The Israelites and Us


The nature of God’s covenant relationship with His people demanded a place where they faith could be exercised and displayed to all nation. And before that can happen, the people of God – the israelites- had to live obediently before Him, or they will be punished. The reward of their obedience is the possesion of Canaan, the ‘merchant people’- known as Israel- Judea- now Palestine- and since the Israelites disobeyed the Lord, they didn’t experienced His blessings, they fail to live obediently before God and it had to take 40 years before the Israelites –led by Joshua- can posses Canaan. God need a new generation who will obey Him before they can entered Canaan, the promised land.

Even after they possesed the promised land, they still disobeyed God, so God had the babylonians punished them in exile for 70 years before they can go back to Israel. But the impact of the exile are astounding. They are all the witness of God and God kept them alive so the world may know that our God is the true God!
God had prepared carefully for the next stage in his great plan of salvation.

The paragraph above explained to us about us, of how we should live in obedience to God himself. All we have to do is to live obediently before Him, and He’ll give us His promises. By living obediently within the world, through us the world would see Him as the one true God... He wants us to live faithfully for Him
So, live and influence others by word and action from our lives.
Learn how to think and approach life like Abraham, Moses, Paul so we’ll deepen our appreciation of God’s word

God wants His people in the game, not on the bench.

The problem is, we often only focused on the destination – God’s promise for us- ,
but we often forget the journey itself!
We ignore the world around us!
We forget to influence the world!

In order to do that, we have to be God’s disciples.
Disciples are more than converts
Discipleship is more than an interest in learning the fundamentals of faith.
It appears that progress toward discipleship is more a goal for the few than a passion for all followers for Jesus.
Then what is a disciple?

A disciple is someone who have passion, desire, commitment and fire to imitate Jesus’s life, His teaching and His actions, not only to their beliefs but to being like Jesus himself.

Jesus, not like the rabbi in his time, picked his disciples..
Not scholars, not wealthy people from big cities like Decapolis or Sythopolis, not educated or religious people..
For that is God’s way...

5 fishermans from Galilee,...
who don’t know anything about Jesus. Yet, they followed Him..
And from this 5 simple Galileans, by their words and the witness of their lives, there were 80.000 or more followers of Jesus by the year near 100 after Christ.
How could this ordinary, simple people changed the sophisticated cultured world of Galatia and Asia Minor – the wealthy countries- ?
Only God’s power can accomplished such a thing, and His power worked through His disciples.
Their lives became the gospel, the message and the text of the good news of Jesus.

What about us?
Do you believe that God had picked us, The ‘no one’ and the ‘nothing’?
Have we been God’s deciples?
Have our lives became the gospel and the message of the Lord?
Have our lives became the witness of God?
Or are we just the people who ignore the world around us?...