Choose to Side with God!

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Monday, April 06, 2009
Devotions: Ps 51; 69; Jer 12:1-16; Phil 3:1-14; Jn 12:9-19

Lord, have mercy and blot out my transgressions! I have sinned against You; so please purge and cleanse me. Fill me with joy and gladness; create a clean heart within me; put a new and upright spirit within me. Restore me, my God, to the joy of Your salvation! Open my lips, that I may praise You; accept my contrite heart and broken spirit. I must depend on You to save me, Lord! I am overmatched by my enemies; only You can save me. Answer me at a time acceptable to You, Lord, and rescue me! Let my enemies experience the punishment they are planning for me; and let Your salvation set me on high! I will praise God’s name and trust His mercy.

Jeremiah voices his conflict and his predicament to YHWH. The shepherds of Israel have destroyed God’s homeland, and face God’s fierce anger! God says: ‘If my people will learn My ways, and swear by My name, I will build them up. Anyone who follows Baal, I will pluck up and destroy!’

Paul writes to the Philippians: ‘Rejoice in the Lord! Avoid the circumcision party. You don’t have to become an observant Jew to be an observant Christian. I was a Jew’s Jew, but all that I took pride in, I now count as rubbish; I lost all that and gained Jesus the Messiah, my Lord. I seek His righteousness—that which is through faith in Christ, so that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection; so that I may share in His sufferings, so I become like Him in death, that if possible I may attain resurrection from death, too. Not that I already have all this, but I press on to make it my own; I strain toward the prize of the upward call of God in the Messiah Jesus.’

A great crowd gathered around Jesus: first, to see Him and Lazarus whom He had raised from death; then, they welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem as a coming king, meeting Him with palm branches. Jesus rode into Jerusalem on the colt of a donkey, as Zechariah had prophesied. His opponents said to one another, ‘See: you can do nothing; the whole world has gone after him!’