Read Exodus 32:1-14. Key Verse: Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants, how you swore to them by your own self, saying to them, "I will multiply your descendants like the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have promised I will give to your descendants, and they shall inherit it forever.' "
The stories in the Bible are our stories. What Israel does is usually something we have done, and it's usually the bad stuff. Today's passage is one of those things. Israel was richly blessed with the gift of freedom. You and I have been richly blessed with the gift of freedom from our sins. Israel, with God's help, faced death at many turns and lived to tell about it, so have we. The people of Israel were blessed with evidence of God's presence and power, yet they turned away. So have we. We have a wonderful worship experience in church or at a retreat setting and then we face something for which we want a rapid answer and we start looking for our own solutions and answers without waiting on GOD. Exactly, what Israel did.
God is faithful and just and through want we have just celebrated, God has blessed us with new life and the fullness/abundance of life- how can we turn away from that? Sadly, it is easy. We are by nature an impatient people, made more so by all the advances and inventions of our day. How easily we forget that God has even addressed this in God's gift of the Holy Spirit; "22 By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness," (Galatians 5:22)
Could it be we need to seek living in the Spirt and letting the Spirit live in us? Imagine the difference.
PRAYER: Come, Holy Spirit, into my heart and into the heart of my church. Bless us with these fruits of love, my, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, and faithfulness. In Jesus' precious and powerful name I pray, amen.
