Hosea 6-9 ; Hebrews 3

Praising You for songwriters and authors who stir us out of our apathy. Who have struggled through the very things that hold us stagnate, tempting us to live in the BUT....
It’s YOU who drives the creative process and You who inspires true words or notes of WORSHIP!
Praising You for YOUR LOVE, a love that ruins us for paler experiences, a love without defining bounds. Praising You that once we see our…….and turn to YOU, there You are. Praising You that IF we embrace all that we are you never allow us to stay there.

So I Go Now by Jeff Jacobson
Our very legacy:
You see, our characters have intertwined for a season, a chapter if you will. Here and now, in our towns and our day, treading waters of uncertainty or contemplating this soil we tread, we find ourselves joined as one, if only to reveal a common thread; an awakening of sorts. Whether we are floating peacefully or sinking in roughshod rapids, whether we are limping in the shadows or walking firmly with the wind to our back and the sun on our face, we are together amidst this very story we call life.
So perhaps it must be said that while we engage in this story, we must remind ourselves that collectively, we are not the Author. There are no feeble offerings that we can even muster with this pen to craft a story such as HE writes. But we are His characters, so it bears repeating that we are no mere label. We have been summoned as the indefinable followers of the One who turned this world upside down. We are the ever-transformed and the energized; we are the empowered examples of grace who cannot be contained nor condensed nor reduced to a script of our own design.
And in and out of this setting that’s been given us through His amazing and stunning handiwork, we’ve realized that the lights are up and we’re on. So we’ve imagined and invited a Rider, who by all modern standards has upset the apple cart—our very historical thoughts of him; for this following of him may be grittier than we thought, the message simpler than we anticipated. Just when we thought we had this all figured out, well—there he is.

Again and again and again.

Oh there’s more much more……buy the book, be touched by it and allow it to go deep into your heart, your psyche. Challenging you and driving you deeper and deeper to the one who can change you. Because we become apathetic or discouraged and in that apathy and discouragement we can choose to run or to press on……we are to Press On…….we are to turn over and over back to the one who chose us. If we don’t want to live in the BUT we must be willing to make that U-turn on the journey that always and forever takes us back to Him. So here I am this morning and maybe you are too…..wondering how I got again so far off track…… IF I stay off track instead of turning back, humbly turning back…I will miss the race He laid out for me…I will miss the mountain He may have planned for me to scale…I will miss the incredible journey He planned.

Hebrew 3: Today, please listen; don't turn a deaf ear as in the bitter uprising. 15-19 For who were the people who turned a deaf ear? Weren't they the very ones Moses led out of Egypt? And who was God provoked with for forty years? Wasn't it those who turned a deaf ear and ended up corpses in the wilderness? And when he swore that they'd never get where they were going, wasn't he talking to the ones who turned a deaf ear? They never got there because they never listened, never believed.

CS Lewis: We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive. "