to their homeland, the beginning of Ezekiel’s vision, well under way, and inexorably headed toward the spiritual revival of the dry bones [Ezekiel 37]. We do not know all the details, but we are watching and participating in this with great excitement.
We are living prophetic history….and are probably in the last act. As history advances and accelerates there will be times when we must be decisive, bold, and unwavering in spirit – fully realizing that our actions are being recorded now…and in the annals of eternity!
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[worthy_plugins_devotion_single_body]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.
A new driver for an interstate trucking company was having a difficult time. He found the long cross-country trips extremely tiring. The older driver who traveled with him, however, seemed to thrive on those long trips. He always seemed to look as fresh at the end of the ride as he did at the beginning.
There’s nothing we can do to earn God’s love, however if we want to experience His blessings we need to observe the qualifications that He’s given us in His Word. Psalm 112 details a whole list of blessings, but the key to receiving them is verse 1.