The Bitter Water • March Devotional

Good Morning, may you have a great and blessed day.

Today I would like to encourage one another to keep your focus on th lord and what He wishes to continue to teach us. In these past 2 years many of us have faced trying times, not only with health issues, unexpected deaths in our families, but also the challenges of drought, and of course the border restrictions due to Covid.

I would like to point everyone to the Children of Israel’s journey through the wilderness. We read in Exodus that 3 days after they were baptized in the Red Sea they were led to a place of bitter water. When they saw that they could not drink the water, they began to murmur and complain. Moses, as a wise leader, cried to the Lord for direction and the Lord showed him a tree and told him to plave the tree into the water and the water became sweet. The tree represents the tree of life, which is Jesus. Whenever we cry to the Lord in prayer when we are faced with bitter difficulties, the Lord gives us a vision of the Cross. Whenever we apply the cross of Christ to any situation, our situation becomes bearable. God uses bitter circumstances to test us and prove us. He exposes our motives, our intentions, and our desires, so that we learn what is within us and where we are in relationship to Him.

It is our submission that identifies our complete dependence on God’s leading. And what a wonderful promise we glean from their experience. For right after putting Christ into their situation as the Tree of Life, God led them to a place called Elim, where there were 12 springs and 70 Palm trees. A wonderful, beautiful Oasis in the dessert, a place where they could resist in the shade and draw water from the springs of salvation and streams in the desert.

May this be our experience,

Pastor Eli