Some Of The People Went Out On The Seventh Day

Exodus 16:4-5 & 26-27 Then the Lord said to Moses, “I will rain down bread from heaven for you. The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day. In this way I will test them and see whether they will follow my instructions. On the sixth day they are to prepare what they bring in, and that is to be twice as much as they gather on the other days.”

“Six days you are to gather it, but on the seventh day, the Sabbath, there will not be any.”

Nevertheless, some of the people went out on the seventh day to gather it, but they found none.

Why do you suppose some people find it so difficult to obey God? Simple instructions from God go unheeded. Warnings of dire consequences have been ignored for generation upon generation upon generation. And yet the disobedience goes on. It simply boggles the mind. Something so simple as love the Lord Your God with all your heart mind and strength is disregarded as if it was a suggestion from an ill-advised source. Really, seriously they are the ten commandments not the ten suggestions. Surely you and I are more enlightened than the rest of humanity. Well, probably not. And in the words of Leslie Nielsen, “Stop calling me surely.”

We are created by a loving God our Father in Heaven to love Him and to love others. Seems simple, yet we are no more enlightened than those who have gone before us. All too often our love of self gets in the way of our love for others. We are tempted to take on the perspective of “I  earned what I have, let others pull themselves up by their boot straps and earn theirs too.”  Are you as guilty of that as I am? It is a growth area for most of us. How about the love God first thing? I once heard church on Sunday described as having to compete against every other thing in the world to do on a Sunday morning. Have you placed worshipping God second in your life?

Okay enough with the guilt trip. Face it, we are all flawed in how we honor God and His commandments. We try, but we are by nature sinful and prone to placing God and others second. The Apostle Paul in Romans 6:1-4 reminds us of our condition and our cure. What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer? Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life. We are saved from ourselves by the sacrifice of the Lamb of God. Jesus bore our sins on the cross, overcame death and left behind an empty tomb for all to see and know that through Him we have everlasting life. We all can do better in living our lives as God intended us to live. And through His Holy Spirit we can have the faith to do just that.

PRAYER: Almighty God and Father, we poor sinners fail in loving You as we should. We place ourselves first in front of You, and in front of others. Help us Dear Lord to be better than we are. Send down Your Holy Spirit to fill our hearts with the faith we need to become better than we are. Give us the daily bread to fill our hearts with Your love. We ask this in Jesus’ name, Amen.