PRAYER: Gracious God, thank you for your renewing grace, for the way you restore us and give us new life.
QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION: Have there been times in your life when you have felt like a parched desert? When? What happened? Are you yearning to be renewed through the power of God’s Spirit? Have you asked for this grace? In these seasons, we echo the prayer of Psalm 126:4: “Restore our fortunes, LORD, as streams renew the desert.” We look to the Spirit of God to wash over us and flow within us, giving us a fresh sense of God’s grace and empowering us to live fruitfully.
We all go through dry seasons in our lives, times when our souls are parched and our hearts yearn for living water. I’ve also put up a photo of the Negev desert.) (For a stunning photo I took recently of Hill Country wildflowers, visit my website. Having never experienced anything like this before, I have been amazed at how the streams of water have renewed the Hill Country.
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Since then we have been blessed with an unusually wet series of months. But all of this changed last fall, when the skies began to pour. Trees wilted, plants dried up, and the normally lush Hill Country began to look more and more like a desert. To make matters even worse, last summer we experienced all-time record heat. In the last couple of years, the Hill Country of Texas suffered a major drought. But when the rains came and filled its streambeds, the Negev would soon be blanketed with flowers and other natural growth. For most of the year, it was a dry and desolate place. The Hebrew of this verse refers to a particular desert region, the Negev, which lay to the south of Israel. So the psalmist cries out, “Restore our fortunes, LORD, as streams renew the desert” (126:4). In time, Israel began to resemble a dry desert, a place of infertility and inhospitality. It was a time of laughter as God’s people rejoiced in the “amazing things” God had done for them (126:2-3).īut the festivity did not last. Psalm 126 begins by celebrating the return of the Israelites from exile (126:1). Restore our fortunes, LORD, as streams renew the desert.
#SAMPLE PAGE OF STREAMS IN THE DESERT HOW TO#
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