Rest for the Land: Sabbath Year (Lev. 25:1-7 & 18-22)

11/9/2008 8:16 AM

SPIRITUAL DIARY

My Worship Time                              Focus:  Rest for the land:  Sabbath Year

Bible Reading & Meditation               Reference:  Lev. 25:1-7, 18-22

            Message of the verses:  “1 ¶  The LORD then spoke to Moses at Mount Sinai, saying, 2  "Speak to the sons of Israel and say to them, ‘When you come into the land which I shall give you, then the land shall have a sabbath to the LORD.  3  ‘Six years you shall sow your field, and six years you shall prune your vineyard and gather in its crop, 4  but during the seventh year the land shall have a sabbath rest, a sabbath to the LORD; you shall not sow your field nor prune your vineyard. 5  ‘Your harvest’s aftergrowth you shall not reap, and your grapes of untrimmed vines you shall not gather; the land shall have a sabbatical year.  6  ‘All of you shall have the sabbath products of the land for food; yourself, and your male and female slaves, and your hired man and your foreign resident, those who live as aliens with you.  7  ‘Even your cattle and the animals that are in your land shall have all its crops to eat.

            “18  ‘You shall thus observe My statutes and keep My judgments, so as to carry them out, that you may live securely on the land.  19  ‘Then the land will yield its produce, so that you can eat your fill and live securely on it.  20  ‘But if you say, "What are we going to eat on the seventh year if we do not sow or gather in our crops?"  21  then I will so order My blessing for you in the sixth year that it will bring forth the crop for three years.  22  ‘When you are sowing the eighth year, you can still eat old things from the crop, eating the old until the ninth year when its crop comes in.”

            This section is about the Sabbath Year, which is every seven years, and in that year the land shall rest, and the people shall rest from sowing and gathering the crops, and the animals shall rest along with the slaves and the sojourners.  God did this so that the land should rest and also so that the Jewish people could show their faith in the Lord to provide for them while the land rested, for God said that if they did this He would give them three years worth of food in the sixth year so that they would have plenty to eat during the seventh and eight year when they would go back to sowing and gathering, and even into the ninth year would they still have food from the sixth year.

            The bad thing for the Jewish people is that they did not keep one of these Sabbath Years and so when they went into captivity in Babylon they had to stay their for seventy years in order for the land to rest for each of the Sabbath Years that they missed.

            Spiritual meaning for my life today:  It is wrong to rob God and to take from Him what belongs to Him and because of the bad investment with Andrew, and because Andrew has refused to give back the money he owes us I have not been able to give the Lord the portion of this investment that I had been giving to Him when we were receiving interest from this investment.  I have had to cut the amount of money that I was giving to Todd and Cindy because of this loss of income and so I would ask God to restore these funds so that we can continue to give His portion to Him.

My Steps of Faith for Today:

1. Trust the Lord to provide for my family what it is that we need in these difficult times.

Memory verses for the week:                                  Romans 6:1-5

1. What shall we say then?  Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase?
2. May it never be!  How shall we who died to sin still live in it?
3. Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death?
4. Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we to might walk in newness of life.
5. For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection,

11/9/2008 8:39 AM