THOUGHT FOR THE MONTH

“Whatever is true, noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.” Paul, Philippians 4:8

     I have read the Bible through roughly 2 dozen times. I don’t say this to boast—I doubt many people care about my tally anyway—but to encourage everyone to keep reading the Bible a lot. Because after all those reads, I am still stumbling onto things I never saw before that give a richer understanding of what we can learn, how we can grow, from the experiences recorded there.
     While journeying recently through Chronicles (among the less popular of the Old Testament history books), I noticed for the first time that, with only a few exceptions, the many kings who ruled in Jerusalem were regarded with esteem. Some were faithful in their prime, only to lapse in the final round; others were wicked most of their lives, yet remembered favorably due to repentance late in life. If there was any way the writer could remember a king fondly, he found it and chose to do so.
     What a good example for us in our dealings with others! If we list all the people we know, there are no doubt many on the list whom we may not easily like, because of some item that came up—real or imagined or believed from a third party—over the years. Often the negatives are sparse or in the distant enough past that they don’t deserve to have much influence on us; or they may not even have been

Back Next