Personal Devotions
Notes from Mark's personal Bible reading and meditation
With a goal to apply one truth from each day's reading to my life that day
Dec 25, 2022, 7:15 AM
Passage Read: Deuteronomy 16-19
Meditation Verse: 19:9
Thought
To love the Lord is to walk in His ways, which He has explained in this Law. John says the same thing in his first letter. To love God is to obey His commands, these commands about how to treat one another and how to purge sin from among ourselves. We cannot say we love God and at the same time ignore what He has said. Of course, unless society supports the consequences, we cannot carry out sentence as we wish, but we can treat all people the way God instructs us to treat them.
Dec 24, 2022, 7:16 AM
Passage Read: Deuteronomy 12-15
Meditation Verses: 14:22-23
Thought
For agricultural communities, the tithe would be gathered annually, at the beginning of the harvest. How much food would that be? It could be a huge amount, depending on the size of the flocks and fields. But for us, we are usually paid every other week. What would it be like to take the tithe and use it to celebrate before the Lord each paycheck? If a whole church came together to celebrate their tithe twice a month, there would be too much food!
Dec 23, 2022, 7:18 AM
Passage Read: Deuteronomy 8-11
Meditation Verses: 10:12-16
Thought
Throughout Scripture, there is only one right response to the mercy and undeserved kindness of the Lord: humble submission to His commands, which were given for the people's own good. God's commands are not evil, nor are they too hard for us, but they do require a change of heart, from selfish to caring of others. That's the hardest part. We want to follow our fleshly desires, to live for ourselves and our pleasures, even at the expense of others.
Dec 22, 2022, 7:19 AM
Passage Read: Deuteronomy 4-7
Meditation Verses: 5:28-29
Thought
Everything the people said was good, but the Lord knew what was really in their hearts. Forty days later they would be making new gods and worshiping them. What they said was good, but what they would become was not. They promised to obey the Lord through His messenger—they wanted someone else to do the scary work of knowing God and His desires, then come tell them.
Dec 21, 2022, 7:20 AM
Passage Read: Numbers 36 - Deuteronomy 3
Meditation Verses: Deuteronomy 3:21-22
Thought
What God has done in the past is recorded for us, so that we will know His power and might, and have confidence in Him to take care of us as we go forward into the future. He has called us to live in a way that is different from the way the world lives. Unbelievers have no one they can count on to defend or protect them, so they have to fight for themselves, to obtain everything they desire. So everyone around them is suspect, a competitor, a possible enemy.