Daily Devotional – June 22, 2020

Faith Baptist Church

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I really hope you were able to look past some of the evidences of rerun status and gain something worthwhile from the devotionals anyway.

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This week's devotionals should be all new, I promise. Well, I'm sure you're praying for our nation these days and the upheaval that's going on in many of our cities, our larger cities.

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I just read this morning that in Chicago, just in Chicago this past weekend, there were 102 people who were shot and 14 of them died.

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And a lot of those who were shot were teenagers, young people, as I recall, even

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I think there was a three -year -old child that was shot in a drive -by kind of a thing, just a travesty of what's going on.

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But in all of these shootings and deaths, none of them were from police officers.

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So that should say something. And one thing it should tell us is we really, really need to pray for God to be merciful and to do a work of grace in our land, in our nation in these days.

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Well, I just finished reading a book entitled Wilderness, Gateway to the Soul. The author is

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Scott Stillman. And in one of the chapters he tells of a five -day backpacking trip that he took in the

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Sycamore Canyon Wilderness. It's near Sedona in Arizona. He went in the late fall.

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Now, when we think, we in the upper Midwest, when we think of late fall, we think of cooler temperatures and a lot of moisture.

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It's like, you know, two out of five days in the fall are going to be days of rain.

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But this is Arizona and the Sycamore Canyon Wilderness is the desert.

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And uppermost in any hiker's mind, even in the late fall, especially in the late fall in Arizona, in the desert, is water.

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And Scott tells that as he set out on day one of this five -day trip, he carried four liters of water, expecting that along the way he'll find water somewhere.

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So throughout the day, that first day, he came across no water whatsoever.

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And as he got near the end of the day, he was down to his last liter already.

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And he'd been conserving the water. It's not like he was just, you know, guzzling it. He just conserved the water all day long.

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Well, he got up on the second day. He's already gotten into his final liter of water.

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And considering, you know, what should he do? He's actually seriously thinking about just turning around and going back to where he started, a place called

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Parsons Spring. Knew he'd get plenty of water, but essentially the trip would be over if he did that.

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So he didn't want to go back and quit already on the second day. So he just carried on, headed forward to the place on his map called

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Sycamore Creek. It was five miles away, and he figured, surely there's got to be some water there.

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Now, that's five miles as the crow flies. And of course, if you've done hiking and backpacking, you know that you don't fly and you're not a crow.

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So it'd be a lot longer than that. So he headed off early in the morning. He wanted to avoid as much of the heat of the day as possible.

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Didn't actually arrive to Sycamore Creek until late in the afternoon. And when he got there, he found nothing but a dry, parched, black creek bed.

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No water to be found anywhere. And he was on his last swig of hot water in the bottom of his bottle.

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All right. So now what? It's 15 miles back to his starting point.

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Well, he looked at his map, and he figured out that he could do a circular route that would actually end up being a bit shorter.

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But it would take him back to Parsons Spring, where he began. He decided to do that. So off he headed, and he got about a mile into that return trip, and he saw something glimmering in the rocks ahead.

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Is this a mirage? You know, what is it? He tempered his enthusiasm, his excitement, until he got closer.

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But there it was. Right in the midst of this set of rocks, there was a two -foot -wide, four -foot -long, very deep hole filled with water.

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He said it was more water than he could drink in a week, even in the desert. But listen to what he writes regarding this cistern there in the middle of the desert.

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He says, dead and dying bees, wasps, and flies float on the surface, drowning, drowning in the desert.

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I filter the water and drink it. It tastes cool, sweet, divine.

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Then later he says, searching for water in the desert, I find immensely satisfying.

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You don't find it often, but man, when you do. Well, as you and I sit in our comfortable homes or offices, and cool water to drink is just a few steps away, we may find it actually kind of hard to relate to what

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Scott Stillman is writing about. But David could. You know

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David, David the anointed but not yet king of Israel, not yet crowned of Israel.

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He's anointed king but hasn't yet been crowned. In one of the songs that he wrote, the

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Psalms, Psalm 63, the preface to that Psalm tells us that David wrote the song, quote, when he was in the wilderness of Judah.

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But he wasn't there on some kind of adventure, some kind of a backpacking expedition, looking for a few days of solitude or something fun to do.

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That's not why he's there at all. Actually, he's a man on the run. He had just managed to get his extended family out of harm's way, got them to Moab.

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First Samuel 22 gives us the context of this incident. And he gets his family to Moab and word from the

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Lord came to a prophet. And the prophet told David to leave there and go to the land of Judah, to a wilderness area of Judah, to a harsh and foreboding wilderness area.

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Okay. So if you're David or Scott Stillman for that matter, out in the wilderness, certainly there are many, many things that you might want, especially if you didn't even particularly want to be there.

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What would be tops on your list of things that you want out in the wilderness?

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Food, shelter from the heat of the sun in the wilderness or from the cool of the desert night, water, of course, comfort, protection from predators or insects or snakes.

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Every one of those things is perfectly understandable. I myself, I'm looking forward to a backpacking trip here in a couple of weeks.

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And in my preparation for that, I'm going through a list of items that I need to take with me. And all of those categories have stuff that are planned to go in the backpack.

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But what was number one on David's list? Psalm 63 verse 1 tells us, listen to what he says,

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Oh God, you are my God. Earnestly, I seek you.

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My soul thirsts for you. My flesh faints for you. As in a dry land, a dry and weary land where there is no water.

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So tops on David's list is his God. I seek you.

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My soul thirsts for you. My flesh faints for you. Why is that?

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I think because David understood, and I hope that you do too, that to have water without God is still to die of thirst, of an inner thirst of the soul.

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But to have God and particularly to have God through Jesus Christ, the

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God man, to have God through Christ, even though you're parched under the desert sun, you'll find your soul's thirst quenched.

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This is what Jesus promised to the woman at the Samaritan well when he said this. He said, whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again.

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The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of living water, welling up to eternal life.

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Well, on this first day of the week, after having just come through the Lord's day, I trust that you have drunk deeply from that well, the well of living water.

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If you have, I know your soul has been quenched. Let's ask God to satisfy our thirst with the water of his word, the water that Jesus gives.

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Our Father and our God, we thank you that in this world that is a wilderness in itself, that we can find true satisfaction, find our thirst quenched in Christ.

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And I pray that today we would rejoice in that. Even though we may have longings and desires and needs in our life, we find the soul, the inner soul satisfied, the thirst quenched in Christ.

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Bless these thoughts to our hearts today, we pray, and we ask it in Jesus' name, amen. All right, well, have a good rest of your

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Monday and look forward to a good week together as we share at these devotional times in God's word and as we labor for our