Today’s Podcast
Today’s Bible reading plan:
Read it in a year – Jeremiah 7-11
see the whole year’s plan [here](http://www.bible-reading.com/bible-plan.pdf)
Today’s Devotional
Matthew 13:52
Jesus: Every scribe and teacher of the law who has become a student of the ways of the Kingdom is like the head of the household who brings some new things and some old things, both out of the storeroom.
What do Jesus’ words mean for us today?
If you really want to learn, there are two kinds of teachers you want to avoid, those that have the “we’ve never it done it that way” attitude, and those that chase after every new idea that comes along. Both will lead you down the wrong path.
The first will hold you back and make you think progress is terrible. Only the old ways are God’s ways. There’s a problem with that kind of thinking, though. God gave us a brain to use it. He enabled us to progress. He gave us the intelligence to build cities, make machines, discover the science behind things. If He didn’t want us to discover and use that knowledge, He would have hid it from us. There is nothing wrong with progress.
I doubt if those that only want the “good old days” really do. The good old days mean hot water comes from boiling water over an open fire after you’ve hauled it to your house from the closest creek or river or pond. It means cooking over an open fire because progress means no stoves have been developed. The good old days means oil lamps haven’t even been invented and anything that is done at night is done by fire light. Do you really like the good old days? The good old days mean walking wherever you go because no cars are around, no saddles for horses, no wagons. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it?
No, God doesn’t intend for us to stay in the stone ages. He wants us to learn and progress. That means even progressing in what we know about Him. We should know more about Him than our ancestors did. Each generation should be able to build on its knowledge of God if we will take what our fathers knew and add to it in our own search and study of His word and infinite wisdom.
Conversely, the teacher who jumps at every new idea and throws out the old is bound for problems. You see, we have progressed to the we are today because of the knowledge of those who have gone before us. If we throw out the principles and understanding of those that made the present possible. When we forget all the principles on which our current successes are founded, we find ourselves standing on a slippery slope. We see it in our nation today.
At one time, we were a Christian nation. Kids could play outside without supervision, without parents’ fearing they would be taken, bullied, introduced to drugs or gangs. Kids left the house after breakfast and came home safe when the street lights came home. Adults looked out after each other’s kids and authority meant something. We didn’t hear about police brutality. Neither did we hear about out of control crime rates, overcrowded jails, rampant evil.
Why was America less insane that it seems to be today? I think in great part because we lived by the principles of our fathers and their fathers before them. Somehow, the last couple of generations have felt it’s okay to forget the past. It’s okay to forget what made us great. The thing that made us great was not our ingenuity or brilliant ideas, it was a combination of the our reliance on the principled life our forefathers lived coupled with those brilliant ideas. It was the importance of keeping the past and reaching out into the future.
Jesus’ message is just as true today as it was when He spoke it 2,000 years ago. When we fail to live by the principles that make us live with respect and admiration for God and each other, the foundation upon which this nation was built, we can never achieve much. We reached for the moon in the early sixties, but what have we done since? We decided we could live by our own rules and in so doing, we have almost destroyed our society today.
It’s about time we go back into the storehouse and pull out some of the old and mix it with some of the new. We’ve forgotten the old things that make the foundation strong and rich and fruitful. Unless the foundation is there, the rest just blows away in the storm. We need to find that foundation again. We don’t need to go back to the “good old days” as some would have us do. But we do need to go find those sacred principles of life, family, godliness, purity, holiness, that God’s word tells us are so important. Those things haven’t changed since the beginning of time. If we think we can stand long without them in this modern era, we are sadly mistaken.
It’s time to remember our past.
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