Morning Moments

Vision is always clearer looking back!  Memory isn't!  We tend to forget the severity of pain, the depth of despair, the closeness of danger, the height of the mountain top, etc.  Oh, we maintain certain emotions about those experiences, but somehow the terror of the moment or the tantalization of the time is tranquilized by time.


It was that way with the Children of Israel!  God kept reminding them of the good times and the bad, the times of deliverance and the times of devastation, but somehow, looking back did not prevent them from falling into the same lapses of memory and into the same loses of trust in the living God!


I wonder how much like them we all are!  We have the scars of childhood when we were careless with a knife or some object with which we cut ourselves.  We can see the scars of sin and selfishness everywhere and yet, for the most part, we remain fixed on learning the hard way the same lessons over and over again, whether in ministry, marriage, money, or merely mundane things of life.  I am reminded of the words of Jesus to those disciples when He said, "O fools, and slow of heart!"


Mama use to call me "buttheaded".  The nurse at the University of Alabama said I was "independent" when I was determined to get well quicker than they thought I should have.  The nurse called me "stubborn" when I had a complete knee replacement and was completely well in 27 days.  I was walking without support the second week.  I am GUILTY!  BUT, it is not because I believe in me, but because I believe in Him who can part the Sea when the enemy is behind me and the mountains beside me.  Somehow, someway, SOMEONE implanted in me that trust of Joshua and Caleb that says, "By the grace of God, we can do it!"  


Too often we are limited by our past!


BUT we can also, as was Israel, be lessened by our fear regarding the future.  It can keep us from the conviction that the God of Impossibility can do "exceeding abundantly ABOVE all that we ask or THINK."


When the Jews didn't see Jesus do what they thought Messiah should do, when the disciples couldn't believe beyond His death, when the Church can't believe beyond persecution, when the nation of Israel cannot believe beyond The Great Tribulation - TO THE KINGDOM THAT SHALL COME, vision has dimmed and memory has diminished!


With all the eschatological truth of Scripture we know THIS:  "In such a time as you think not...THE SON OF MAN COMETH!"


BE RIGHT!  BE READY!  BE RIGHTEOUS!


BLESSINGS!