Today's Passage:  Nehemiah 9

Most of the history of God's people is summarized in this one chapter.  God made the heavens and the earth...made a covenant with Abraham...rescued the people from Egypt and revealed the law through Moses...and then it is a history of disobedience and repentance.  The people would get complacent and turn to sin, and then God would be forced to get their attention.  Time after time this pattern would happen until God allowed the land to be taken from them.  But now, according to his great mercy (vs. 31), He does not completely give up on the people.

It's a story that many of us are all too familiar with...a cycle of disobedience and repentance.  God gets our attention and things go well for a while, but then we get comfortable and complacent and turn back to old ways.  God gets our attention again and the cycle starts all over again. 

As we can read here, this cycle doesn't work out very well for the Israelites.  They go through generations of hurt before getting back to this moment where they understand that following God is always the right answer.  Will we learn from their mistakes and follow God with our whole hearts?  Will we refuse to get complacent and trust in things other than Him?