We Love God!

God: "I looked for someone to take a stand for me, and stand in the gap" (Ezekiel 22:30)

The next time your heart is indifferent toward sin, think for a moment of what sin cost your Savior on the cross. Think about His lacerated back ripped open to the bone from the Roman scourge. Think how He suffered for a breath of air as He extended His bloody body up the vertical beam of the rugged cross. Think about the splinters that dug deeper into His freshly cut wounds with every movement. Think about the large spikes that pierced His hands and His feet penetrating deeply into nerve endings. Think of the slow suffocation as Jesus hung there in the nude, mocked by the onlookers. Jesus didn't die for His own sin; He died for ours. '[He was] pierced through for our transgressions… [He was] crushed for our iniquities' (Isa. 53:5). Does the love of Christ compel you to turn from that which brought Him unspeakable anguish?
Randy Smith

Make him a minister of the Word! Fling him into his office, tear the office sign from the door and nail on the sign: Study. Take him off the mailing list, lock him up with his books and his typewriter and his Bible. Slam him down on his knees before texts, broken hearts, the flippant lives of a superficial flock, and the Holy God. Force him to be the one man in our surfeited communities who knows about God. Throw him into the ring to box with God until he learns how short his arms are. Let him come out only when he is bruised and beaten into being a blessing. Set a time clock on him that will imprison him with thought and writing about God for 40 hours a week. Shut his garrulous mouth forever spouting "remarks" and stop his tongue always tripping lightly over everything nonessential. Require him to have something to say before he dare break silence. Bend his knees in the lonesome valley, fire him from the PTA and cancel his country club membership; burn his eyes with weary study, wreck his emotional poise with worry for God, and make him exchange his pious stance for a humble walk before God and man. Make him spend and be spent for the glory of God. Rip out his telephone, burn up his ecclesiastical success sheets, refuse his glad hand, and put water in the gas tank of his community buggy. Give him a Bible and tie him in his pulpit and make him preach the Word of the living God. Test him, quiz him and examine him; humiliate him for his ignorance of things divine, and shame him for his glib comprehension of finances, batting averages, and political in-fighting. Laugh at his frustrated effort to play psychiatrist, scorn his insipid morality, refuse his supine intelligence, and compel him to be a minister of the Word. If he dotes on being pleasing, demand that he please God and not man. Form a choir and raise a chant and haunt him with it night and day: "Sir, we wish to see Jesus." When at long last, he dares assay the pulpit, ask him if he has a Word from God; if he does not, then dismiss him and tell him you can read the morning paper, digest the television commentaries, think through the day's superficial problems, manage the community's myriad drives, and bless assorted baked potatoes and green beans ad infinitum better than he can. Command him not to come back until he has read and re-read, written and re-written, until he can stand up, worn and forlorn, and say, "Thus saith the Lord." And when he is burned out by the flaming Word that coursed through him, when he is consumed at last by the fiery Grace blazing through him, and when he who was privileged to translate the truth of God to man is finally translated from earth to heaven, then bear him away gently, blow a muted trumpet and lay him down softly, place a two-edged sword on his coffin and raise a tune triumphant, for he was a brave soldier of the Word and e'er he died he had become a spokesman for his God.
Floyd Shafer

Bible – French Darby Genèse Chapter 7:1-24.

Index: French Darby

 

Genèse 7

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7:1 ¶ Et l’Éternel dit à Noé: Entre dans l’arche, toi et toute ta maison, car je t’ai vu juste devant moi en cette génération.

7:2 De toutes les bêtes pures tu prendras sept par sept le mâle et sa femelle, et des bêtes qui ne sont pas pures, deux, le mâle et sa femelle;

7:3 de même des oiseaux des cieux, sept par sept, mâle et femelle, pour conserver en vie une semence sur la face de toute la terre.

7:4 Car encore sept jours, et je fais pleuvoir sur la terre pendant quarante jours et quarante nuits, et j’exterminerai de dessus la face de la terre tout ce qui existe et que j’ai fait.

7:5 ¶ Et Noé fit selon tout ce que l’Éternel lui avait commandé.

7:6 Et Noé était âgé de six cents ans quand le déluge eut lieu et qu’il vint des eaux sur la terre.

7:7 Et Noé entra dans l’arche, et ses fils et sa femme et les femmes de ses fils avec lui, à cause des eaux du déluge.

7:8 Des bêtes pures, et des bêtes qui ne sont pas pures, et des oiseaux et de tout ce qui rampe sur le sol,

7:9 il en entra deux par deux vers Noé dans l’arche, mâle et femelle comme Dieu l’avait commandé à Noé.

7:10 Et il arriva, au bout de sept jours, que les eaux du déluge furent sur la terre.

7:11 ¶ L’an six cent de la vie de Noé, au second mois, le dix-septième jour du mois, en ce jour-là, toutes les fontaines du grand abîme se rompirent et les écluses des cieux s’ouvrirent;

7:12 et la pluie fut sur la terre quarante jours et quarante nuits.

7:13 ¶ En ce même jour-là, Noé, et Sem et Cham et Japheth, fils de Noé, et la femme de Noé, et les trois femmes de ses fils avec eux entrèrent dans l’arche,

7:14 eux, et tous les animaux selon leur espèce, et tout le bétail selon son espèce, et tous les reptiles qui rampent sur la terre selon leur espèce, et tous les oiseaux selon leur espèce, tout oiseau de toute aile;

7:15 et ils entrèrent vers Noé dans l’arche, deux par deux, de toute chair ayant en elle esprit de vie.

7:16 Et ce qui entra, entra mâle et femelle, de toute chair, comme Dieu le lui avait commandé. Et l’Éternel ferma l’arche sur lui.

7:17 ¶ Et le déluge fut sur la terre quarante jours; et les eaux crûrent et soulevèrent l’arche, et elle fut élevée au-dessus de la terre.

7:18 Et les eaux se renforcèrent et crûrent beaucoup sur la terre; et l’arche flottait sur la face des eaux.

7:19 Et les eaux se renforcèrent extraordinairement sur la terre; et toutes les hautes montagnes qui étaient sous tous les cieux furent couvertes.

7:20 Les eaux se renforcèrent de quinze coudées par-dessus, et les montagnes furent couvertes.

7:21 ¶ Et toute chair qui se mouvait sur la terre expira, tant les oiseaux que le bétail et les bêtes des champs et tout ce qui fourmille sur la terre, et tout homme.

7:22 Tout ce qui avait le souffle de vie dans ses narines, de tout ce qui était sur la terre sèche, mourut.

7:23 Et tout ce qui existait sur la face de la terre fut détruit, depuis l’homme jusqu’au bétail, jusqu’aux reptiles et jusqu’aux oiseaux des cieux: ils furent détruits de dessus la terre; et il ne resta que Noé et ce qui était avec lui dans l’arche.

7:24 Et les eaux se renforcèrent sur la terre, cent cinquante jours.