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Welcome the Season Fall is the season associated with harvesting. It is the time to gather the ripe crops from the fields. Like harvesting crops, we need to take time to enjoy the reaping of what we have sown. Take time to look back over your year. How have your grown? Worshipped? Laughed? Instead of seeking to accomplish something new, take time to celebrate what has already been accomplished. Thank God for the abundance in your life~~~family, friends, church, job, food ~~~the ways God meets your needs daily. Embrace the present. Savor it. Prepare your heart for Thanksgiving with a posture of gratitude for the provisions God has already provided. Let's welcome the season of fall with these words from Psalm 95:1~7: Come, let's shout joyfully to the Lord, shout triumphantly to the rock of our salvation! Let's enter his presence with thanksgiving; let's shout triumphantly to him in song. For the Lord is a great God, a great King above all gods. The depths of the earth are in his hand, and the mountain peaks are His. The sea is His; He made it. His hands formed the dry land. Come, let's worship and bow down; let's kneel before the Lord our Maker. For He is our God, and we are the people of his pasture, the sheep under his care. |
"Why sayest thou, O Jacob, and speakest O Israel, my way is hid from the Lord, and my judgment is passed over from my God?" The Lord cares for all things, and the meanest creatures share in his universal providence, but his particular providence is over his saints. "The angel of the Lord encampeth round about them that fear him." "Precious shall their blood be in his sight." "Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints." "We know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them that are the called according to his purpose." Let the fact that, while he is the Saviour of all men, he is specially the Saviour of them that believe, cheer and comfort you. You are his peculiar care; his regal treasure which he guards as the apple of his eye; his vineyard over which he watches day and night. "The very hairs of your head are all numbered." Let the thought of his special love to you be a spiritual pain-killer, a dear quietus to your woe: "I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee." God says that as much to you as to any saint of old. "Fear not, I am thy shield, and thy exceeding great reward." We lose much consolation by the habit of reading his promises for the whole church, instead of taking them directly home to ourselves. Believer, grasp the divine word with a personal, appropriating faith. Think that you hear Jesus say, "I have prayed for thee that thy faith fail not." Think you see him walking on the waters of thy trouble, for he is there, and he is saying, "Fear not, it is I; be not afraid." Oh, those sweet words of Christ! May the Holy Ghost make you feel them as spoken to you; forget others for awhile - accept the voice of Jesus as addressed to you, and say, "Jesus whispers consolation; I cannot refuse it; I will sit under his shadow with great delight."