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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. |
The disciples ought to have known Jesus, they had heard his voice so often, and gazed upon that marred face so frequently, that it is wonderful they did not discover him. Yet is it not so with you also? You have not seen Jesus lately. You have been to his table, and you have not met him there. You are in a dark trouble this evening, and though he plainly says, "It is I, be not afraid," yet you cannot discern him. Alas! our eyes are holden. We know his voice; we have looked into his face; we have leaned our head upon his bosom, and yet, though Christ is very near us, we are saying "O that I knew where I might find him!" We should know Jesus, for we have the Scriptures to reflect his image, and yet how possible it is for us to open that precious book and have no glimpse of the Wellbeloved! Dear child of God, are you in that state? Jesus feedeth among the lilies of the word, and you walk among those lilies, and yet you behold him not. He is accustomed to walk through the glades of Scripture, and to commune with his people, as the Father did with Adam in the cool of the day, and yet you are in the garden of Scripture, but cannot see him, though he is always there. And why do we not see him? It must be ascribed in our case, as in the disciples', to unbelief. They evidently did not expect to see Jesus, and therefore they did not know him. To a great extent in spiritual things we get what we expect of the Lord. Faith alone can bring us to see Jesus. Make it your prayer, "Lord, open thou mine eyes, that I may see my Saviour present with me." It is a blessed thing to want to see him; but oh! it is better far to gaze upon him. To those who seek him he is kind; but to those who find him, beyond expression is he dear!