God's Way Or The Golden Calf's Way?
Thursday of the Fourth Week of Lent
My dear encountered couples:
Moses had just led the people out of Egypt. He is now on the mountain conversing with God and receiving God’s commandments. While he’s gone the people turn their attention to a golden calf. “Go down at once,” God told Moses. “The people have turned aside from the way I pointed out to them, making for themselves a molten calf and worshiping it, sacrificing to it and crying out, ‘This is your God, 0 Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt.’” You would never have done that, would you? Me neither.
But let’s think a bit before we consider ourselves better than those ungrateful, faithless people. How will we spend the rest of the day after we leave the Church on Sunday? How did we spend yesterday? Are we really going to keep God and his teachings first in our thoughts and actions? Or will we push him aside while we go on with our living in the real world, which sometimes demands that we hedge a bit and bend God’s principles of living, so that we conform more to what some golden calf of the world urges us to do?
Are we really going to treat everyone we meet today well, or will we have to be nasty and unpleasant to a few so we can get things done our way and according to our schedule — or even what we might sincerely believe is God’s way and schedule? (How so very many of us Christians are nasty when we are in a rush to get done what we call “God’s work”!) Are we going to be honest today in every way? Or will we find reasons to lie and cheat a little? Will your day be spent God’s way, or the golden calf’s way? Who or what is it that you really worship and love?
