When I married Ken, I couldn't cook.  Anything.  Remember, I told you that in my family, when I was growing up, if you were reading a book you didn't have to do any housework.  Reading was considered the most important work that a child could do.  I read constantly.  A no-brainer.

The first thing I attempted to cook was Jello.  But the instructions seemed stupid to me.  Boil water, add Jello powder, put it in the refrigerator.   Why boil the water if you were going to put it in the refrigerator?  It made no sense.  So, I mixed the Jello powder with water and stuck it in the refrigerator.

It sat in the refrigerator until it molded.   I learned something.  Instructions may be important.  Boil the water, you get Jello.  Don't, you get mold.  I learned to make Jello by following the instructions.

It's the same thing with directions in the Bible.  Follow the instructions, you get peace.  Don't, and you get mold of the soul.  God knows how things are going to turn out.  But there are steps involved that you can't skip or get out of order.  Step one, step two, step three…

l.   Recognize that you sin and you can't fix the past.  It's done.  You did it.
2.  Repent.  And I'm not talking about being sorry.  Repent means you aren't  going to do those things        any more--or anything else that isn't in the instructions for making Jello.  God's plan.  Not yours.
3.  Ask for forgiveness.  Recognize that your sins were paid for by God's sacrificial Lamb.  Jesus.
4.  Give the rest of you life, all of it, to Him.  Of course this means that you may not know what happens next in God's recipe for your life.  But it will be alright.  "Thy will be done" means just that.

Now you know how to cook.  Don't skip steps.

I was probably in the second grade.  All of us kids walked home back then.  It was safe. No one hurt anyone, much less a  child.  If they did, they would probably be dead by morning.  Vigilante law had been in effect as recently as 50 years earlier, and in Oklahoma, in the 40's,  justice was still pretty much swift.  Maybe not always legal, but swift.

There was a field of clover on the way home.  I always stopped and watched the bees darting around in the blossoms while I hunted for four leaf clovers.  And I always found one.  I got pretty good at it.

I would take them home, press them in a book until their leaves were dry and brittle.  I didn't know if there was such a thing as luck, but I wanted to be on the safe side.  I had a lot of four leaf clovers.  There was even a song about them that was popular at the time:

"I'm Looking Over A Four Leaf Clover"

I'm looking over a four leaf clover 
I overlooked before
  One leaf is sunshine, the second is rain
Third is the roses that grow in the lane

No need explaining
The one remaining is somebody I adore
I'm looking over a four leaf clover
I overlooked before.

Now that I'm older, I no longer believe in luck.   But I definitely believe in prayer.  God answers prayer.   Ken has had two much easier days.  Yesterday and today.  Some of you out there must be praying for him!!    James 5: 16b "The… effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much."  

And that isn't luck.

I've been reading the 10th chapter of Hebrews and I don't know which verses to pick!!  The entire chapter explains that sacrifices by priests are utterly useless - that we have one and only one way to cover sin.

Hebrews 10:12 "But this man,  (Jesus) after he had offered one sacrifice for sins forever,  sat down on the right hand of God:"   Done.  No more sacrifices.  No more routes to God.

Jesus said, "...I am the way, the truth and the life, no man comes to the Father but by me."  John 14: 6

So if you are looking for something more you can do to seal your salvation, give it up.  He is it.  The only IT.  All these other religions and methods won't get you where you want to go.  The Bible is our guide.

Heb. 10: l7, God speaks in the first person again.  But this time, the first person is speaking to the first person!!!  "Then said I, Lo, I come (in the volume of the book, it is written of me,) to do your will O God."  Jesus was God.  Speaking to the Father.

And he is saying that all the Old Testament was written about Him.  "The volume of the book."

We probably ought to read it.

My daughter asked me why I never write about what is happening in my life "In The Now."  She said, "You always write about what happened years ago and never what is going on now.  There are people who would be encouraged by what you are going through."

My answer was that while I'm going through something hard, painful or discouraging, that I am just trying to get through it.  Knowing that God is with me.  Also knowing that nothing will ever come my way that I cannot bear because He says so in His word.  But most of the time, I have no idea what the point of the experience is until later.  When I can look back and say, "Oh.  That was what that was all about.  And then maybe I can comfort someone else.

Both of my daughters are concerned that I am exhausted by the enormous  difficulty of caring for their father, my husband of 57 years.  But God has blessed me with enough physical and spiritual strength to manage.

Ken is not well.  This "Bigger than life" Marine is fighting a battle with kidney failure that he is slowly losing.  The loss of the ability to handle the things in our lives that he has always been able to do is of great concern to him.  He doesn't want to be a burden.   I tell him every day that it is my great privilege to care for him.  He is such an awesome person.

There is nothing I would rather be doing with my life than caring for him.   Which is a God thing, because I am not normally a very compassionate person.  I always thought that everyone should just keep on keeping on and deal with what comes their way.  But God  has turned me into a new and different person through this experience.  My compassion overflows.

I started blogging because I quit doing a lot of things that took me away from Ken.   I have no idea who all is reading this.  But be encouraged.  Our God is sufficient for all our needs.

Hebrews is a book rich with historical reviews of stories in the Old Testament.  At every turn, the writer uses these stories to show us the relationship that God had with his people back then,  and to explain clearly the new, better, eternal relationship that Jesus has brought to us.

Heb. 9:14  "How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?"

The term "dead works" is referring to keeping the law in hopes of salvation instead of serving the living God.  Nothing wrong with the law, we should keep the law.  But it doesn't save us.  Only the law God has written on our hearts will prompt us to service of the living God.  We give our lives to Him, and He prompts our conscience.

I have always been a truthful person, sometimes to my detriment.  I have only told a lie two times that I remember.  The first was as a senior in high school when the principal asked me if I had had lunch with some of my friends--who were standing behind him nodding their heads up and down.  They didn't want to get in trouble.  I never did find out what they had done.

I said, "Yes."  A lie.  Which haunted me from within my Spirit filled conscience for twenty years, until we had our first high school reunion.  My old high school principal was there.   I found him and told him what I had done.  And how sorry I was.   Confession is good for the soul.

He said, "I should never have put you in that position. I knew they were guilty."

But he did put me in that position.  And I lied.  And God wouldn't let me forget it.  When He lives in our bodies, His temple, He decides what is right and what is wrong.  You can't escape Him.


  

Bought with a price.  The death of Jesus on the cross was horrible.  But that alone was not what saved us.  Many people died on crosses.  Two men died on either side of Jesus and they couldn't save us.

You might say that Jesus was different because he was perfect.  True, but that only allowed him to be the perfect sacrificial lamb.  It allowed a sacrifice that was acceptable to God.

The thing that saves us is that Jesus became sin--for us.  Every wrong thing that the people of the world have done was laid on him.   And God, who cannot look upon sin, turned away from the cross.  And Jesus died.  Alone.  Because of you.  Because of me.

In Matthew 27: 46, Jesus cries "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me."

And in Isaiah 59:1-2 : "Behold, the Lord's hand is not shortened that it cannot save; neither his ear heavy, that it cannot hear; But your sins have separated between you and your God, and your sins have hid his face from you, that he will not hear."  Our sin, laid on Jesus, caused God to turn away and close His ears.

And in Isaiah 53: 6 "All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the sins of us all."   We killed an innocent man.

Now that is what is meant by, "Bought with a price."

Occasionally in the Bible, God speaks in the first person.  The writer of Hebrews gives us the voice of God himself in  Heb. 8: 8-12.  I'll give you the short version:

"…I will make a new covenant with Israel…",  "Not according to the covenant I made with Israel…",  "I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt…"   "I regarded them…"  This is the covenant  I will make …with Israel…",

And then God (personally, using the word " I" ) adds an important new concept for the reader of the book of Hebrews.  He tells us a remarkably wonderful thing.  A thing that neither the Jews, nor the Gentiles would never have thought  up by themselves.

In  Heb. 8: 10b,  God says:  "I will put my laws into their mind, and write them (the laws) in their hearts:  and I will be to them a God, and they shall be to me a people:" 

God had always connected with people in the temple.  Through a priest, in a pillar of fire, a burning bush, to name a few ways he spoke to them.  He gave them laws to follow--which they (and we) broke.

But now, after the perfect sacrifice for sin had been made through the death of Christ on the cross,  God is saying that we will have a new way of knowing right from wrong.   He will take up residence within us and lead us in the paths of righteousness.  We become the temple of God.  He will write law on our hearts.

1Corintthians 6: 19-20 "What?  don't you know that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which you have of God, and you are not your own?  For you ares bought with a price;:  therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God's."

Bought with a price.