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MONDAY 6TH JULY
2 Samuel 6.1-5, 12-19
David celebrated with joy

The Ark was a very specially made wooden box. It was engraved with beautiful carvings and richly ornamented. It contained some sacred objects, the Ten Commandments, some Manna and other things. It was very important to the Israelites because it symbolized the presence of God. A special place had to be built for it to rest. When it was brought into this special place there were some tremendous celebrations. Everyone celebrated with all their might. They sang and they played musical instruments and they danced. They were so happy, overjoyed in the presence of the Lord. King David did not hold back. He joined in the celebrations very enthusiastically and ran before the Ark dancing with all of his might.

Whenever God is making His presence felt He makes people happy. He makes them want to sing and dance and clap their hands. He makes them very enthusiastic. I have seen this happen many times when the Holy Spirit has been moving powerfully to give a living experience of the presence of God. Sometimes people get upset when they see people get enthusiastic with singing and when they start to dance in church, like David’s wife Michal, and they try to stop them. I love the story of Billy Bray, a Cornish tin miner converted in a revival, who became a famous preacher. He said, “If you stop me praising God by putting me in a barrel and rolling me down a hill, I will shout ‘alleluia’ through the bung hole.”

PRAYER: Father, anoint us powerfully with your Holy Spirit that we may be so filled with joy because of your presence which is so wonderful, that we will want to sing and play and clap and dance with all of our might, through Jesus our Joy Giver. Amen.

TUESDAY 7TH JULY
Psalm 85
Love and Faithfulness meet

Today’s psalm is a prayer for revival and restoration. We all need reviving and restoring from time to time. Let’s examine the state of our spiritual lives. Let’s put them into the light of the Holy Spirit.

What do we find? It’s more than likely that we will see a lot of the life has gone out of us and that our love for God has grown luke-warm. This may have affected our spiritual discipline, we may have slackened off on our prayer times and haven’t made Bible reading a top priority. We may have skipped church sometimes. This means that we need a new outpouring of Holy Ghost power into our hearts to make us come alive with a very strong love for God. At the same time our whole rule of life needs to be restored.

God is ever willing to revive and restore us. For such revival to take place, God’s love and our faithfulness must meet. God’s love is always pouring down from heaven because He longs for us so much. His love is called righteousness which means the ability to live in a right relationship. God pours out His love to enable us to have such a relationship. On the cross Jesus poured out His love. It was so powerful that it cancelled out our sins. When we hear of God’s love being poured out as He reveals it to us in the Bible, we have to respond with faithfulness. As we put our faith in Him, His love floods down into our hearts and we are revived and soon our whole relationship with Him is restored.

PRAYER: Father, we can’t stand being luke-warm; we want to have a very strong love for You. As You pour out Your love make us ever so faithful so that as Your love and our faithfulness meet, we may be revived and have our relationship with You restored, through Jesus Christ our Saviour. Amen.

WEDNESDAY 8TH JULY
Ephesians 1.1-14
What God’s Word says about us

Do you sometimes feel down in the dumps and think you’re no good? Are you unsure of your standing with God? If you die are you sure you will go to Heaven? If there is any doubt about these things, today’s reading will boost you up no end. Your feelings haven’t been too good because you have been listening to what you think about yourself and what others say about you. Now you must listen to what God is saying about you. Before you do, make sure you have been saved into a right relationship with God. Verse 13 tells us that we are saved (included in Christ) when we hear the word of truth, the Gospel of salvation and when we believe it. When God sees your faith response to the Good News that Jesus loves you so much that He died to set you free from all sins, He marks you with a seal. He gives you His Holy Spirit.

Once you experience the Holy Spirit you know that God has paid a deposit for you. This guarantees that you are on your way to Heaven. Now you know you are saved and heavenward-bound, listen to what God’s Word says, meditate on it and learn it off by heart.

1. He has blessed us with every spiritual blessing.
2. We are so very special because God has chosen us.
3. His plan for our lives is to make us holy and blameless.
4. He predestined us, or specially chose us, to be adopted as His own sons and daughters.
5. This adoption is made possible by God’s grace which Jesus poured down on us because He loves us so much.
6. Jesus has set us free from our sins by the power of His blood poured out from the cross.
7. God lavishes us with His love and grace continuously.
8. He brings us all together as one huge happy family.

PRAYER: Father, from now on we know we are saved and on our way to Heaven. Help us to believe what You say about us, especially how much You lavish us with Your love and that You love us so much You will help us to be with You for ever. Amen.

THURSDAY 9TH JULY
Ephesians 1.15-23
The eyes of your heart opened

Paul was so thankful for the Ephesian Christians. He couldn’t stop praising the Lord for them every time he prayed for them. They had put their faith in Jesus and were gloriously saved by Him. Paul goes on to pray that their relationship with Jesus will grow stronger and stronger every day.

Sometimes people don’t grow closer to Jesus because they can’t see or understand spiritual truths in the Word of God. They are blind to these things. They need to be filled with the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of wisdom and revelation. The Holy Spirit cures their blindness. He opens the eyes of their hearts. When this happens, the Bible really comes alive for them and they begin to understand how blessed and how fortunate they are. What a fantastic inheritance they have. They are filled with so much hope.

PRAYER: Father, thank you so much for enabling us to grow so close to Jesus by having the eyes of our hearts opened and by our being given the same power You exerted when You raised Jesus. We will not stop praising You and thanking You, through Jesus our Lord. Amen.

FRIDAY 10TH JULY
Amos 7.7-15
Oppositions

Amos had been given a special task to do by God. God had called him to be a prophet. As a prophet he had to deliver messages from God to His people. One of these messages was that God had measured the lives of the Israelites like a builder measures whether a wall is straight by using a plumb line and had found they were crooked. For this they would face destruction. They couldn’t stand these messages. No one likes to be told there is something wrong with them. They tried to discredit Amos, telling him to go home. Amos’ answer was that he couldn’t help what he was doing. He didn’t choose to be a professional prophet. Like his father, he was a simple man off the land, a shepherd and orchardist. But God took him from tending his flocks and looking after his trees and told him to go and prophesy.

God loves to warn people when they are going wrong. He knows that the consequence of their sin is eternal death (Romans 6.23). He wants to save them from that sure death and give them eternal life through Jesus Christ. The Communist leaders in China are getting very worried. They hate God and try to convince themselves that He doesn’t exist. The evangelists in China are being empowered by God to be very effective. Thousands of Chinese people are being converted every day. As a result, many pastors are in prison as communism tries in vain to oppose the spread of the Good News.

PRAYER: Jesus, give us the courage as a Church to warn the present generation of the terrible consequences that will happen if they reject God and tell them how wonderful it will be for them if they accept Jesus as their Lord and Saviour. Amen.

SATURDAY 11TH JULY
Mark 6.14-29
John the Baptist

John the Baptist had done a terrific job! After a miraculous birth he was chosen by God to be set apart to be a special prophet to get God’s people ready for the coming of Jesus. He had a fantastic ministry. Being filled with the Holy Spirit from his birth, he had lots of power. He was a very convincing preacher, and very challenging. He inspired thousands of people to repent of their sins and be baptised in the Jordan River. One day he baptised Jesus. When he did, God revealed to him the Holy Spirit coming down on Jesus and he told the crowd that Jesus would baptise with the Holy Spirit.

When Jesus started his ministry six weeks after his baptism, most of John’s followers attached themselves to Jesus. It didn’t worry John at all; he was happy to grow less important because his whole mission in life was to prepare people for Jesus and he was so glad when all the people flocked to Him.

Later John opposed Herod marrying his brother’s wife after a divorce. Herod put him in jail for this. This cost John his life when Herod was tricked by his wife into executing John.

PRAYER: Jesus, raise up in Your Church people with a special ministry of preparing people to receive Jesus. Give courage to those who do this in hostile countries like China and the Middle East. Save them in their persecution. Amen.

SUNDAY 12TH JULY
This week’s Message
Faithfulness is a very important quality of a Christian.

A faithful person never gives up even when everything seems to be going wrong. I found this poem in a book of Illustrations:

    Two frogs fell into a deep cream bowl,
    One was an optimistic soul;
    But the other took the gloomy view,
    “We shall drown,” he cried, without more ado.
    So with a last despairing cry,
    He flung up his legs and said, “Good-bye.”
    Quoth the other frog with a merry grim,
    “I can’t get out but I won’t give in.
    I’ll just swim around till my strength is spent,
    Then will I die the more content.”
    Bravely he swam till it would seem
    His struggles began to churn the cream.
    On the top of the butter at last he stopped,
    And out of the bowl he gaily hopped.
    What of the moral? ‘Tis easily found
    If you can’t hop out, keep swimming round.

(Walter Knight p 440, The Tale of the Tardy Oxcart.)

This reminds me of the tremendous faithfulness of the Great Missionary Hudson Taylor. He showed incredible faithfulness in his first journey to China after he had founded the China Inland Mission. Their sailing Ship the Lammamar went through some terrible storms. Hudson’s faith kept them going, saving them from being ship-wrecked. They finally staggered into Shanghai harbour with broken masts and torn sails, but they made it!

We can always make it through the struggles of life if we keep going when things get tough. As someone once said, “When the going gets tough, the tough get going”. WE can all get tough when we realise what Jesus has done for us and the wonderful plan he has for each of our lives. Meditate on today’s second reading from the first chapter of Ephesians.

When we first heard the God News and put our faith and trust in Jesus’ death on the cross we were included in Christ. He saved us from our sins and made us very tough, giving us the seal of the Holy Spirit, a guarantee that we would make it to the end!