Good weekend to you my “Walking with Jesus” friends,
We are one week into 2024 and I wonder if you’ve already established some patterns for this new year. Many people launch each new year with “resolutions” and perhaps you did. Have you kept them thus far in ’24? Have you discovered that it’s fairly easy to establish new patterns in your life? It simply requires repetitive action over an extended period of time and fairly quickly you have new habits, new patterns in your life. Of course, you can begin new patterns any time. May I give you three that I highly recommend?
* Read some of God’s Word every day, asking God to speak His truth into your life. I always read the Psalm of the date and often also read the chapter of Proverbs which corresponds to that date. Did you know there are 1189 chapters in the Bible, so if you wanted to read the entire Bible in one year you need to average just a little more than 3 chapters every day! (Hebrews 4:12; Psalm 119:105)
* Look to encourage someone each day with some words of encouragement. That could be spoken words face to face or a phone call or text or a note or email or even an old fashioned, handwritten card! You won’t believe how good you feel when you encourage other people, and you may assume everyone you encourage will have heard plenty of discouraging things that day, so your words will be very helpful to them. (Ephesians 4:29)
* Spend a few moments talking with God every day! Always start your prayer by THANKING God and that should be easy for we all have so much to be thankful for. Then invite God to speak into your mind and heart with whatever He’d like to tell you that day! It’s a great experience!!
Ok my friends, I urge you to join me in forming some new, life changing habits. As we rejoin Samuel about 1100 years before Jesus was born, I’ll show you why I’m suggesting these new habits for us. 1 Samuel 7:13 is where I left you yesterday. We were with a large group of Israelites who had just experienced a miracle. God had sent a great thunderstorm to protect His people because while they were worshiping God the Philistines came to attack the Israelites as they worshiped! To help them remember this remarkable experience, Samuel had set up a big rock in that location and named it “Ebenezer” saying “Thus far the LORD has helped us!”
I hope you and I can echo those words as we reflect on the journey, we’ve each walked in 2023 and already the first week of ’24. Then God honored His promise to protect His worshiping people, for the record says: “Throughout Samuel’s lifetime the hand of the LORD was against the Philistines…. and there was peace between Israel and the Amorites.” (1 Samuel 7:13,14) Yes God kept the enemies of Israel at bay and His people lived in peace for an entire generation even though surrounded by the ancestors of Hamas and Hezbollah who like today, wanted Israel destroyed!
Now think about that my friends as you consider what you see on the news about current events in the middle east today.
And then here’s the statement in the record that has motivated me to urge us all to form some God honoring habits early in ’24: “Samuel continued as judge over Israel all the days of his life. From year-to-year Samuel went on a circuit from Bethel to Gilgal to Mizpah, judging Israel in those places. But he always went back to Ramah, where his home was, and there he also judged Israel. And he built an altar there to the LORD.” (1 Samuel 7:15-17) Do you see Samuel’s pattern? Many years later the phrase that would describe what Samuel was doing would be a ‘circuit preacher’. Rather than Samuel staying in one place and demanding that the people came to him, Samuel served the people by going to them and providing the judicial and spiritual leadership they needed.
Perhaps you recognize the names of those towns? Bethel was that famous town where Jacob met God twice. First alone as he was fleeing from his brother Esau, and God reaffirmed His Covenant of Land and People there (Gen. 28) and then 20 years later, as Jacob was returning to his homeland with all his large family, God met him at Bethel a second time and changed his name to Israel in that place. For the Israelites Bethel was a very special place to honor their heritage and meet with God.
Gilgal, you may recall, was the place Joshua and the people spent their first several weeks after they left the desert and crossed the Jordan river into the Land of God’s Promise. (Joshua 4) Here Joshua piled up 12 big rocks which they’d taken out of the Jordan riverbed as God had held back the flow of the river so the entire nation of more than 1 million people could cross over into the Promised land. Therefore, this was a very special place for people to gather and meet with God.
Mizpah, of course, was the place we read about yesterday where God protected His worshiping people from the attacking Philistines. And then as we see, Samuel returned to the home of his parents, Ramah. That was the town from which Hannah had brought her young son Samuel, (1 Samuel 1) bringing him to live at Shiloh, under the tutelage of Eli the High Priest, serving the LORD.
If his parents were still alive, oh can you imagine what a great blessing it was to them to have Samuel move back into their town and be close to them? We don’t know how long Samuel spent in each of these towns every year on his circuit, but we can imagine his visit was very, very welcome by the people who lived there or came to meet Samuel at each of these places every year.
As we pass through our first weekend of 2024, I wonder my friends, what will be the routines, the patterns of your life this year which will be very helpful to you in growing your spiritual maturity; in nurturing your relationship with Jesus; in deepening your understanding of God’s Word; in developing your prayer relationship with God and in refining your sensitivity to the Holy Spirit who seeks to teach you, guide you and refine you more and more into the man or woman God has designed you to be at this stage of your life?
And what about the children and grandchildren your life will touch this year? Could I ask you to consider that sentence again and give it some serious thought as we close out this first week of a new year? And here’s a worship song I think you’ll enjoy, to help you consider your life patterns like Samuel, keeping your eyes focused on Jesus.
Today’s Scripture is 1 Samuel 7:13-17.
Choose below to read or listen.
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Bible images provided with attribution to www.LumoProject.com.
Have a comment or question about today’s chapter? I’m ready to hear from you, contact me here.
Pastor Doug Anderson
“Let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, with our eyes fixed on Jesus…” (Heb. 12:1,2)
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