Eternal Love

Well my computer hasn't died yet. That's about the only good thing I can say about it. It is just so incredibly slow now for some reason. But there were a few times yesterday that it zipped right on around through the different places I went without any trouble or extra time at all. Go figure. I will do the best with what I have.

We had small group this morning and we did several exercises about the different, mostly minor prophets. We looked at Jeremiah and I think he's one of the major prophets, isn't he? Anyway we just took out a section of verses and broke them down into answers for a set of questions. We had to give the quoted Scriptures a title of 7 words or less. Then state what God wanted. How did God attempt to change His people? What does God promise or predict? What does the passage say about God? Man? And finally what was the application today. We asked these questions of Joel, Micah, and Jeremiah. It was all we had time for. We skipped doing the one on Zephaniah because of the time but I will do that short exercise on my own a little later. But what I discovered by asking these same questions each time is that all these prophets were really saying the same thing. Their messages revealed the heart of God. How the people had gone astray but how much God longed to shower them with love and prosperity. They spoke of God's faithfulness and how desperately He longed to have a real relationship with His people. And each one had a single line that I found intriguing. Joel's was, "And everyone who calls on the name of the LORD will be saved"; Micah's was that we are required to "act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God"; and Jeremiah's sentence that stuck me was, "No longer will a man teach his neighbor ... because they will all know me from the least of them to the greatest." Those weren't necessarily the points of the prophets, just a sentence that stuck me as I was reading the passages. But you could do this little exercise with just about any book of the Bible. And it doesn't even have to take the entire book. We were just doing a paragraph or two and then analyzing them. But asking the same questions of each prophet really revealed to me God's attitude of always seeking us, always beseeching us to come to Him, always wanting to bless us with His love and blessings. Take a paragraph or two anywhere in the Bible and do that little exercise. I'm sure you will be blessed by it. I was. You take something like giving that section a title in 7 words or less and see how it really makes you stop and think. But in all of these prophets God was yearning and striving for a deep, intimate relationship with His people. It was amazing. I think I will use this exercise again in the future in my own quiet time. I love to sit with a pad of paper and a mechanical pencil and just read and takes notes. There's something about the physical act of writing things down that seems to plant the seed a little deeper in the mind.

I had intended on writing more about God's eternal love today. But I can't seem to get my mind in gear so I think I will save that for another time. Sorry. Not that I really have much of anything to write other than that. But I just can't get creative today.

Our weather is beautiful. Bright sunshine and blue skies, a soft breeze blowing the windchimes around outside. I have two sets of tuned windchimes and they make such beautiful music when the wind blows. I have the door open so I can hear them. And the fresh air is so nice. Before long we won't be able to keep the door open for fresh air because it will be too hot. I don't look forward to that at all. But I guess we have to take the bad with the good. I think I'm going to get around and get a few things done. I haven't done anything today because of small group so I have things that need to be done. Hopefully in my next blog I will feel up to writing about God's eternal love because it is so much more than eternal in time; it is eternal in quality too. So until my next blog...