I have a confession to make, sometimes reading the Bible is not my favorite thing to do. In fact at times it can be down right boring. I'm not talking about the book of Acts or the awesome bloody stories of the Old Testament. Some of those are actually actions movies that should have been made by now. Like when Deborah kills that dude with a tent peg through the head, or the King that was so fat when he got stabbed with a sword it got stuck in his belly. These are really in the Bible as are many other amazing happenings, not to mention the earth shattering teachings of our Lord Jesus Christ.
The part that kind of gets to me is I and II Kings and I and II Chronicles. They just seem soooo redundant. Of course you have some David and Solomon, and the prophets Elijah and Elisha, but for the most part it seems to read Israel had a bad king, then a worse king, then things where so screwed that the next king repented then there was a good king or two, and then a bad king for the next few generations. Well reading last week I saw plenty of that, but something jumped out of the pages, that's one of the benefits of reading the Bible more than once, you always find something new.
Two of the kings mentioned in II Chronicles chapters 24 and 25, Joash and Amaziah, who I'm sure won't be kind to my spell check, both started out very well. King Joash was raised under a godly priest , he renovated the Temple of God (what we would call the church building), and made sure the right offerings where brought to God from his people. King Amaziah listened to Godly council and was enlarging his kingdoms boundaries by trusting God to fight his battles. If they story were to end here these kings would go down as great rulers.
However this is not the case, before I snitch on these two kings, I want the reader to think about their life and their past. It's easy to start out great for God. You have a conversion experience and are filled with fire and want to do everything you can to please Him. But as time goes on your passion wanes and you don't do all the things you used to do. After reading these chapters I felt convicted to write this, not just to bring it to someone else's attention, but to also confess my own short comings. Some where in the busyness of life I can't honestly say my relationship with God is the best it's ever been, and that's a sin. I'm confident it wasn't God who moved but me.
So just as King Joash listened to evil advisors and deserted God's temple and took up worship and sex shrines and other false idols, and King Amaziah was coming home from a battle where God gave him the win, instead of praising he brought back the false idols of the people he had conquered, it just shows it's easy to start out right, but finishing right is much harder.
So as 2011 comes to a close, if you can reflect on your year and say it was great, don't rest on it, there is always more to do. If you look back and say you made mistakes last year, just be grateful our God is a God of second chance. Your start may not have been the best, but it's all in how you finish.
