Rest and Reflect

John 3:15 (Numbers 21)

For those too “bright” for raw faith, it was over. But for those who were drawn by desperation to look in faith, they were healed. If it had been you (dying from the poison of the snake), you would have been pleading, “Somebody please, get me to the door. I need to see it.”

They knew there was no magic in the bronze serpent. God was simply calling for raw faith.

We are not called to believe blindly. But we are asked to be not too proud to bow before God and say “Lord save me.”

Make sure you don’t forget God, your God, by not keeping his commandments, his rules and regulations that I command you today. Make sure that when you eat and are satisfied, build pleasant houses and settle in, see your herds and flocks flourish and more and more money come in, watch your standard of living going up and up—make sure you don’t become so full of yourself and your things that you forget God, your God,

the God who delivered you from Egyptian slavery;
the God who led you through that huge and fearsome wilderness, those desolate, arid badlands crawling with fiery snakes and scorpions;
the God who gave you water gushing from hard rock;
the God who gave you manna to eat in the wilderness, something your ancestors had never heard of, in order to give you a taste of the hard life, to test you so that you would be prepared to live well in the days ahead of you.

If you start thinking to yourselves, “I did all this. And all by myself. I’m rich. It’s all mine!”—well, think again. Remember that God, your God, gave you the strength to produce all this wealth so as to confirm the covenant that he promised to your ancestors—as it is today.

If you forget, forget God, your God, and start taking up with other gods, serving and worshiping them, I’m on record right now as giving you firm warning: that will be the end of you; I mean it—destruction. You’ll go to your doom—the same as the nations God is destroying before you; doom because you wouldn’t obey the Voice of God, your God.

Martin Luther — “…all morality is gratitude”

1 John 2:3-4
And we can be sure that we know him if we obey his commandments. (The converse is also true.) If someone claims, “I know God,” but doesn’t obey God’s commandments, that person is a liar and is not living in the truth.

Though a sinner do evil an hundred times, and his days be prolonged, yet surely I know that it shall be well with them that fear God, which fear before him.