[ Today's Readings ]
Today I have set before youlife and prosperity, death and doom.
The LORD wants us to come to him to have true life. The choice is a
For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it,
but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.
There are other gods in our world as surely as in the time of Moses. Technology, comfort, health, and pleasure, all good in themselves, can become false idols. We try to serve them in order to have long life but it does not work. We perish. The only way to life is "loving the LORD, your God, heeding his voice, and holding fast to him." It means dying to any idolatrous desires that prevent us from following and serving God.
What profit is there for one to gain the whole world
yet lose or forfeit himself?"
This is a call to self-denial. It is a call to deny ourselves all of the things which lie to us with false promises of life and happiness and turn our faces toward the one source of true life.
I have set before you life and death,
the blessing and the curse.
Choose life, then,
that you and your descendants may live, by loving the LORD, your God,
heeding his voice, and holding fast to him.
This call will not leave us dry, withered, and wilting. Instead, if we answer it, we know life such as we have never known before. There is a freshness and a vibrance beyond anything we'd guess.
He is like a tree
planted near running water,
That yields its fruit in due season,
and whose leaves never fade.
Whatever he does, prospers.
The LORD himself becomes the living water that sustains us through the power of his Holy Spirit. So why should we seek to save our life on those old terms which merely set us up for disappointment? Instead let us choose life according to the promise. Let us know the blessings of those who hope in the LORD.
counter-intuitive because it runs up against everything the world tells us to do to save our lives and protect ourselves.
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