Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“You shall eat your fill and bless the Lord your God for the good land that he has given you. ”
NL Daily Devotion for Thursday, January 24, 2019
by Daniel D. Maurer, Clergy Stuff Writer
God continued to work with God’s people and bring them into new covenants, despite the fact that God’s people kept goofing up. It’s not that God didn’t care whether or not the people followed the law; not at all. God simply never gave up, because God wanted the people to thrive.
In today’s reading, we not only hear about God’s warning, but we also hear of the rewards. The amazing thing is that these rewards are simple—they contain the riches of the new land that the Israelites are meant to inhabit.
In what way might this be relative to us, today? I think it’s an indication that material gifts can also be a blessing. It’s only that we fall into materialism that it becomes a risk.
But, it seems, that was a risk for God’s people before—it’s no wonder that it continues to endanger us! For that, God warns us as well; for we are God’s children.
Narrative Lectionary Daily Reading:
Deuteronomy 8:1-10
This entire commandment that I command you today you must diligently observe, so that you may live and increase, and go in and occupy the land that the Lord promised on oath to your ancestors. Remember the long way that the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, in order to humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commandments. He humbled you by letting you hunger, then by feeding you with manna, with which neither you nor your ancestors were acquainted, in order to make you understand that one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. The clothes on your back did not wear out and your feet did not swell these forty years. Know then in your heart that as a parent disciplines a child so the Lord your God disciplines you. Therefore keep the commandments of the Lord your God, by walking in his ways and by fearing him. For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land with flowing streams, with springs and underground waters welling up in valleys and hills, a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey, a land where you may eat bread without scarcity, where you will lack nothing, a land whose stones are iron and from whose hills you may mine copper. You shall eat your fill and bless the Lord your God for the good land that he has given you.
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