Dear Ones,
Hope you are finding Holy week meaningful for you.  This morning I made choc covered raspberries, went to my exercise class and shopped for prizes for our North Carolina grandsons. We are going there in April!!!!
Devotions from Judy’s heart
How free are we? Hopefully we are on the road to more and more freedom in our lives. I have been reading about the Israelites, leaving their bondage of Egypt and gaining freedom as they went towards Canaan, the land of milk and honey. They had to leave behind their routines, security, and slave life to go towards a life of faith and dependency on the Lord. Isn’t it a picture of all of us who were once in bondage to our selfish sinful nature and then freed to walk the new way in the Lord? The 10 commandments were given to help them and us to live under God’s protective hand and to preserve a free life. Just as it took them a while to experience how to live free, so it is with us. We all have to get free of our slave mentality to and to learn how to live by faith in our God we can’t see physically with our eyes just yet. Pastor Eugene Peterson writes about what that must have been like for the people when Moses climbed up to Mt. Sinai to receive instructions from the Lord and was gone a long time. The people were used to working hard every day as slaves, and now they had time to fill as they waited for Moses to come down again. They got tired of waiting with so much empty space to fill and demanded Aaron to make them a god of their own that they could see, a golden calf. Big mistake! They just couldn’t wait and were bored and tried to fill it with the way of the world. God was very angry because of their sin and Moses pleaded to God for mercy. Before we are quick to judge them, we have only to look at ourselves and the many times we rebel and blow it and deserve His wrath. Maybe we get anxious or bored or rebellious and gravitate to the gods of this world. How much we need His grace and that the new will take hold in our lives, as it says in II Cor. 5:17 (ESV), “Therefore, it anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold the new has come.” Just as the Israelites had to get accustomed to a life of freedom and get over their old slave habits, so do we, and it takes time. We have only to ask for help and grace to live as His free sons and daughters.
Challenge for today: Be willing to give up old habits that enslave and enter into the new life God has for you.
Blessings on your day and prayers and love, Judy