FBC Daily Devotional – January 4, 2021

Starting the New Year and the Daily Devotional Plan

The first week in the new year. The year is just in its infancy and we're here we are back at it right? Have you started working on any of those goals yet? Holiday's behind us, New Year's is done, you've written down some New Year's goals for the year.

Working on those yet or is it still too early? Well you know how it is, the longer you wait on beginning to work on those things the less likely they trail off and nothing comes of it. Well I hope you've established some good goals for 2021 and I hope that the Lord will bless you with seeing many of those things come to come to fruition.

Maybe just a brief explanation, you notice I have my glasses on this week again. If you follow the devotionals at all, last week I didn't have any glasses on and you may have thought, oh well that's interesting the guy can finally see.

Well I was doing a little experiment. I had gone to the eye doctor and he suggested I try some bifocal contacts. I need no glasses to see a distance but I do need some reading glasses. So he suggested I try some bifocal contacts and so last week when I was doing the recordings, that's what I did.

I had those bifocal contacts in and they worked fine for reading but with the contacts in my distance vision was a little fuzzy and a few years ago I got LASIK surgery because my distance vision was just horrible and fixed that wonderfully.

Well you know I'm not gonna get bifocal contacts and then have fuzzy distance vision just so I can read up close. So here we are back at the glasses and the reflection of stuff in the glasses and I you know I apologize for all of that.

Maybe I'll get some glasses that have a anti-reflective coating on it or something so you know whatever is sitting in front of me as I share these devotionals isn't reflected in my glasses. So nonetheless, well we're starting something new this year with the devotionals.

I devised a Bible reading plan, actually adapted one from a daily Bible reading, a Bible actually that's put out by Crossway, that the Bible itself takes you through the reading the Scriptures in a year, adapting that and making it a two-year reading plan.

And so we started that on New Year's Day and let me suggest a couple of ways in which you can get a copy of that plan if you don't have it. One of them is you can go to the Faith Baptist Church website home page and on the menu bar there's a menu item called articles and devotions.

Just put your cursor on that, hover over it, and it opens up a sub menu item with a Bible reading plan. You click on the Bible reading plan and it opens a new page and you can either bookmark the page so you can go back to it every day and read it or you could actually print off the page.

A second way to do it is go to the Faith Baptist home page, scroll down on that home page to the daily devotional video, and to the right of that video is the Bible reading plan. And there's a little icon on the plan where you can enlarge it and it goes full screen.

It opens up a new tab, you can then print it off in that way. And then another thing you could do is send me an email or a Facebook message and I'll email you a copy of it and you can have it that way.

Matthew 2:13–3:6 and the Visit of the Magi

Well anyway, today's reading covered Matthew chapter 2 verses 13 through chapter 3 verse 6 and I thought about commenting on that but a week ago Sunday, the Sunday after Christmas, I preached a message from particularly the visit of the Magi followed by the Herod's killing of the innocents, the innocent children, the innocent baby boys around Bethlehem.

So maybe if you didn't get to hear that message you might want to again go to the Faith Baptist Church home page and in the video section where you can watch the daily videos, to the right of that there's a little box that has all of the videos that we've ever done and probably on page 2 at the most 3 under related videos you'll find that Sunday morning message.

Proverbs 1 and the Fear of the Lord in Parenting

But what I want to zero in on today is the passage we read in Proverbs 1 verses 7 through 9. Verses 8 and 9 say this, it says here my son your father's instruction and forsake not your mother's teaching for they are a and pendants for your neck.

Well I'm guessing that most of us, most who are watching and I myself, I'm a parent. Maybe your children are still young and in the home and you're actively teaching them on a daily basis or perhaps your children are parents themselves, I don't know, whatever the case.

Let's think about this exhortation to the kids. You know it's easy for moms and dads to hear this exhortation to the kids and say yeah yeah that's right you listen to this, you listen, he doesn't know what he's saying.

But I want to hear this in a different way. I want to hear this and ask ourselves as parents a couple of important questions. The first is what am I teaching my children or my grandchildren for that matter?

What is it that I'm actually teaching them? And then is that instruction really graceful garland or a lovely pendant? I mean you realize of course that lessons are many times more often caught than taught.

So you know looking at my behavior, looking at my lifestyle, looking at my attitudes that are expressed and the way I converse with my spouse or my children or and so forth, you know what what am I teaching them?

Is my instruction really graceful garland or a lovely pendant? Now a good way to know the answer to that is to look at verse 7 in our passage. Verse 7 says the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.

So if we as parents are teaching our children the fear of the Lord, both with our active instruction as well as our you know passive, you know the way we live, our passive instruction. If we as parents are teaching our children the fear of the Lord, that is if we're teaching them to honor him with our time, our talents, our treasure, and our temple.

By our temple I mean our body. If we're teaching them to honor him, if we're teaching them to trust him with our life, with our soul, with our eternal destiny, then with every lesson taught we're adding a leaf of whatever to that garland and or we're adding a link to that chain that's the pendant that's going around the neck.

What is it that we're actually teaching them? The most fundamental aspect of our instruction needs to be the fear of the Lord. Well I want to close with a lesson from the Puritan pastor John Owen. He said this, he said sin may be the occasion of great sorrow when there is no sorrow for sin.

Get the point of that lesson? The way of the transgressor, another proverb says, the way of the transgressor is hard. Sin hurts, sin sorrow, but the sorrow may not actually be sorrow for the sin. In teaching our children the fear of the Lord, let's teach them not simply to smart or to hurt from the sin and its consequences, but to actually sorrow for the sin itself.

A Closing Prayer for Parents

So our Father and our God, help us as parents to be good teachers, good instructors to our children and may the lessons they learn truly be graceful garland for the head and a pendant for the neck. This we pray in Jesus name and for his sake, amen.

All right, well I hope your new week in the new year gets off to a good start and I trust God will richly bless you in it. Have a good day.