Our Daily Bread Today Deut 11 ++

Scripture selections are taken from the Rock Church Daily Bread Reading schedule for each month. “Lena’s Journalin’” are Lena’s comments on the specific passages from her Daily Journal.

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Deuteronomy 11:1-32
1"You must love the LORD your God and obey all his requirements, laws, regulations, and commands. 2Listen! I am not talking now to your children, who have never experienced the discipline of the LORD your God or seen his greatness and awesome power. 3They weren't there to see the miraculous signs and wonders he performed in Egypt against Pharaoh and all his land. 4They didn't see what the LORD did to the armies of Egypt and to their horses and chariots—how he drowned them in the Red Sea F26 as they were chasing you, and how he has kept them devastated to this very day! 5They didn't see how the LORD cared for you in the wilderness until you arrived here. 6They weren't there to see what he did to Dathan and Abiram (the sons of Eliab, a descendant of Reuben) when the earth opened up and swallowed them, along with their households and tents and every living thing that belonged to them. 7But you have seen all the LORD's mighty deeds with your own eyes!
The Blessings of Obedience
8"Therefore, be careful to obey every command I am giving you today, so you may have strength to go in and occupy the land you are about to enter. 9If you obey, you will enjoy a long life in the land the LORD swore to give to your ancestors and to you, their descendants—a land flowing with milk and honey! 10For the land you are about to enter and occupy is not like the land of Egypt from which you came, where you planted your seed and dug out irrigation ditches with your foot as in a vegetable garden. 11It is a land of hills and valleys with plenty of rain—12a land that the LORD your God cares for. He watches over it day after day throughout the year!
13"If you carefully obey all the commands I am giving you today, and if you love the LORD your God with all your heart and soul, and if you worship him, 14then he will send the rains in their proper seasons so you can harvest crops of grain, grapes for wine, and olives for oil. 15He will give you lush pastureland for your cattle to graze in, and you yourselves will have plenty to eat.
16"But do not let your heart turn away from the LORD to worship other gods. 17If you do, the LORD's anger will burn against you. He will shut up the sky and hold back the rain, and your harvests will fail. Then you will quickly die in that good land the LORD is now giving you. 18So commit yourselves completely to these words of mine. Tie them to your hands as a reminder, and wear them on your forehead. 19Teach them to your children. Talk about them when you are at home and when you are away on a journey, when you are lying down and when you are getting up again. 20Write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates, 21so that as long as the sky remains above the earth, you and your children may flourish in the land the LORD swore to give your ancestors.
22"Be careful to obey all the commands I give you; show love to the LORD your God by walking in his ways and clinging to him. 23Then the LORD will drive out all the nations in your land, though they are much greater and stronger than you. 24Wherever you set your feet, the land will be yours. Your frontiers will stretch from the wilderness in the south to Lebanon in the north, and from the Euphrates River in the east to the Mediterranean Sea in the west. F27 25No one will be able to stand against you, for the LORD your God will send fear and dread ahead of you, as he promised you, wherever you go in the whole land.
26"Today I am giving you the choice between a blessing and a curse! 27You will be blessed if you obey the commands of the LORD your God that I am giving you today. 28You will receive a curse if you reject the commands of the LORD your God and turn from his way by worshiping foreign gods.
29"When the LORD your God brings you into the land to possess it, you must pronounce a blessing from Mount Gerizim and a curse from Mount Ebal. 30(These two mountains are west of the Jordan River in the land of the Canaanites who live in the Jordan Valley, F28 near the town of Gilgal. They are located toward the west, not far from the oaks of Moreh.) 31For you are about to cross the Jordan to occupy the land the LORD your God is giving you. When you are living in that land, 32you must be careful to obey all the laws and regulations I am giving you today.
FOOTNOTES:F26: Hebrew sea of reeds. F27: Hebrew to the western sea. F28: Hebrew the Arabah.

Copyright Statement: Holy Bible, The New Living TranslationCopyright © 1996 by Tyndale Charitable Trust. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers. All rights reserved.

~ Lena’s Journalin’ Today~
If you’ve been a person of “why’s” in your life, you may be asking what is the big deal here with love and obedience, why do they go together. Can’t you love without “obeying”?
You can love chocolate, the color red, my dog’s new collar, the beach, your car, etc and not obey them, but God is a person, and not only A person, but the Creator of your life, your universe!
You do know in English we have one word for “love” and when we say it, the people around us have to attempt to know what we mean when we say it, and they have to guess that maybe we love them more than we do the dog’s collar, right? Doesn’t that leave whole lot of guessing? How do we help their guess to be more accurate to our thoughts and words? By our actions and only our actions can tell other humans and God what we mean.
The Bible was written in Hebrew, Greek & Aramaic languages, then Praise God, for us it was translated so we could read it, BUT in reading it, we cannot read it as we would speak it, we have to think like a Jew! That’s why digging into the word is important. In Greek, which is what most of the New Testament was written in, there are 5 words for love (that I know of). So the Greek did not say, I love your cat’s new hat, they said a word that meant what they meant. Like I feel like your cat’s hat is so cute it makes me smile. Then if they only liked a person as a friend, they wouldn’t say, I love you. They’d say something that actually meant, I befriend you. Isn’t that nicer to say what you mean and mean what you say? Our English expression is not clear like that.
So why do we obey to show love? Because it is reciprocation of affection and appreciation in demonstration. God demonstrates His, why would we not also demonstrate ours? It is also all about our free wills, given to us by God to exercise, and if we choose to exercise them freely in love towards another it is proof of true heartfelt love in action.
One of the Greek words for love is “agapeo”, it means no conditions whatsoever. God loves us with that kind of love. Humans find this kind of love very hard to express, genuinely. I find it interesting this morning as I looked up this Hebrew word, “love” found in the first verse here, it does not say we have to love the Lord our God with “agapeo”, the highest form of love, the same love that God loves us with, but rather it says, love God with as much human expression as you can. Give all of your humanness to His love. Be affectionate to Him and allow that affection to grow. The “love” here is a progressive love that grows. I think that is cool of God. It’s kind of like He’s saying, walk with Me a bit and I’ll prove My love to you enough for you to want to love Me more.
Really this love’s definition starts out as a desire, as a friend, then a loving affection, a yearning, a lover, a father, etc. It encompasses where we are and where we’ll be.
Everything we see in the spirit and experience in the love of God draws us to God. BUT the enemy does not want us to be drawn to God and His love, he wants to come in-between that relationship and any potential of it.
A few ways he does this is through lies and wrong perceptions of God Himself. God extends Himself towards us and the enemy says, that wasn’t God doing that for you, that was just “fate” or “coincidence” or whatever. He minimizes the works of God and then also uses criticism against God and any servant of God, these complaints also minimize God and His works and make the enemy look bigger and somehow greater than God. The complaints try to nullify the works of God as though either they didn’t ever really happen or they somehow were magical in nature. This is why the word continuously tells us to magnify the Lord, exalting His name in unity, and remembering what He’s done. Tell about His goodness, do not allow the good news to be silenced by lies and hatred of the enemy for God expressed in the earth.
WOW, do you see this, another “reason” to obey God? To have strength to conquer enemies! You do know one reason we have enemy opposition is we have not obeyed God’s words, we’ve gone our own way and the consequences of the warnings He’s given us in His word have come upon us? SO if we obey, we’ll be strong enough to join others and fight others enemies, and God’s enemies and not only our own all the time!
Don’t you want the blessings, and not the results of cursings? Man I’ve had enough with dealing with curses and the effects of others’ sins and my wrong choices etc. I hear people all of the time saying, it just gets from bad to worse, and what’s going to happen next? Let’s not expect bad and curses, lets’ walk in obedience, praise, love, and see the blessings of God in the land of the living!
How does one love the Lord with everything? All of the heart, all of the mind, all of the body? Make room for His spirit in your life, the life you now live, not the after life in heaven, the life now. What takes up the space of your life? What do you give a lot of attention to? What do your thoughts dwell on? Where do you go? What do you spend money on? When it says don’t serve other gods, it does NOT mean we bow to idols. It means we spend time and money and give a lot of thought to something more than we do God.
A lot of people complain about the church telling them what they should and should not do or be, why would they do that to people? Because they love people like God does, and they want to see them go all the way with God and they want to see them flourishing in their faith walks and they wants to see their generational enemies defeated! They want to see them live out their purposes on earth and not waste their life on things that they will become shocked to realize later when they stand before God.
The enemy has lied to church people telling them that they get saved to feel God’s great love and smile at people to show them they feel loved by God and they can be good on earth to prepare for heaven later on! That is a lie. God sent us here to be and do something. Knowing His love is ONLY the beginning of our new and eternal life here. God is trying to assemble an army to do a few things while we are still alive here. He’s waiting for us to know His love enough to rise up in faith and response and say, what do You want me to do for You, GOD? Where can I go today, what can I do today, who can I save today? How many more days do I have, because there’s a powerful lot to do, use me to do some of it Lord.
The scripture here has examples of what the church tells people they should do. Commit these words to your life, to the living, breathing and thinking of the words of God. So the church might say: read your Bible, come to Bible study, be at church 3 times a week, serve the kids in nursery by teaching them of the love of God you know, and help a cell leader teach and share your faith, etc. Is that enough to have God’s words in us in more abundance than anything else? A lady in our church said if we do a church thing 3 times a week, we are giving God 3% of our week! She figured out the hours spent etc. Is that too much?
I always tell people about the balance scales. How much of God do we want? Do we want to include Him into our lives, like a picture on the wall or a nick knack on the shelf? No, we want Him in our lives. Since we are human that means a few things have to go and be replaced. Music is a biggie, any media is a good target for more of God and less worldliness. Replacing what we’ve been hearing and seeing is #1 in being changed to praise God in our thoughts and actions. Junk in junk out, faith in faith out, praise in praise out. Can’t have both, our capacity is only so large and can only contain so much. If we find ourselves complaining, we may want to step back and look at the picture of our activity and what we are spending our lives on. If there’s no room for reading the Bible, is it because we surf the net a lot and use that time for that, or we have to watch such and such TV shows? Some things have to go to “fit” God in, and you know He doesn’t want to be “fit in”, He wants all of us to be in all of Him and all of Him to be in all of us, He wants to make us One!

Proverbs 27:17-19
17 You use steel to sharpen steel, and one friend sharpens another. 18 If you care for your orchard, you'll enjoy its fruit; if you honor your boss, you'll be honored.
19 Just as water mirrors your face, so your face mirrors your heart.
Psalm 122:1
1 When they said, "Let's go to the house of God," my heart leaped for joy.