Under the Cloud

Last week we began the 10 lessons we can learn from Numbers Chapter 9.  The first lesson was to Celebrate God's work in your life.  I hope you got some ideas or even had a remembrance time to honor God and thank Him for the work He has done in and around you. This brings us to our second lesson: Seek spiritual advice, especially in new situations. The Israelites were told to follow all the rules and regulations set down for the Passover festival in the wilderness. Some were unclean because of a dead body. The rules for uncleanness and for cleansing are from the book of Leviticus, which sets down rules for sacrifices. Anyone who touches a dead body is ceremonially unclean and may not attend festivals until they have been cleansed; usually one was unclean until evening. “‘You must keep the Israelites separate from things that make them unclean, so they will not die in their uncleanness for defiling my dwelling place, which is among them.’” ( Leviticus 15:31 ) Those th...

The next 10 weeks we will be looking at life lessons we can learn from Numbers Chapter 9.  Let's start right off with the first: 1. Celebrate God’s work in your life. God is working in your life whether you notice or not. He works in us by His Holy Spirit. We can look back in our lives and see the hand of God changing us even if we don’t realize it on a day-to-day basis. God worked in my life before I made Him the Lord of my life. I can see that now, but once I surrendered to His will for me, the changes were much more dramatic and I was attuned to His work, so it was more noticeable. Perhaps your story is similar. God is always at work in and around His people. We should be sharing what we do see as part of our testimony. In the Old Testament, we see many memorials and commemorations. I have often thought that such celebrations were a good idea. We celebrate Christmas and Easter, of course, but what if we celebrated the anniversary of our salvation? What if we cele...

http://www.gloriadei-sd.org/let-your-light-shine/ We had some  pretty violent  thunderstorms this afternoon.  I was in the basement when the lights went out.  I had an immediate concern as to how long this darkness would persist.  Thankfully, they blinked back on in less than a  minute  so I didn't really have to go upstairs and start searching for candles, matches, flashlights or anything else I needed in the dark.  How ironic that I was experiencing total darkness right before writing about the lampstand in the tabernacle for my Numbers Bible Study!   Numbers Chapter 8  t alks about the lampstand.  The seven  lamps on the lampstand need  to light the area in front of them .  The direction of the light is important.   If you have ever been in a completely dark room, you know that a light in one area does not illuminate another.  If we are trying to see something that is not near the light, w...

What should we give to God?  What does He need?  He has given us everything: life, salvation, forgiveness, grace, mercy, redemption, love and so much more. As we more fully understand His grace toward us, our hearts overflow with gratitude and we recognize what a privilege it is to serve the God of the universe.  This gratitude abounds in generosity.  Paul reminds us in 1 Corinthians 4:7 that everything we have we received from God; so to be generous is to give back to God. Proverbs 19:17 says that Whoever is kind to the poor lends to the Lord!  Wow!  I can lend to the Lord!  That is an amazing thought.  In 2 Corinthians 9:7b, we learn that "God loves a cheerful giver." The more we give, the better we feel and the less tightly we hold to our possessions as our own.  You can't take your possessions with you to heaven.  You wouldn't want to anyway.  We will want for nothing in the next life, I am sure.  But giving isn't just m...