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Closing the Gap 12.6.18

By December 6, 2018Daily Devotional

Advent Season

Week 48 Day 4

Pray

Ask God to reorient you to Himself. Confess any known sin. Thank Him for His forgiveness. Be still and reflect on Jesus and His sacrifice for you. Ask the Holy Spirit to open your heart and mind to God’s Word. Pray for others in your life that they, too, would know and love God today.

Read:

Ex. 2:23-3:7 There the angel of the LORD appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush. Moses saw that though the bush was on fire it did not burn up. So Moses thought, “I will go over and see this strange sight—why the bush does not burn up.” When the LORD saw that he had gone over to look, God called to him from within the bush, “Moses! Moses!” And Moses said, “Here I am.”  “Do not come any closer,” God said. “Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.”

Reflect:

Imagine you are a slave in Egypt and you hear for the first time of the great promises of God made to Abraham.  How exciting that would be! You might, for the first time in your life, have hope. Perhaps your waiting and suffering has purpose.  Perhaps your waiting will soon come to and end. Maybe you put a calendar up and began to mark the days until God’s promise is fulfilled in your life. The days are long and hard but each night, with joy, you mark off another day.  Each day you mark off means the great day of release is getting near. But…the days began to drag on. That initial burst of excitement dissipates into the dust of your daily grind. Days turn to years and to decades. Then your final day on earth dawns, your very last chance to experience God’s great promise and then the sun sets on your final day and you die a slave in Egypt.  Now for the question…did God rip you off? Were you cheated, lied to and given over to false hopes? Where his promises not for you after all? Let’s go back in our narrative, back sometime after the early days of excitement and before the days of despair. In those days of waiting, looking to the future, and anticipation of freedom you find that your heart is becoming more and more drawn to God himself.  Your thoughts and feelings of what God might do cause your mind and heart to more and more contemplate God himself.  You speak to him and he speaks to you, even as you make bricks for Pharaoh’s projects.  You still mark your calendar looking to the future but you also began to write on the calendar what God said to you and did in and around you today. You find that you would truly love to see God move among his people in your lifetime and bring about the great rescue…but you have become a person of deep contentment in God.  Life has become about God, not what God might or might not do in your life.  Whether you die in Egypt or experience the exodus, either way, you are already free.  Waiting is work and your labor in the Lord is never in vain. “Therefore, my dear brothers, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.” (1 Cor. 15:58)

Pray after reading:

(Personalize this prayer today; make it specific to the circumstances that face you.)

Ask God to lead you through His Spirit as you go through your day. Ask Him to bring to mind the truth of the gospel and its implications for what you will encounter today. Tell Him “Yes” to His will and ask Him for His power and protection to live this “yes.” Ask God to create and reveal opportunities to proclaim the good news today.

 

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