Thought for February 1

 History:

• 1790: Supreme Court convenes for the first time
• 1849: First U.S. College of Dental Surgery incorporated in Baltimore
• 1856: Auburn chartered as the East Alabama Male College
• 1862: Julia Howe publishes "The Battle Hymn of the Republic"
• 1884: First volume of the Oxford English Dictionary published [A-Ant]
• 1896: Puccini's "La Boheme" premiers in Turin
• 1898: First auto insurance policy issued--Travelers
• 1918: The Patriarch of Moscow publishes a letter rebuking the Bolsheviks for jailing, torturing and killing priests, nuns, and laity. "Your acts are not merely cruel, they are the works of Satan for which you will burn in hell fire in the life hereafter and be cursed by future generations in this life." He was jailed for a year and died shortly after his release.
• 1920: First commercial armored car
• 1953: "You Are There" with Walter Cronkite premiers ["Today was a day like all days filled with those events that alter and illuminate our times, and you are there"]
• 1965: Martin Luther King arrested in Selma
• 1978: Harriet Tubman is first African American woman on a stamp
• 2003: Columbia disintegrates entering the atmosphere--7 astronauts die
• Born: Bradbury Robinson [threw first legal forward pass, 1906], John Ford, Clark Gable, Langston Hughes, George Beverly Shea, Boris Yeltsin, Don Everly, Lisa Marie Presley
• Died: Mary Shelley, Buster Keaton, Angelo Dundee [Ali's corner man] Ada Ruth Habershon ["Will the Circle be Unbroken"]

As I have written before, we associate "Will the Circle be Unbroken" with the Carter family and in fact, AP Carter wrote the blue grass version sometime in the 1930"s. But Ada Ruth Habershon wrote the words in London. In 1884, Dwight Moody was touring England and met Ada [age 23], an avid Bible scholar. He invited her to teach at the Moody Conference Center where she taught Old Testament and wrote many books. She returned to England in 1901 in poor health and began writing poetry. She was asked to write some song lyrics and this is one of the 200 songs she wrote. 

Thought:

Looking at passages I have marked in Jeremiah today--a lot of red underlining. We think Jeremiah was about 20 when the Lord called him. Consider how the conversation Jeremiah has with the Lord in 1:1-10 applies to me today.

• God speaks to Jeremiah
• I knew you before you were formed. [1:5] Sounds like Psalm 139:13. Or perhaps like what was said of Isaiah in Isaiah 49:1-5 [God called him from his mother's womb]. 
• Before you were born, God consecrated you [1:5]. In Galatians 1:15, Paul says he was set apart or consecrated in his mother's womb.
• God appointed you to be a prophet to the nations. [1:5]

Just think for a moment about what those verses mean to us. God has always known us. He knew us before any person on earth knew us, even before our mother's knew us. He knew all about us from the beginning and He knows everything that has ever happened to us since then. God set us apart for His service and for His glory in our mother's womb. Now we may reject or disobey, but He created us for His service, for His glory, for His purpose. Ponder that---the God of the universe created you personally. He knew you from the moment you existed. He had a plan for you from before you were born. He knew all of your days before there was even one. 

Now, think about the fact that this Great God who created you and set you apart for His glory has appointed you a messenger to the nations. Just like Jeremiah, we have a message from God that the nations must hear. And God has appointed us for that task. We each have an appointment from the King. Jesus reminds us of that appointment in the Great Commission--but God told Jeremiah about it 2600 years ago. 

I guess the question for me is, Larry, how are you handling God's assignment? 

Blessings

Larry