Good Word for Today!

The Lord Be With You Today! Isaiah 43:19 See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; (Today, this new thing He is doing in us is entirely His doing, His accomplishment, His creation. As we look forward to this New Year, we can look forward through the plan the Lord has for us. He is doing something now that is entirely new and different in our lives today. He has redeemed us from our former chains and attitudes, of control and of attempts to be in control, of self-sufficiency, of fear, of despair, of anger, of un-forgiveness, of pride. What the Lord does in our life springs forth out of Him and out of His love.) Do you not perceive it? (As a new shoot in the coming spring can easily be missed, easily trampled on, easily overlooked as we slog through the lingering winter gray and rains and snows, so this work that He has begun in us can easily be ignored and overlooked and even crushed. Our job is to look for His work and to be sure to nurture what the Lord is doing in us. We need to be sure to watch and listen for and to take note of His still, small Voice in the whirlwind of our busyness. Lord, help us to have eyes and ears to see and hear You, to perceive that still, small Voice which is Yours.) I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland. (He promises that His new work in us will restore and refresh and guide us through the deserts in our life this year where, humanly speaking, there is no way to proceed other than by His Hand. His new work is like the reviving, cleansing rivers of water where there has been waste and destruction. His river of grace and love washes away the past and the filth to bring newness of life in Him!) May the Lord richly bless you this day! In Christ's love, Blessings! Sally 513 254 3874       [category word for today]

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Good Word for Today!

The Lord Be With You Today! Isaiah 43:18-19 Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. (As this New Year unfolds before us, the Lord reminds us not to brood over the failures and hardships of the past, but to look toward the new, forgetting what lies behind and pressing on to what lies ahead.) See, I am doing a new thing! (The "new" before us is best seen as we behold with admiration and awe the mighty work of God in our lives today, as we contemplate Him and His preparation and provision for us to step out into the new He holds for us.) Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? (While this new thing the Lord brings about through His unlimited power, silently and inexorably opening forth and blooming into fullness, we can only stand in awe as we focus our full attention on what the Lord promises for us.) I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland. (Whatever our past has created for this present, whatever actions have brought us into the wilderness today, just as the Lord provided for the Israelites  as they traveled through their difficult wilderness journey, God also paves a road for us through the wilderness areas of our life and carves out rushing rivers of water in the desert places to guide us and sustain us and feed us and refresh us and to lead us into His never-failing purposes for us with His complete provision for today!) May the Lord richly bless you this day! In Christ's love, Blessings! Sally 513 254 3874     [category word for today]

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Good Word for Today!

The Lord Be With You Today! Psalm 77:11-15 I will remember the deeds of the Lord; yes, I will remember Your miracles of long ago. (As we contemplate the coming year, what better way could we make use of our time than to turn our minds to focus on what the Lord has done for us, to remember the ancient boundaries the Lord has laid out for us so that we rest in pleasant places He has created for us, places of hope and peace and mercy and forgiveness and safety and victory!) I will consider all Your works and meditate on all Your mighty deeds. (Only as we consider and meditate on God do we more fully come to know Him and His character and to more fully understand and interpret His actions and how He desires His declarations and actions to impact us.) Your ways, God, are holy. What god is as great as our God? (Because we so often try to fit God into a human-sized box, to fit Him into our own capability to understand, we often jump to conclusions about those challenges that come into our lives, misjudging them and the God Who may, at times, send or allow those events.) You are the God Who performs miracles; You display Your power among the peoples. (This God we serve is a God of wonders, of wondrous and beautiful and amazing creations, of other-worldly happenings, of triumph and victory, of love and mercy, of redemption and salvation, of forgiveness and hope!) With Your mighty arm You redeemed Your people, the descendants of Jacob and Joseph. (This God has saved His people, delivered His people, and rescued His people Israel through His unsurpassed strength and power. If He has accomplished these feats before, we who have been adopted as co-heirs of Christ can be assured that He will continue delivering and rescuing us today! May we look to and welcome this New Year today through the lens of God's character and His past interventions in the lives of His people!) May the Lord richly bless you this day! In Christ's love, Blessings! Sally 513 254 3874 [category word for today]

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Good Word for Today!

The Lord Be With You Today! Psalm 65:1-13 Praise awaits You, our God, in Zion; (As we stand at the threshold of the New Year, our first and foremost priority is to exalt God Who has Himself provided us with these next days. Our praise and honor and acclaim and tribute belong to the Lord because nothing less befits Him.) to You our vows will be fulfilled. (As we stand in the place of rest under God's provision for today and this year, all He has already accomplished for us renews in us an overwhelming sense of God's majesty and sovereignty, making our commitments to Him the only possible answer to this God Who is above all and over all and full of goodness and righteousness and holiness.) You Who answer prayer, to You all people will come. (Not only is He good and holy, but He chooses to hear us and provide for us. He hears us before we call and answers us before we even speak.) When we were overwhelmed by sins, You forgave our transgressions. Blessed are those You choose and bring near to live in Your courts! We are filled with the good things of Your house, of Your holy temple. (The foundation of His relationship with us is the atonement and redemption that He provided through His plan of salvation in Jesus. Today as we prepare for this New Year, we stand forgiven and made righteous because of His provision and His favor toward us, and He has even invited us to be His dwelling place.) You answer us with awesome and righteous deeds, God our Savior, the hope of all the ends of the earth and of the farthest seas, Who formed the mountains by Your power, (His magnificent earthly symbols reveal to us a small bit of the picture of God's Own mighty immutable strength and immense power.) having armed Yourself with strength, Who stilled the roaring of the seas, the roaring of their waves, and the turmoil of the nations. (He calms and overcomes at His command the ravages of the life storms that assail us. If He controls the roaring seas and the nations' turmoil, can we have any doubt that He is in control of the places in our lives that are roaring and heaving in turmoil.) The whole earth is filled with awe at Your wonders; where morning dawns, where evening fades, You call forth songs of joy. (He speaks forth the marvel of the successive days and nights of our lives to allow us to see Him through the wonder of His creation, as a way to reassure us that He is present and absolutely omnipotent and faithful to guard us through each of our days.) You care for the land and water it; You enrich it abundantly. The streams of God are filled with water to provide the people with grain, for so You have ordained it. You drench its furrows and level its ridges; You soften it with showers and bless its crops. You crown the year with Your bounty, and Your carts overflow with abundance. The grasslands of the wilderness overflow; the hills are clothed with gladness. The meadows are covered with flocks and the valleys are mantled with grain; they shout for joy and sing. (As we look out toward this New Year and as we see how He cares for the earth and its needs, through such care, He reveals to us how He also cares for our needs, watering the desert places in our lives, bringing forth the harvest of the work of our hands, crowning us with the harvest of the prosperity of His bounty, and clothing us with the beauty of His favor and right standing with Him. He has endowed, equipped, and readied us for all we need as we step into this New Year.) May the Lord richly bless you this day! In Christ's love, Blessings! Sally 513 254 3874 [category word for today]

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Good Word for Today!

The Lord Be With You Today! Matthew 2:1-3, 9-11 After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem and asked, "Where is the One Who has been born King of the Jews? We saw His star in the east and have come to worship Him." (As these Magi sought after the One and Only, let's begin our own journey to seek the King Who is the Savior in our lives. We are all deeply in need of Christ's saving grace and forgiveness.) The star they had seen in the east went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the Child was. When they saw the star, they were overjoyed. (As we seek Him, God always shows us the way to find Him. He will always provide signposts for us so that we can find Him, and He has promised He will not be hard to find.) On coming to the house, (By this time, Mary and Joseph had moved from the place of Jesus' birth to another location, although it is not known where.) they saw the Child with His mother Mary and they bowed down and worshiped Him. (In the same way, our only action and response upon coming into the presence of the Lord is to bow before Him in joyful, reverent worship!) They opened their treasures and presented Him with gifts of gold and of incense and of myrrh. (The gifts are symbolic, with gold representing the great value and royalty of this new-born King. Frankincense, accompanying the priests' sacrificial offerings, symbolic of the sacrificial fragrance of the sin sacrifice and the prayers accompanying such offerings, both of which are pleasing to the Lord, represents the deity of this new-born King. Myrrh, used in burial ceremonies, represents the later death of the Savior. The Magi's gifts foreshadow Jesus' family's need for funds that the gold would provide them so they could leave the land and relocate to safety in Egypt. The frankincense reflects on Jesus' later sacrificial death that would be an acceptable and pleasing sacrifice to the Lord for mankind's sin, and the myrrh, the spice used for burial purposes, is symbolic of Jesus' sufferings and burial. Like the Magi, let us bring our most prized treasure to Jesus today. The most priceless treasure we can give to the Lord is to bring to Him our lives, a far more highly prized gift than even gold or expensive spices. He gave Himself and now asks for nothing less from us. As we prepare for the New Year opening before us, our greatest gift to the Christ is to give ourselves and nothing less, a gift that is of priceless value, a gift that is a sweet-smelling sacrifice to the Lord, and a gift that speaks of our death to self and our dedication to the Lord.) May the Lord richly bless you this day! In Christ's love, Blessings! Sally 513 254 3874 [category word for today]

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Good Word for Today!

The Lord Be With You Today! John 1:14a And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (The very Word of God, His communication of Himself, His revelation of Himself, His expression of Himself, first unveiled His creation of man, then His covenant with man, then His Law, then His tabernacle, then His Son as God With Us, as Emmanuel, then the Holy Spirit within us, and then a Book of His Own Word, of His Own story. He became flesh, both God and man. His Word, His revelation of Himself, did not become a tree, or a building, or a mountain, or a rock, or a monument, but became flesh and blood. God Himself became man, one of us, to fully communicate to us Who He is, to show us what He looks like as a living, breathing Man, to reveal as much about Himself as we can comprehend, not so He could know what it is like to be us. He already knows that and everything about us and everything we feel and know and are. He is God. But, so that we could more readily relate to Him, so that we could see Him as One to Whom we could draw toward and with Whom we could be at ease, He became flesh. He is "God With Us," God Who dwells with us. But He became Flesh for more reasons than even those. A spirit does not have skin and sinews and flesh and blood. God as Spirit is not flesh and blood. Since the life of a human is in the blood, for Him to save and redeem us, He Himself had to put on flesh and blood. Our blood is not sufficient to redeem us. He had to become blood in order to finish the work of His creation, to redeem His creation, to bring us to Himself. The celebration of His birth today is first and foremost about His death and the work of His Blood to redeem us.) May the Lord richly bless you this day! In Christ's love, Blessings! Sally 513 254 3874 [category word for today]

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Good Word for Today!

The Lord Be With You Today! Luke 2:11 Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; (Christ's birth is historical fact, a Child born in a specific place to a specific mother under the care of a specific father; the "today" of Christ's birth of yesteryear is as present now in this day's circumstances as it was in Mary and Joseph's time, a present-day fact of today's reality. Today we have the same promise that a Savior has been born to us, One Who is with us in real time, right now, today.) He is Christ the Lord! (As the Messiah, the Anointed One, He is truly Lord of our lives, Lord over the turmoil, the disappointment, the hurt, the fear, the lack, the despair, the illness, the job, the bank account, the relationships, the Lord of every aspect of our lives. He doesn't see us as compartmentalized segments, separating one part of our life from its other parts. He sees us as a whole, as we truly are, in all our need, and He has chosen to make Himself our Lord, our Savior, our Christ, our Redeemer, our Promised One! As we welcome the coming New Year and whatever it holds, may we welcome Christ Jesus as Savior with gladness and joy and open our lives to all of Him in us!) May the Lord richly bless you this day! In Christ's love, Blessings! Sally 513 254 3874 [category word for today]

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Good Word for Today!

The Lord Be With You Today! Luke 2:10 The angel said to them, (The announcement of this extraordinary, supernatural, awesome invasion of God's redemptive gift to mankind is given to ordinary men out on a hillside, to ordinary men who were engaged in ordinary work on an ordinary night, not mighty men of high standing, not professionals, not men of great means or advanced education, but men who were uneducated, farm workers. The Lord still sends His extraordinary, heavenly message today to ordinary people, to you and me, to ordinary people in ordinary lives!) "Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people." (As we contemplate the coming year, no matter what we may face today or tomorrow, no matter what causes us fear or concern or dread or hopelessness, the Lord is still shouting forth His high and holy message to us, His Good News of great joy, that His appearance means we have nothing to fear, that His plans over our lives are sovereign, that His salvation is for every one of us, and that His provision is for every situation! May we be as wise as the shepherds of old and firmly believe and trust in the message of truth with which we have been entrusted today!) May the Lord richly bless you this day! In Christ's love, Blessings! Sally 513 254 3874 [category word for today]

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Good Word for Today!

The Lord Be With You Today! Luke 2:8-20 And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. (What a wonder that the news of the Messiah, the announcement to a world desperate for His appearing, was made to a group of lowly shepherds, rough men of the field who worked with their hands, common laborers, who shared some of the lowest levels in the social hierarchy of the day. The Lord still reveals His wondrous news today to us who are unremarkable, average, unnoticed, and undeserving in the eyes of the world.) But the angel said to them, "Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. Today in the town of David, a Savior has been born to you; He is Christ the Lord. (This wondrous Good News is to us today as we put our own name here. This same Savior has been born to us, as well as to those shepherds and to the rest of the world!) This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger. (To make sure we find the One for Whom we are looking, the Lord gives us clear and specific ways to recognize this Savior even today. When we open our eyes to look for Him, the Lord makes sure He will be found by us.) Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying, "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom His favor rests." (The Lord's favor rests on us today, and He grants His peace that passes all human understanding to us in whatever situation in which we find ourselves today! His favor, His strong and powerful peace that guards our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus, are more than sufficient, more than adequate, more than enough for whatever needs we have today!) When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, "Let's go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about." (Why would the angels announce the good news to shepherds? How would these shepherds know what manger to hunt for and where to find it? In those days right outside Bethlehem, shepherds regularly raised and nurtured the choicest, finest sheep to use in the priests' temple sacrifices, and these shepherds knew well where the stable and manger were because this was likely the place where they took the sheep that were chosen to be sacrificed in the temple offerings. The angels had trumpeted their good news to the lowly, insignificant caretakers of the sacrificial lambs used in the sacrificial offerings of the temple, and the angels called the shepherds now to witness the birth of THE sacrifice! What a gift! How God elevates the lowly to heights of honor! How He still honors us with the good news of the Savior's birth!) So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the Baby, Who was lying in the manger. (May we today be as quick to run to and seek Jesus as were these uneducated, ordinary, and poor men who left their fields and their agendas behind as they sought out the Lord.) When they had seen them, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this Child, and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them. But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart. The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told. (Like Mary, who weighed, meditated on, and carefully guarded all she heard and witnessed, may we meditate and focus on the revelations that God shares with us in His Word and in our lives, not forgetting the truth of His promises that guide our lives. Although the shepherds returned to their flocks, they would never be the same again. They were forever changed men. We, too, are changed forever when we encounter the living God! He chose to give us the most He could give, the most wonderful gift of all of life, the gift of Himself! What a God, the One who deserves all glory and all our praise!) May the Lord richly bless you this day! In Christ's love, Blessings! Sally 513 254 3874 [category word for today]

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