Matthew 20:17-19
Now as Jesus was going up to Jerusalem, he took the twelve disciples aside and said to them, “We are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be betrayed to the chief priests and the teachers of the law. They will condemn him to death and will turn him over to the Gentiles to be mocked and flogged and crucified. On the third day he will be raised to life!”
What of Today’s Verse…
One thing the Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) make clear is that Jesus’ death on the cross was no accident. Jesus knew the challenge that awaited him in Jerusalem, and he walked into it to deliver us from the same fate.
Let us Pray:
Holy God and Loving Father, thank you for your plan to cover my sin with your grace by the death of your Son. May I live today aware of his sacrifice and confident of his victory over sin and death so my life may reflect your victory. Through Jesus, my precious Savior, I pray. Amen.
Words of Wisdom
Worship
Worship is giving God the best that He has given you. Be careful what you do with the best you have. Whenever you get a blessing from God, give it back to Him as a love gift. Take time to meditate before God and offer the blessing back to Him in a deliberate act of worship. If you hoard a thing for yourself, it will turn into spiritual dry rot, as the manna did when it was hoarded. God will never let you hold a spiritual thing for yourself, it has to be given back to Him that He may make it a blessing to others.
Bethel is the symbol of communion with God; Ai is the symbol of the world. Abraham pitched his tent between the two. The measure of the worth of our public activity for God is the private profound communion we have with Him. Rush is wrong every time, there is always plenty of time to worship God. Quiet days with God may be a snare. We have to pitch our tents where we shall always have quiet times with God, however noisy our times with the world may be. There are not three stages in spiritual life – worship, waiting and work. Some of us go in jumps like spiritual frogs, we jump from worship to waiting, and from waiting to work. God’s idea is that the three should go together. They were always together in the life of Our Lord. He was unhasting and unresting. It is a discipline, we cannot get into it all at once.
“And he pitched his tent having Bethel on the west and Ai on the east: and there he builded an altar.” Genesis 12:8
