Wisdom is available to all who seek it Ceilon Aspensen, February 8, 2024February 8, 2024 Get the FREE worksheet for this program here. The most important message I picked up from today’s readings overall is wisdom is available to all who seek it. My primary takeaway from each of the passages was this: Exodus 27-28 – More details about the construction of the sanctuary. Keeping the lamp burning at all times symbolizes God saying, “We’ll leave the light on for you.” Mark 11 – “I tell you, therefore, everything you ask and pray for, believe that you have it already, and it will be yours. And when you stand in prayer, forgive whatever you have against anybody, so that your Father in heaven may forgive your failings, too.” v.24-25 Psalms 39 – When things are going badly and life itself feels like punishment, cry out to God and ask for mercy. It will be granted every single time. Proverbs 8 – Wisdom is not only available to all who seek it, but it is also always crying out to us, trying to get our attention. The evidence of the wisdom available to us is written in the laws of nature and physics. All we have to do is respond to the world around us in a healthy and responsible way and its secrets will be revealed to us. When I find myself in a long old testament passage like the one we’re reading today in Exodus, about a lot of details about things that seem awfully old and far away, I try to consider what symbolic intent was built into all the minutiae of something like designing and building the sanctuary and the consecration of its priests. Today what stuck with me was the fact that the lamp had to be burning at all times, 24×7, 365. I believe the intention of that at the time was to indicate “God is in the house.” For us today, about 3200 years removed from the time of Moses and the Exodus, I think the symbolism is much simpler: keep the light burning within us to keep us close to God. Reading the Bible every day is the way I do that. I find something in it every day that is relevant to my life at the moment. When I pray, I talk to God. When I read the Bible, God talks to me through the experiences of those who followed him long before I was a twinkle in anyone’s eye. It’s wisdom for the ages. With that in mind, it’s important to understand that the wisdom of the lived experiences of the people is in what they learned, not in what they actually did. There’s a lot of warfare, murder, adultery, and deception in the Bible, in both the old and new testaments. Those stories are not in there as examples for us to follow. They are stories that show us how God changed each of the individuals featured in the stories over the course of their lifetimes. They show us how God can change us if we are willing. In Proverbs 8 we read that wisdom is calling out to us incessantly. It was calling out to the people of the Bible as well. The stories that we read show us that they didn’t always listen, or when they did they had doubts, and that it wasn’t always easy to follow the course laid out for them, or to grasp and act upon that wisdom. On the rare occasions they did, amazing things happened for their good and the good of all of those around them. When we respond to the call of wisdom, we know what to pray for. In Mark 11 Jesus tells us that if we have faith we will receive whatever we ask for and believe that we already have it. Anyone who has prayed to win the lottery and didn’t would argue that that’s pie in the sky. However, centering ourselves in the Bible every day, keeping that lamp burning, changes us and our desires. Over time we may change our minds about what we think is important and in doing so change our focus in prayer. As C.S. Lewis said, “I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God. It changes me.” When we keep the light burning inside us, we begin to align our thinking and our desires with God’s. When that happens we do, indeed, receive everything we ask for. That’s what I got out of it. What did you get out of the readings today? You can join us in our private Facebook group that I set up specifically for sharing what we take-away from the readings each day. If you haven’t gotten the FREE “Read the Bible in a Year” worksheet yet, you can Get the FREE worksheet for this program here. It is not necessary for you to start on January 1st–you can start from the beginning on whatever date you get the worksheet. Join us! Learn more about why I read the Bible all the way through every year, and feel free to share with anyone you think could benefit. This post is part of the series, “Read the Bible in a Year.” To see other posts in this series, go to the Chronological Index of Read the Bible in a Year Posts. Please follow and like us: Read the Bible in a Year Spiritual Practice changechange for the betterchristianchristianityencounter with Godpositive changeread the biblesacrificespiritual