Daily Lesson for February 22, 2021

 Today's Daily Lesson comes from Deuteronomy chapter 8 verses 11 through

11 Take care that you do not forget the Lord your God, by failing to keep his commandments, his ordinances, and his statutes, which I am commanding you today. 12When you have eaten your fill and have built fine houses and live in them, 13and when your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold is multiplied, and all that you have is multiplied, 14then do not exalt yourself, forgetting the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, 15who led you through the great and terrible wilderness, an arid waste-land with poisonous* snakes and scorpions. He made water flow for you from flint rock, 16and fed you in the wilderness with manna that your ancestors did not know, to humble you and to test you, and in the end to do you good.

We are in the 40 days of Lent and the Daily Office gives us lessons day by day from the book of Deuteronomy -- a book which recounts the Israelites' 40 year sojourn in the wilderness and give instruction for living in the Promised Land after.

This morning's lesson is an instruction on not forgetting where it is that we came from. It is a reminder that though prosperity may find the people, they must never forget that they were once slaves in Egypt, having nothing of their own -- not even their own bodies.

We live in a prosperous land in America. On whole we are rich in the resources of wealth and education and standard of living. But almost none of us is more than two or three generations away from a poor farm with hardly a pot to pee in. Pardon the crudity, but it's true.

And the lesson today comes to remind us. We too were slaves, or immigrants, or migrants, or refugees, all of us trying make it by God's grace. We should never forget that. And whether or not we remember it is based one the way we treat others.

Last week I went to the clinic and the nurse saw that I was from Lubbock. She told me she grew up the child of migrant farm workers who made their way every year up to West Texas near Plainview to pick cotton. Now she has a good paying job with great benefits. She is a success now by many standards; but she still hasn't forgotten where she came from.

Neither should we.

Ryon Price is Senior Pastor of Broadway Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas.