Musings from SHDZ ARK

Here are a couple observations I made while reading through Joel 2 recently:

V. 13--"So rend your heart, and not your garments." It's a powerful thought to think of rending our heart and not our garments. It's entirely too easy to do something external without ever touching the internal.

V. 16--"Gather the people, Sanctify the congregation, Assemble the elders, Gather the children and nursing babes" Everyone needed to be gathered together, from youngest to oldest. What a compelling picture and argument for uniting the ages together when we come to worship! Why is it that we think we must segregate and segment the generations so much?

V. 25--"So I will restore to you the years . . . " God is a God of restoration. In the natural, we so often deal with the consequences of our choices. But God's grace is so wonderful--as here, He at times will restore to us even the things that we have lost!

Blessings to you today!

Hello Everyone—

I think you’ll enjoy this excerpt from One Month to Live by Kerry and Chris Shook . . . good food for thought!

When you think about it, we don’t have control over many things in life. We didn’t get to decide where we were born, who our parents are, or which time period and culture we face. We don’t get to decide the dates on our gravestone. We don’t know when our time on this earth will be up. It could be next week or next year or decades away. Only God knows. Our lives are in His hands. But there is one thing we have a vast amount of control over. We get to decide how we’re going to use our dash.

You get to choose how to spend that little dash of time between the two dates of your earthly existence. What are you spending yours on? Are you living the dash, knowing fully who you are and why you’re here? Or dashing to live, hurriedly spending precious time chasing things that really don’t matter to you? The psalmist prayed, “Teach us to number our days and recognize how few they are; help us to spend them as we should” (Psalm 90:12, TLB). God wants us to realize that our time on earth is limited so we will spend it wisely. But He gives us the choice about how we spend this most valuable currency.

May you live your dash well today!

:) Pastor Brad