Dear Friends of "Dial Daily Bread,"
Why do so many people who go to church suffer from depression just like so many people who do not go to church? For the same reason that Abraham's free-born descendants let themselves become slaves in Egypt. They became entangled in old covenant thinking, and the apostle Paul at last had the keen insight to see that their old covenant thinking is what "gives birth to bondage" (Gal. 4:24).
It was God's intention to renew to them at Sinai the glorious liberty of new covenant experience--He had promised it to Abraham; but their slave mentality at Sinai they brought with them from Egypt instinctively drove them to choose again the old covenant experience. Their bodies were free but their minds were still in bondage.
God had promised Abraham, "'Look now toward heaven, and count the stars if you are able to number them.' And He said to him, 'So shall your descendants be.' And he believed in the Lord, and He accounted it to him for righteousness" (Gen. 15:5, 6). But newly delivered Israel at Sinai did not so "believe in the Lord." They responded with a firm self-righteousness: "Then all the people answered together and said, 'All that the Lord has spoken we will do'" (Ex. 19:8). They didn't believe God's promise as Abraham did (at first); they made their own promise. (Even he fell back into this slippery old covenant in his affair with Hagar and Ishmael--hence modern Palestine today)
Thus God's true people at Mt. Sinai fastened themselves in their own home-grown old covenant; God did not lead them into it. Their national history thereafter, all the way to a cross outside Jerusalem's wall where they murdered their holy Messiah, was the up and down, revival and backsliding syndrome. Every revival, even that of King Josiah (2 Chronicles 34, 35) ended as in 36:14-16, "till there was no remedy." The "City of peace" with its glorious holy temple was burned, and the pagan Babylonians took the people into captivity for 70 years.
Paul's conclusion: Learn from your history! "Stand fast therefore in the liberty by which Christ has made us free" (Gal. 5:1).
--Robert J. Wieland
From the "Dial Daily Bread" Archive: May 22, 2006.
Copyright © 2014 by "Dial Daily Bread."
Be sure to check your e-mail for "Dial Daily Bread" again tomorrow.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Please forward these messages to your friends and encourage them to subscribe. The "Dial Daily Bread" Web site resides at: http://1888message.org/dailybread/
To subscribe send an e-mail message with "subscribe" in the body of the message to:dailybread@1888message.org
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Robert J. Wieland's inspirational "Dial Daily Bread" messages are availalbe via e-mail to anyone who wishes to receive a daily portion of uplifting Good News. "Dial Daily Bread" is FREE. Due to travel or other circumstances, there may be intervals when "Dial Daily Bread" will not be sent.
