Time with Abba, Singing Praising 親親爸父，唱詩歌頌 : OT DAY 89 - God Can Only Make You Limp (請按此處收聼廣東話Cantonese podcast click here)

Friday, December 5, 2014

OT DAY 89 - God Can Only Make You Limp (請按此處收聼廣東話Cantonese podcast click here)

Starting last week we add one important thing to our daily devotion. We start our devotion with one to two verses from the Psalms to praise God. We always have so limited vocabulary when we want to praise God. Let's learn from the Psalms so that we can be able to praise God in a better way:

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
2     He makes me lie down in green pastures.
He leads me beside still waters.
3     He restores my soul.
He leads me in paths of righteousness
    for his name's sake.

Psalm 23: 1-3

Today's Reading: Genesis 32:24b- 32

** If you would like to learn a simple and good way of Daily Devotion method please read my “Count Down 5” from my Devotion on Fire blog:

http://bishopsilas.blogspot.ca/2009/08/count-down-5-subject-shifting-devotion.html

To use this simple and good way of Daily Devotion method please click this link:

.Subject Shifting Devotion.pdf

Please click this link to read Genesis 32:24b-32

Chinese(CUV): https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=創世記 32&version=CUV
English(ESV): https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis 32&version=ESV

Bible Study

Today's passage is perhaps one of the most difficult passages in the Bible for us to understand. Why God wants to wrestle with Jacob? How can God lose a wrestling game to Jacob, a human being? That's impossible! And then God bless Jacob and gives him a new name, Israel. What is it really happening? What has that wrestling to do with us?

Let's take a look at what Professor John Goldingay says (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Goldingay) :

So why is God wrestling with Jacob? God has been doing that all Jacob's life, trying to turn Jacob into the man God wants him to be but failing…
God has to "win us," as we say. We have to want to yield to God's purpose and God's vision for us if the change in us is to be authentic. But Jacob does not want to yield, and never does.
Yet God does bless him and gives him a new name that epitomizes his nature…Jacob is a person who keeps fighting with God in order to stay the man he is. In the end God lets him do that because even God cannot force people to change. God can only make them limp…"Isra-el" does not actually mean "he fights himself with God." It is a statement of which God is the subject - as God was the initiator of the fight in the story. If anything, "Isra-el" would mean "God fights himself." God strives to get a person like Jacob to become the kind of person he could be and should be and that God wants him to be, and keeps at it in this struggle with Jacob…
And insofar as the church comes to share in Israel's relationship with God, we recall that we too are Jacob, we are Israel. We are a people whose nature is to struggle with God to avoid becoming the people we could be, and a people with whom God continues to struggle to try to take us there.

John Goldingay. Genesis for Everyone - Part Two. Louisville,KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010, p.117-118.

Did God make you limp in order to change you into a person He wants you to be? What have you experienced so far?

Let's have a time to be still and give the Holy Spirit space to speak through the passage we have just read. Offer this time up to Jesus as you listen to him, while listening to "Gabriel's Oboe": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmax47l2hLU

Spiritual Journal

The title I heard from Jesus today is: God can only make you limp

What Jesus tells me today is a totally new insight to understand Jacob's wrestling experience with God. It is such a moving experience the past hour as I recall one by one how God made me limp many, many times in order to change me. And, how rebellious and stubborn I have always been to wrestle with Him.

How about you? Jesus is trying to tell you something very, very important now. Why don't you take the time when you listen to the song "10,000 reasons" to kneel before God for five minutes? Wait for Him to speak to you and be willing to yield, change and be more Christlike.

I have the honour to have Dr. Philemon Choi inviting me to speak to all the full-time staff of Breakthrough Youth Global Network in Breakthrough Village, Shatin, Hong Kong this Tuesday. After the talk, Dr. Choi asked them to pray for me, my family and ministry.
Also, a photo with Dr. Choi and his younger son, Jonathan who is a staff of that Network.

Please click this link to the app. Andy Ng wrote. You really need to use that if you have an Android cel. Andy said he is going to do the App. for iPhone later:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ideal.rec.app

Please click this link to worship with us -