3.107 The People Murmured

In Matthew 5, Jesus calls us the salt of the earth and the light of the world, reminding us that our lives are meant to preserve, illuminate, and point others to Him. This season on Savory Salt, we'll walk through the Old Testament, one verse and one thought each day. Perhaps these moments will add greater savor and brighter light to our lives as we seek to truly live as savory salt.

Hello, my friends. It's a new day with new opportunities. Choose ye this day whom you will serve.

Oh, how quickly the coin flips to the other side. I hope you had an opportunity to listen to yesterday's episode as Hope did such a great job talking about an opportunity for you to share and rejoice in your gratitude to the Lord for all the things that He has done for you. If you haven't had a chance to listen to yesterday's episode, please take a second and go do that.

It's solid and Hope is getting better and better. Isn't she as she does this? This is so cool.

My friends, the readings throughout this week in Exodus 14 through 18 have some of the most pivotal and well-known parts, I believe, of all of the Old Testament. Not only do we get the parting of the Red Sea, but we get the delivery of manna to the Israelites. We get Moses tapping on the rock.

We get the war with Moses raising His arms up, right? We have these key pivotal moments that we seen displayed and told and talked about from these stories. And it seems to happen so quickly here inside of these chapters.

Today I want to look at the other side of the coin that tends to happen in our own lives after these awesome, amazing experiences with the Lord where we sing His praises and then sometimes this sneaks in. For the Israelites it seems to happen more than sometimes. Maybe that could be the case in our lives as well.

Let's take a look at Exodus chapter 17 verse 3. Although if you're reading inside of here this week, you'll notice this verse could be used and duplicated many times throughout the chapters. Verse 3 says, "And the people thirsted." My friends, the people of Israel were very good at murmuring.

But I chose this specific phrase and this specific verse because of the footnote associated with the word murmur. If you look inside of the footnote in 3a, you will find the word ingratitude associated with murmuring. So here we had just a couple of, I know in the story it's not this timeline, but just a couple of chapters ago, the people are singing praises to the Lord.

They've just witnessed the parting of the Red Sea. They've walked across the Red Sea on dry land. And then they murmured when they got hungry.

And notice again the context of that word, ingratitude. My friends, sometimes we can get stuck inside of the grateful, ingrateful loop. This is where we're flipping a coin every day.

Today, are we going to praise the Lord or are we going to complain to the Lord for the issues that we're facing? I think it's a lesson that we absolutely can draw from the children of Israel here. The Lord, in His attempts to help them out, tells them, like, I'm going to help you out to see if you're going to obey My commandments.

And then He helps them out to see if they will. You'll notice a couple of times in here that there are some of the people that test the Lord. And they find out what happens there.

There are some of the people that try to go out on the seventh day and collect the manna, and they find out that there is none there. My friends, I hope that you and I are not some of those people that murmur, that find ourselves ungrateful, that find ourselves tempting the Lord or testing the Lord when it comes to following the covenants and commandments that we have made with Him. I hope instead that we can stay on the praise side of the coin.

When we flip the coin, let's have it land on heads, so to speak. Let's have it land on thanking the Lord, finding what we can be grateful for, finding the blessings in all of our circumstances. And I think that mindset is not just about whitewashing for the sake of whitewashing.

I think that mindset truly brings us in alignment with the Spirit of the Lord to have that gratitude in our lives. That's all for today, my friends. You and I have come here for such a time as this.

Step forward in faith and let's be savory salt. We will be here tomorrow and we hope you are too.