Today, I am going to continue to go through the book of Malachi and direct your attention to principles we can apply to our lives today. God's appeal through Malachi's message is designed to break through the barrier of Israel's …
My maternal grandfather, Grampa Wool, was a fine man. My mother was the youngest of seven, so, by the time her five kids came along, Grampa Wool was into his sixties. Nonetheless, he played baseball with us (he had been a semi-pro player …
Have you ever done something and almost immediately regretted doing it? It is easy to do such things from our computers, whether it is sending an email critical of the boss or a coworker to the whole company instead of just one colleague …
(21) "I hate, I despise your feast days,
And I do not savor your sacred assemblies.
(22) Though you offer Me burnt offerings and your grain offerings,
I will not accept them,
Nor will I regard your fattened peace offerings.
(23) Take away from Me the noise of your songs,
For I will not hear the melody of your stringed instruments.
(24) But let justice run down like water,
And righteousness like a mighty stream.
Israel's religion was going nowhere. The people were not righteous, moral, or just in their dealings with one another, so their playing at religion, though sincere, was despicable to God. In the list of sacrifices in verse 22, the sin …
"The days of our lives are seventy years," writes Moses in Psalm 90:10. King David concurs: "Man is like a breath; his days are like a passing shadow" (Psalm 144:4). Unlike God, "who inhabits eternity" (Isaiah 57:15), we mortals have a limited existence. Due to our finite time, we tend to view things through the lens of immediacy. We continually take stock of where we are and how much progress we have made toward this or that goal. We take a short-term view of time—relative to God, at least—and in our zeal for efficiency, we measure where we are against where we have been to get an idea of …
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