Blessings Lenten Devotional Readers!
As you embark on this year’s journey with us, you are encouraged to make yourself as open and available to GOD’s word as possible. To this end, please take time to immerse yourself in the entire chapter from which the focal text is drawn each day. REMEMBER, the word of God is meant to be both heard and heeded. For this cause, we invite you to continually listen to, read, recite, and meditate on this week's text, Joel 2, in its entirety, that you might commit it to your head and heart.
Discerning the Trumpet’s Call
With instruments such as drums and horns, ancient communities developed effective ways to message their members. Using rhythms and/or melodies known only to their tribes or citizenry, communications sent reached the entire community whether they were nearby, on the outskirts of town, or miles away. For Israel, their instrument was a ram’s horn known as a shofar. Using the shofar, Israel’s leaders would in one instance trumpet a call to the community to assemble for worship, and in another summons troops to battle. The shofar would be sounded as an alarm on one occasion and used on another to signify victory.
In today’s text, the sound trumpeted from the shofar is one of warning. Herein the prophet Joel comes with a word of warning, not to the enemies of Israel, but to Zion: GOD’s own people, that the wrath of God is about to befall them.
Today, Ash Wednesday serves as the trumpet sound in Zion… the trumpet sound resonating in the hearts and minds of the people and community of GOD. The message sounded is one of prayer and preparedness. You may have discerned that this preparation will include fasting from food or frivolities. Yet, for all of us, this preparation will include the trying and strengthening of our faith. Let Us be sober-minded that we would tune the ears of our hearts to the call of the LORD, enabling us to discern and rightly interpret GOD’s trumpet sound in this season of our lives. Let Us hear and heed the call of GOD concerning our personal walk with the LORD as well as within our family, our community, this nation, and the world.
Let Us Pray
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