God’s Great Mercies!

Happy Birthday. It’s time to celebrate!

       In Nehemiah chapter nine we see The Temple is built, and the walls are built, the offering has been taken up, revival is happening, so now what?

There is a man I know who always ask me when he sees me, “hey Mike, how are you doing? What are you celebrating?” Sometimes I wish more people would ask me that. When we stop and consider this question, we usually just see the tip of God’s mercy iceberg. Some things are easy to celebrate like your birthday and other things are heavy on our hearts. But I believe we can still celebrate the fact that God is on His Throne and is holding all things together. His Grace and Mercy are enough.  Do you remember the Beatles song, “Come Together”? In this passage the congregation, the members of the church, assembled. The community of believers came together for a time of prayer, self-examination, confession, and repentance. The funny thing about the Beatles song is a line in the song rings with so much truth. It says, “I know you, you know me, one thing I can tell you is, you got to be free, come together, right now over me.” This is what God is saying to us, not through the Beatles, but through His Word. They read God’s Word for a quarter of the day, that would be 6 hours of studying the Bible and in this era the Law. And then another 6 hours they confessed and worshipped. Wonder how that would look today? Imagine the freedom and liberty they had. It reminds me of John 8:31-32, “So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed him, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, 32 and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

This is how we should all be thinking when it comes to our relationship with God. We need to remain faithful because we see the examples here of what faithfulness and unfaithfulness looks like.

Nehemiah 9:19 shows us that God is our navigator and will not abandon us. It’s His promise to us and He cares for us. God’s Mercies are endless, and God doesn’t want us to miss them.

Winston Churchill once said, “Every once in a while, we trip over the truth, but we can usually pick ourselves up and dust ourselves off and hurry on as if nothing ever happened.”

Happy Birthday!

Mike R

  ’67 / ’83  Jacksonville FL