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Daily Dose of Hope October 30, 2024 Day 4 of Week 31 Scripture: Amos 4-6; Psalm 55; Matthew 14 Welcome back to the Daily Dose of Hope, the devotional and podcast that complements the New Hope Church Bible reading plan. Tonight, we have a special worship night! We will have Recharge groups at 6:30pm and then gather in the sanctuary at 7:30pm for a time of praise and worship. Please consider joining us. This will truly be a recharge for the rest of your week. Today, we are continuing in the book of Amos. Remember, things seemed to be going well for the people but Amos was called to bring them a warning. God was rejecting their worship. Let’s read a portion from Amos 5:21-24,“I hate, I despise your religious festivals; your assemblies are a stench to me. Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them. Though you bring choice fellowship offerings, I will have no regard for them. Away with the noise of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps. But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream! God rejected their worship. He was disgusted by it. It was the people who came to worship who allowed great injustices against the poor. Whether they were actively involved in the oppression or just allowing it to happen, not caring enough to do something about it, we don’t know. What we do know is that God is not simply annoyed, he is truly angry. And then we read this famous line about justice – let justice roll on like a river... Justice in the Old Testament is often used when describing four groups: widows, orphans, foreigners, and the poor---the absolutely most vulnerable people in that society, people with no safety net, no protection, and no one to help care for them. The just and righteous person is the one who helps take care of these groups. And justice, according to this definition, includes lifting up the oppressed. A just person is one who uses their own resources for the good of the community. Keep in mind that Israel was originally an egalitarian society. The Torah, the covenant God made with his people, made provision to ensure that all people are cared for and that no one was taken advantage of. What we are seeing in Amos is that the people saw their resources as theirs and theirs alone. They felt no compassion and no responsibility to be agents of justice and righteousness, they felt no need to follow the covenant. Yet they would go through all the religious motions. They did their required festivals, they gave the required sacrifices and offerings, they sang religious songs. They worshiped, they did small groups and Bible studies. But there was no connection between what went on during worship and what happened the rest of the week. This is truth: What we believe about God is demonstrated not by how often we come to church, not by the number of Bible studies we attend, but by how we live the rest of the week, by how we treat our neighbor. Jesus certainly taught this. What was the Great Commandment? This comes from Matthew 28: Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” Amos taught this, Jesus taught this–we need to pay attention to this: Love of God and Love of Neighbor cannot be separated. Justice, righteousness, and how we treat others flows out of our worship of God. We may try to disconnect our worship/our church life from the rest of our life and we may actually do a good job convincing ourselves this is possible. But what God is telling us in Amos and what Jesus teaches is that it isn’t. It just isn’t possible. We can’t worship God on Sunday and neglect the poor on Monday. We can’t go to bible study on Tuesday and gossip about our church friends on Wednesday. Why? Because Amos’ unpopular truth is that what we believe about God is demonstrated not by our religious busyness, not by the church stuff we do, but by how we live every other day of the week. With that, let’s move on to our New Testament reading, Matthew 14. There are three very different but powerful narratives in this chapter. Be sure to read through all of it if you haven’t done so already. We start with John the Baptist’s murder in an incredibly gruesome way, specifically a beheading. We can see there is little value placed on human life in the Roman Empire; rather, Herod is far more concerned about how he looks in front of his guests than how he looks in front of God. Then, we read about Jesus feeding the 5,000.This is a beautiful miracle that gives us a great picture of the Kingdom of God. In God’s Kingdom, there is no hunger so Jesus feeds. But he doesn’t do so in any kind of conventional way. He makes sure that everyone there knows that God provided the meal. Every part...