Today's Daily Lesson comes from Matthew chapter 4 verses 1 through 3:
Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. 2 And after fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. 3 And the tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.”
When Jesus came down to the Jordan to be baptized by John in the Jordan River, the heavens were split apart and the Holy Spirit descended like a dove and then God spoke in a profound voice: "You are my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased." This was a declarative sentence, a word of pronouncement. "You ARE . . ."
Then forty days later, after wandering through a wilderness where water no longer flowed, the land was barren, and nothing would grow. That is when another voice was heard. This was a voice, not in the declarative but the subjunctive. "IF," it said, "IF you are the son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread."
Every life runs through its own wilderness. In the wilderness things don't grow, ends don't meet, and not only can we not bring home the bacon, we can't even put bread on the table. And that's when the subjunctive voice of doubt always comes and along with it the temptation to do something to prove how ourselves as producers and providers. "IF you really have any worth, do . . ."
It's in life's wilderness that we have to remember who we are. We are God's sons and daughters, God's children. This has been spoken to us in the declarative. And no matter how dry the wilderness, how meager the crop, and how barren the table, we keep believing it.
The word for this kind of wilderness belief is called dignity. And no circumstance and no one can take our dignity away from us. It's ours -- by God.
No ifs, ands, or buts about it.
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