SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 1/29/2022 10:22 AM
My Worship Time Focus:
“Comforting the Weak”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Matthew
12:20a
Message of the verse: “A battered reed He will not break off, and a smoldering wick He will not put out.”
I want to mention again the same two things that I
mentioned in our last SD, and that is we are still in the section of Matthew
where it comes from the Old Testament book of Isaiah, and both today’s and
tomorrow’s SD’s will be very short.
Her are some interesting facts about how reeds were used
in ancient Israel, and may still be used like this in the Middle-East even
today. Reeds were used for many
different purposes and once they became bent or battered they were
useless. There were times when a shepherd
would take a reed and actually make music from playing it, and this was done to
help calm the sheep while they stopped for the night, but once it became
cracked, it would no longer make music and thus the shepherd would have to
throw it away.
Now we want to talk about lamps and wicks. When the lamp burned down to the end of the
wick, it would only smolder and smoke without making any light, and since such
a smoldering wick was useless, it was put out and then it was thrown away, just
like the broken reed.
Now the application is that the reed and the wick
represent people whose lives are broken and worn out, ready to be discarded and
replaced by the world. It was because
they could no longer make music or give light that society casts off the weak
and the helpless, the suffering and the burdened, and these were the kind of
people the Romans ignored as useless and we also know that the Pharisees felt about
them just like the Romans did.
John MacArthur writes “One of the most obvious legacies
of the fall is man’s natural tendency to destroy. Small children will often step on a bug just
for the sake of killing it, or snap off a beautiful bud just before it
flowers. A tree branch is broken for the
sake of breaking it, and a stone is thrown at a bird just to see it fly away or
fall to the ground. On a more destructive
scale, adults devour and undercut each other in business, society, politics,
and even in the family.
“The nature of sinful man is to destroy but the nature of
the holy God is to restore. The Lord
will not break off or put out even the least of those who come to Him, and He
gives dire warning to those who would do so.
‘Whoever causes one of the little ones who believe in Me to stumble,’
Jesus said, ‘it is better for him that a heavy millstone be hung around his
neck, and that he be drowned in the depth of the sea’ (Matt. 18:6).”
What can we learn from this? Well we can learn that in the hands of the
Savior, that the battered reed is not discarded but restored, and also that the
moldering wick is not put out but rekindled.
1/29/2022 10:41 AM
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