A God Moment

We are trying to start a new tradition at our dinner table, a tradition I borrowed from Ann Voskamp's beautiful blog. Ann's family brings their Bibles to the dinner table, and once the meal is over they all pull out their Bibles, read a chapter or two, and then discuss as a family what God is speaking to them through his Holy Word. I fell in love with that idea of family devotional time around the table and asked my husband if we could try it. So far we have only successfully remembered to do our Bible reading twice...it is far from being a habit yet, but we are hoping it becomes one.

Anyway, today as we sat down to dinner, I reminded the boys to remind me to remind them to do our Bible reading once we finished eating :) Then I recalled the Scripture passage about "man does not live by bread alone but by every word that comes forth from the mouth of God." I said it out loud to the boys to try to explain to the boys why we are starting this new tradition of reading the Bible every day...because God's Word feeds our souls and is more important than food feeding our bodies. I asked the boys if any of them remembered where that verse in the Bible is found. Like good Catholics, none of us could remember the "address" for the verse :} So we dismissed it and started eating dinner. After dinner, it was Joseph's turn to be our Bible reader. I told him he could pick any book in the Bible to read from or he could just open it up and randomly read whatever page he opened to. He thought the latter idea sounded fun, so he opened the Bible and pointed to the middle of the page. Guess what passage he pointed to?

"One does not live by bread alone." (Luke 4:4)

God totally answered my question at the beginning of our meal!!! I could not believe it! All of us stopped and looked at each other with our mouths hanging open. I said, "Crazy! That was no accident, boys!" Luke 4:4 is relating the story about how Jesus responded to Satan tempting him on the mountain after his 40 day fast. When I looked at the cross reference to the verse it brought me to Deuteronomy 8:3. Jesus is quoting the Old Testament passage when the Israelites were given manna in the desert and Moses tells them, "Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes forth from the mouth of the Lord." So now we know the address,and I don't think we'll every forget it. How incredible. I guess God wasn't joking when he said, "Ask and you shall receive." How neat for our family to see a miracle like that, proving that indeed our God is alive and active in our daily lives, and that He cares about the smallest questions that we might have.