Thought for December 30, 2024

•  1879: Gilbert & Sullivan's "Pirates of Penzance" premiers
• 1903: Iroquois Theater fire in Chicago kills 602
• 1922: Formation of the USSR
• 1924: Edwin Hubble announces the existence of other galaxies
• 1944: Corrie Ten Boom released from a concentration camp. Her father and sister had died in the camp. Corrie said, "You can never learn that Christ is all you need until Christ is all you have."
• 1968: Frank Sinatra first records "My Way"
• 1978: Woody Hayes fired by Ohio State
• 2002: Three Christian missionaries are shot and killed in a Baptist Hospital in Yemen.
• Born: Titus [the Roman general who destroyed Jerusalem in 70 AD], Asa Candler [bought the recipe for Coca Cola from John Pemberton for $238.98 and founded the company known by that name], Rudyard Kipling, Simon Guggenheim, Bert Parks, Jack Lord, Bo Diddley, Skeeter Davis, Sandy Koufax, John Hartford ["Gentle on My Mind"], Meredith Vieira, Matt Lauer, Tiger Woods, LeBron James
• Died: Grigori Rasputin, Sonny Liston, Richard Rodgers [Rodgers & Hammerstein], Saddam Hussein, Barbara Walters

Thought:

Tomorrow's thought for the day will be the last for a while. I began writing these daily thoughts in March of 2020 in response to the Covid outbreak and resulting lock down. Over 1500 daily thoughts have been written since then as I shared what the Lord was showing me each morning. The last 800 or so of the thoughts have been published on this blog site. The Lord has led me to suspend writing for a while--how long is up to Him. I may go back and assemble a year of thoughts into a daily devotional, but that is for later. So today I am reading Philippians 3. I wrote from this passage several times over these almost 5 years. My prayer for those who read this is found in this passage:

I pray that you will know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death in order that we may attain to the resurrection from the dead.  

What I have written over these years has been really for me--things that I needed to hear, accept, obey. Many mornings were times of reflection, while others were times of celebration and rejoicing. I hope all of them contained something that the Lord could use in your life to help you know Him. As Paul says, everything else is really just garbage compared to the surpassing value of knowing Him. 

I'm sure some mornings you may have wondered what was going on in my mind. And sometimes you had to reach out to remind me to push the button and publish the thought. When I go back and read, I sometimes ask myself what I could have been thinking about. Hopefully, God can use even the ramblings of mine to help someone know Him, or know Him better. 

As we reach the end of another year, verses 13-14 are again appropriate for thought and meditation. I am going to try and do the one thing Paul mentions---forget what lies behind and press on. Here is what I understand him to mean:

• Do not be held prisoner to yesterday's successes and failures. Certainly we learn from our experiences and I want to remember the glorious times and opportunities God has given me this year. I want to remember the friends who have gone home before me this year, thankful for the chance to walk and learn and grow and pray with them. I want to remember seeing prayers answered, lives transformed, new life in the kingdom. But I do not want to live in the past; I want to get up each day and say this is the day the Lord has made, I will rejoice and be glad in it. Just as I do not want to live on past glory or yesterday's success, I do not want yesterday's failures to cripple my today. Learning to really forgive others  and forgive myself so that I do not carry burdens that I have given to Jesus. Refusing to let Satan remind me of past failures to cause me to fail again today. 
• Press on. These words tell me that moving forward is not easy--it requires effort and endurance. Pursuing the goal of the upward call of Christ is not a leisurely walk, it is a forced march like soldiers endure. And as I get older, just walking is sometimes hard. 
• Then I read verses 20-21. My citizenship is not here--it is there. So in 2025, I will eagerly await His coming. Alert, stewarding those gifts, talents and resources He has entrusted to me. 

Blessings

Larry