May the nations praise you, O God. Yes, may all the nations praise you. Then the earth will yield its harvests, and God, our God, will richly bless us. Yes, God will bless us, and people all over the world will fear him.
Psalms 67:5-7
This has been my solemn prayer for quite some time now. That we, as a human race, will come to realize WHO God really is and what he has really done. There is so much strife, hurt, anger, deceit, hopelessness, greed, malice, and just pure evil in the world right now. However, we must all realize that this is not new. We just happen to know about it in seconds, minutes, or hours now versus weeks, months, or years in days gone by. My wife Kristina sent me this the other day, as it is something I have been saying for a while now:
8Everything is wearisome beyond description. No matter how much we see, we are never satisfied. No matter how much we hear, we are not content. 9History merely repeats itself. It has all been done before. Nothing under the sun is truly new. 10Sometimes people say, “Here is something new!” But actually it is old; nothing is ever truly new. 11We don’t remember what happened in the past, and in future generations, no one will remember what we are doing now.
Ecclesiastes 1:8-11
So, even in this time of what we feel is unprecedented evil, human nature really hasn’t changed that much. People in bygone days also thought “this must be it – we are living in the times that Revelation talks about!” Yet, they have forgotten what the previous generation(s) have been through.
God is still firmly in control. Jesus is at His right hand. The plan is still in place. We know the ending, just not what happens here in the middle during the vapor that is our lives. The day is coming when the verse I quoted to start this will absolutely come true. Will it happen before the second coming or after? I am yet hopeful that people are waking up and asking different questions than they ever have been. I would bet that despite their outward appearances and the words and rhetoric that they use, that more people are open to hearing about God and His majesty than ever before. Their outward appearance may not say that, but I bet deep down they feel it.
I have talked with many people recently, and I get a sense this is happening. I find people are open to listen more since they see so much junk happening around them. They are looking for an potential explanation and certainly for comfort and hope.
There are still many who are walled off and closed to hearing about God, but as stated in my last post, even the stone heart that I had was able to be changed. After all, my sister-in-law, who knows me well, told Kristina she would never get me to church. Sometime it takes some really hard times either individually or collectively to realize that God IS real, that His Son did come here and die for all of us, and that we ALL fall short of the glory of God.
Lord, I continue to pray the above, that all nations would praise you collectively and that you would mightily bless us all. I pray that we will have the courage to stand before those who persecute us and who ridicule us to never back down from Your word and Your teaching. The harvest is truly plenty, but the workers are too few. Let us be a people set apart for a time such as this. Oh what a time to be alive! The world needs a beacon of hope, it needs salt and light. I pray that we are those things to this very dark world. Amen!
Sixty-six books in a year 