FBC Daily Devotional – December 13, 2021

Faith Baptist Church

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Well, good morning and welcome to a new week. Hope your day yesterday was a good one, the

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Lord's Day. I hope you were able to gather with God's people and just get some soul refreshment.

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Also get a good break from, you know, the rest of your Monday through Saturday routine.

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That is the design behind the Lord's Day, you know, just to give us a rest, a rest from all of that other stuff that we have to do the rest of the week.

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Well, nevertheless, today we're starting a new week and we're in Acts chapter 14.

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There's a verse that is found here in this chapter. It's in the middle of what's actually at the end of something that Paul is saying, speaking to the citizens of the city of Lystra.

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He and Barnabas have just been effective, Paul particularly, in healing a man.

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And the result of that is that the residents of Lystra have concluded that Paul and Barnabas are gods and they're set out to worship them.

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And so Paul wants to address this paganism and the notion of the different, the various gods.

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And, you know, in that ancient Greek and Roman mythology, they had a

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God for everything. They had a God of the sea, Poseidon, they had the sun god. They had the

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God for love, they had, you know, all of these different gods. And there was a

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God for every phenomenon of nature as well. So Paul's addressing this, he's saying, look, you know, we're just men, we're just men, but there is a

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God. There is a God in heaven. And speaking of him, he says in verse 17, he says, this

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God who, you know, you can't see, he made the heaven, the earth, the sea, and all the things that are in them.

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This one God. So there's not Poseidon over the sea and another God over this other thing and so forth.

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He says there's the living God who made all things. And he says in bygone generations, he allowed all nations to walk in their own way.

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So the reason you're, you're worshiping these no gods is that God allowed you to go off on your own, in your own way.

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But then he says this, nevertheless, he did not leave himself without witness.

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All right. Now, how did God give witness to his existence, to his power, to his presence, to his care for his creation?

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How did he do that? And the answer to that question is still true today.

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And God still gives witness to his presence, his existence, his power, and his care.

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He gives witness to it if we will but see it. So how did he do that? What did Paul say? He says this is how he did it.

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God gave, God did not leave himself without witness in that he did good. He did good for his creation and he expressed that goodness in his, to his creation in this way.

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He gave us rain from heaven and fruitful seasons, filling our, filling our hearts with food and gladness.

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Isn't that amazing? These are just very basic fundamental things of life, aren't they?

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Rain, well this time of year, snow, but precipitation, rain, harvest, farmers in the fields just recently finished up their harvest.

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God's given us rain, he's given us the harvest, he's given us food to eat, and that food ends up not only nourishing us but gladdening our hearts.

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And what Paul is saying is that God, God uses those things to give witness to his existence and his goodness.

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But isn't it a sad thing? Isn't it a sad but real thing that most people don't think of that at all?

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Whether or not we get rain is dependent upon the weather currents, it's dependent upon what's happened out in the

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Pacific Ocean or down in the Atlantic or down in the Gulf of Mexico, what's happening up in the northern, north of us in the

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North Pole in the Arctic region, you know, and it comes down and all that. We attribute rain or the lack of it simply to the forces of nature, mother nature even some would say.

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And whether we have crops or not and have food to eat, we attribute that to the effectiveness and success of our husbandry, our farmers, and what they're able to produce whether here in the

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States or in Mexico or in South America, wherever we import our food from. And we don't give thought that all of that really comes from God.

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It is an expression of his goodness, of his kindness, of his grace, of his power, of his authority, of his sovereignty, of his providence.

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And the gladness that we get from, you know, having our bellies filled from a good meal and enjoying the taste that touches our palate, the blessing of that, most people don't even stop to thank

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God for it. Go to a restaurant sometime and just watch, just watch.

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Watch as people come, sit down, order their food, food's brought to their table, and they just dig right in.

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Give no thought to where it came from other than the kitchen in the back, some cook, and they might say, wow, this is really good.

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And they'll praise the cook. But did they praise the God who gave it? You see, so this is really, you know, this statement of Paul's should be a eye -opening, perspective -giving enlightenment for our everyday existence.

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The weather that we experience, the food that we eat, the gladness that comes from it, all of these things are gifts from the good

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God who really does exist, the God who made all these things.

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And he, in his goodness to his creation, gives them, gives them abundantly, and gives them regardless of whether man stops to praise him and thank him or not.

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Those of us who know Christ as our Savior, we're followers of this God. Let's not make that mistake.

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Let's be sure to give thanks to our good, generous, faithful, caring

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God. So Heavenly Father, we do thank you today. We thank you for these gifts that you give to men, whether or not man as a whole even acknowledges it.

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We do thank you. We thank you for the precipitation that causes the crops to grow. We thank you for the food that we have to eat, and for your hand in providing it and giving it to us.

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And we thank you for the gladness of heart that we receive from these simple gifts.

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Thank you, gracious God. Bless these thoughts to our hearts today, we pray, and we ask this in Jesus' name, amen.

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All right, well, I hope you have a good Monday. Your week gets off to a great start. Have a good day.