A Note from Tom: July 30th
Hey, everyone!
Hope this is an awesome, praised-filled day! After a couple of years of doing Bible study at the Anderson County Detention Center, I’m thinking…if you had anything other than a pimento cheese sandwich for lunch…and you were somewhere where you could see that the sun was actually shining outside,…and if you were wearing clothes that had more than one color, top and bottom, and if you were wearing something that you haven’t been wearing for the last three days…those are GREAT reasons to praise the Lord!
Y’know, this morning I was leaving the house really early for something and I switched on the news really quick to find out what the weather would be for today (I watch channel 10 when I can…Todd’s my weather homeboy!) and before the news and weather, there was a commercial on telling me and everyone in the viewing audience, to go out and buy a new Lexus today, along with how we could get good financing on it. After thinking about it, I realized that if the person (you couldn’t see him…you just heard his voice) was talking at that volume in a room of people, it would probably be classified as yelling. Right after he was done, another kinda “yell-y” person was telling us to go to a certain restaurant and buy a lot of food “smothered in butter and sizzling bacon.” I thought, “Y’know, it’s only 6:07 in the morning and already a person who doesn’t know most of us in the viewing audience has told us to go $37,000 in debt and another person who doesn’t really know who might or might not have heart problems and/or cholesterol issues, has told us to just forget about all that, come to his restaurant and send our LDL cholesterol numbers through the sun-roof of our new Lexus!
Man!
It just seemed kinda pushy and bossy for so early in the a.m., if you know what I mean! So far, I’ve made it through the day without doing either one of those things…
It made me stop and think about a verse in Isaiah…It’s about Jesus, written seven hundred years before He was born in Bethlehem. Listen…
“The Sovereign LORD…wakens me morning by morning. He wakens my ear to listen like one being taught…” (Isaiah 50)
It’s so awesome to think of Jesus’ heart! A heart to please the Father with every beat and every breath! The heart of One who woke up each morning, opening His ears to the Father’s voice as soon as He opened His eyes to the new day…
In Mark’s first chapter, after a night’s sleep following an unbelievably busy day of healing the sick and freeing the oppressed, Jesus’ guys woke up and couldn’t find Him. They might have panicked for a minute, but by then they should have known that He would be up “very early in the morning to find a solitary place” (1:35) to be alone with the Father...to share His heart…and to listen…”like One being taught.”
I think the Father can and will tell you what to do, if you’ll listen. If you really want to know. He won’t yell at you like they do on TV. But if you ask Him, “Father, I want to please your heart today. All day. Show me how my heart and my words and what I do, can please You”, He’ll let you know. Psalm 16 tells us, “I will praise the Lord Who counsels me; even at night my heart instructs me.”
Whatever He tells you to do won’t be bad for your cholesterol.
In fact, it’ll do your heart good!