What do you do everyday? Everyday we look for ways to make ourselves feel as if we are fulfilled. We can drink all the coffee in the world but it will never truly make us fully awake. We can never full have our eyes open if we use the ways of this world. We could have all the money in the world but yet still not be better off in life. We will always be wanting more because these things do not last. It truly is one of the best feelings to have that moment that you bite into that juicy burger to satisfy your hunger or get that fat paycheck. But those things come and go. So what do we find ourselves doing? We find ourselves eating more and more cheeseburgers which throws us off our diet, fattening our bodies. Our we load up our work hours to the point that we become tempted with cheating with a co-worker or that we never spend time with our families.
A Vision of Ripe Fruit
"Then the Sovereign Lord showed me another vision. In it I saw a basket filled with ripe fruit. “What do you see, Amos?” he asked. I replied, “A basket full of ripe fruit.” Then the Lord said, “Like this fruit, Israel is ripe for punishment! I will not delay their punishment again. In that day the singing in the Temple will turn to wailing. Dead bodies will be scattered everywhere. They will be carried out of the city in silence. I, the Sovereign Lord, have spoken!” Listen to this, you who rob the poor and trample down the needy! You can’t wait for the Sabbath day to be over and the religious festivals to end so you can get back to cheating the helpless.You measure out grain with dishonest measures and cheat the buyer with dishonest scales. And you mix the grain you sell with chaff swept from the floor. Then you enslave poor people for one piece of silver or a pair of sandals. Now the Lord has sworn this oath by his own name, the Pride of Israel: “I will never forget the wicked things you have done! The earth will tremble for your deeds, and everyone will mourn. The ground will rise like the Nile River at flood time; it will heave up, then sink again. “In that day,” says the Sovereign Lord, “I will make the sun go down at noon and darken the earth while it is still day. I will turn your celebrations into times of mourning and your singing into weeping. You will wear funeral clothes and shave your heads to show your sorrow—as if your only son had died. How very bitter that day will be! “The time is surely coming,” says the Sovereign Lord, “when I will send a famine on the land—not a famine of bread or water but of hearing the words of the Lord. People will stagger from sea to sea and wander from border to border searching for the word of the Lord, but they will not find it. Beautiful girls and strong young men will grow faint in that day, thirsting for the Lord’s word. And those who swear by the shameful idols of Samaria—who take oaths in the name of the god of Dan and make vows in the name of the god of Beersheba—they will all fall down, never to rise again.”
-This chapter of Amos 8 was taken from Biblegateway.com-
This chapter could easily be taken as talking about the end of the world but we are going to focus on this sin in a different light. The words above becomes a blunt force straight to us about what happens if we do not fill ourselves with the Lord. Our minds, hearts, and souls become filled with so many things of this world that we leave not room or Christ. And then we sit back to look at our lives and we wonder why we are not full. Yeah we can be full and satisfy but we have to keep filling that over and over because things around us are not built to last. They simply were made that way and if they were made any differently then who would need Christ? He would get kicked to the curb even more and I feel as if we would still be...empty.
We can think as hard as we can to find things in this life to become happy but it needs to start at the root of our hearts. WE NEED that foundation through Christ to be fulfilled. Sure that does not mean that we can't indulge in the things of this world but we need to watch if we depend on it to be the only thing.
"So we don’t look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever."
~2 Corinthians 4:18
Word of the Day: "Now the Lord is the spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom."
~2 Corinthians 3:17
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