Remember The Wilderness

James Reston was a syndicated columnist for the New York Times for more than thirty years. In his final column for the newspaper, he wrote: “In America, we have learned something about how to deal with adversity since the great Depression, but not much about how to dea … More

Prosperity

Is it harder for you to maintain a proper relationship with God in prosperity or in hardship? Why?

Moses doesn’t want Israel to forget God and be proud of their own attainments once they get in the promised land (v. 1). He reminds them of how they had learned humility, how God had proved their faithfulness and how He had revealed what was really in their hearts (v. 2). It is so easy for us to start thinking that life is based on material things, but things never satisfy. The more we get the more we want. Real life comes from total commitment to God, discipline, and hard work. 

Israel had been in a situation in the wilderness where they had to completely depend on the Lord for their food and water (vv. 3-6). Now they were going into a land that had an abundance of water and agricultural products (v.v. 7-8). Moses warns them that prosperity may cause them to stop depending on God. The thing that will help them to remember God is to continue praising Him. Failure to praise Him will lead to forgetting Him followed quickly by the worship of other gods.

One of the major differences between the nation of Israel in the Old Testament and the church in the New Testament is that God promised Israel temporal blessing and He promises us spiritual blessings (vv. 9-10). If we can get this straight in our thinking it will cause us to rejoice rather than to lapse into a back-slidden condition.

Application

The one thing that will cause me to worship the gods of this world is to stop praising God for who He is and what He does.

Deuteronomy 8:1-10 (English Standard Version)


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