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Lamp and Light Bible Reading Plan
Welcome to the Lamp and Light Bible Reading Plan where we are seeking to love the Lord our God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength with God's Word lighting the way!
Lamp and Light Bible Reading Plan
January 15, 2026 - Genesis 13 & Psalm 13
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Genesis 13 & Psalm 13 detail some of the specifics of the Abrahamic covenant and how to continue trusting the Lord in the midst of sorrow.
For more information about Compass Bible Church South Valley, visit compassbiblesv.org. Keep reading. Keep growing. God’s Word is a lamp to your feet, and a light to your path.
Welcome to the Lamp and Light Bible Reading Plan, where we are seeking to love the Lord our God and love our heart, soul, mind, and strength with God's word lighting the way. I'm Josiah Smith, joined by Tyler Sanborn. Today is Thursday, January 15th, 2026. Listen intently to God's written word. Genesis 13. So Abram went up from Egypt, he and his wife and all that he had, and Lot went with him into the Negeb. Now Abram was very rich in livestock, in silver and in gold, and he journeyed on from the Negeb as far as Bethel to the place where his tent had been at the beginning, between Bethel and Ai, to the place where he had made an altar at the first, and there Abram called upon the name of the Lord. And Lot, who went with Abram, also had flocks and herds and tents, so that the land could not support both of them dwelling together, for their possessions were so great that they could not dwell together, and there was strife between the herdsmen of Abram's livestock and the herdsmen of Lot's livestock. At that time the Canaanites and the Parazites were dwelling in the land. Then Abram said to Lot, Let there be no strife between you and me, and between your herdsmen and my herdsmen, for we are kinsmen. Is not the whole land before you? Separate yourself from me. If you take the left hand, then I will go to the right, or if you take the right hand, then I will go to the left. And Lot lifted up his eyes and saw that the Jordan Valley was well watered everywhere like the garden of the Lord, like the land of Egypt, in the direction of Zoar. This was before the Lord destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. So Lot chose for himself all the Jordan Valley, and Lot journeyed east. Thus they separated from each other. Abram settled in the land of Canaan, while Lot settled among the cities of the valley and moved his tent as far as Sodom. Now the men of Sodom were wicked, great sinners against the Lord. The Lord said to Abram, after Lot had separated from him, lift up your eyes and look from the place where you are, northward and southward and eastward and westward. For all the land that you see I will give to you and to your offspring forever. I will make your offspring as the dust of the earth, so that if one can count the dust of the earth, your offspring also can be counted. Arise, walk through the length and the breadth of the land, for I will give it to you. So Abram moved his tent and came and settled by the oaks of Mamern, which are at Hebron, and there he built an altar to the Lord. Psalm thirteen.
SPEAKER_01:How long, O Lord, will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I take counsel in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all the day? How long shall my enemy be exalted over me? Consider and answer me, O Lord my God. Light up my eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death, lest my enemies say, I have prevailed over him, lest my foes rejoice because I am shaken. But I have trusted in your steadfast love. My heart shall rejoice in your salvation. I will sing to the Lord because he has dealt bountifully with me.
SPEAKER_00:Let's back up to Genesis twelve just for a moment, so that we can get some context for the Abrahamic covenant. That was initially when God made this covenant with Abraham that he would make him a great nation. And that covenant comes with three main things that kind of help you keep track of the Abrahamic covenant and even a lot of the narrative moving forward in Genesis. And those three things are land, seed, blessing. So as you think about the Abrahamic covenant, if you were going to summarize it in three words, those are the three words that you should use: land, seed, and blessing. And here, right at the end of Genesis 13, we see God reiterate the land portion, really, and the blessing portion of that Abrahamic covenant. You see in verse 14 it says, Lift up your eyes and look from the place where you are, northward and southward and eastward and westward. For all the land that you see, I will give to you and to your offspring forever. And he goes on and talks about him having as many offspring as the sand and the seas, uh as though uh you could count it, right? I will make your offspring even as the dust of the earth, he says. So that if you if you can count the dust of the earth, your offspring also can be counted. So we have this Abrahamic covenant that comes with those three main items: land, seed, and blessing. And here in Genesis 13, we see God reminding Abraham Abram and Abraham to look north, south, east, and west. And God is gonna, in this covenant, provide this land for the nation ultimately that would be established that we know to be now the nation of Israel. Now, what's interesting about that is Lot is in some sense associated with this covenant, at least, because he is a family to Abraham, and yet he chooses to go somewhere that is not promised to Abraham. The land that was promised was the land of the Canaanites. If you notice, when Lot and Abram went their separate ways, Abram stayed in the land of the Canaanites, the text tells us, but Lot left. Now, where did Lot go? Well, it says in verse 13 that he went closer to the city of Sodom, and it says, Now the men of Sodom were wicked, great sinners against the Lord. And so we see this deviance from the canopy, you could say, of blessing that God has promised Abraham. I will bless those who bless you, I will curse those who curse you. Lot leaves that, kind of goes his own way. He is interested in the green, lush grass. You had mentioned fly fishing.
SPEAKER_01:Maybe, PJ, maybe he wants, maybe he wants the waters, maybe he wants the that city nightlife. Maybe he's looking east and saying, I hear there's some nice brown trout out that way. Maybe I'll cruise out. He was see what I can see. He was the first one to live for retirement. Look at look at look, I could I could live in a city and I can have a not a two-car garage. I could have a third, a three-car garage, a third bay for all of my camels, lay toys and things that I can ride out into the desert with. Who knows?
SPEAKER_00:It says there in verse 12, Abram settled in the land of Canaan, which remember that was the land that God promised, enemy territory. While Lot settled among the cities of the valley and moved his tent as far as Sodom. Now his proximity ultimately, the text tells us right after, that is to a city and to the men of that city who were known for their wickedness. Now the men of Sodom were wicked, great sinners against the Lord. And we see this sort of pattern all throughout the Bible, but specifically with the Abrahamic covenant, we see those who choose the path of blessing. Even think back to Psalm 1, if you remember from the very first day of this reading plan, Psalm 1, there's these two paths: the path of the wicked, the path of the righteous. And we see that kind of on display here, where Lot chooses to, you know, or Psalm 1 talks about do not stand, do not walk, do not sit. You know, literally, he sets up his tent right next to the wicked. He stakes a claim. Literally. Now the men of Sodom were wicked, great sinners against the Lord. And that's who Lot is choosing to be his company. He's leaving again the canopy of God's blessing, the land that God promised, and he's going somewhere that's filled with wickedness. And that's just a good warning. That's a good warning of the things that we choose to spend our time on, the people that we choose to associate with. What's in our proximity, I guess you could say? Is it the blessing of being with the Lord and walking the path of the righteous? Or is it going to be in proximity to the wicked? And we're going to see in this story that Lot's proximity to Sodom, it doesn't come without a price. It doesn't come without a cost. And so we need to we need to heed that warning of okay, are we placing ourselves in proximity to wickedness, to things that are great sinners or people that are great sinners against the Lord? Are we not heeding caution? Uh and even as Paul says that bad company corrupts good morals. And so we want to make sure that we're we're we're heeding that warning.
SPEAKER_01:PJ, you might you might know some people that have moved here over the past seven years or so, and and they might say, Well, that that was me. I was fleeing, I was removing myself from this wickedness from the state which I was raised in. And I didn't have any saying it, I'm out of there. Now, now what can you say to to people that are surprised to find that there is just wickedness everywhere?
SPEAKER_00:And I would just say as a warning and a caution, oftentimes the wickedness is not out there. Sometimes the tent that we stake in the ground, uh close to wickedness, is actually our own heart. Uh and so we just need to be doing the the evaluation, uh, the prayerful evaluation of our hearts to ask, okay, what are we drawing close to? Uh, draw near to the Lord, he will draw near to you, the scriptures say. Uh, what are we drawing near to in our hearts? What are our hearts longing for? What are they desiring? Are we getting caught up in the nice things, the shiny things? We're going to put it in the terms of lot. Is it the really lush green grass? This looks really uh nice, it looks really appealing to the eyes, it looks like exactly what I want. Maybe I can kick up my feet, maybe I can't go fly fishing or whatever it is that Lot likes to do with all of his animals and his herdsmen. Uh, but he he put himself and staked a claim next to um the wicked. And so we we need to recognize that that can happen in our own hearts. And so we need to evaluate, okay, Lord, search me, know my heart, and see if there be any wicked way within me. That's a prayer that I like to go back to often. Uh, David's praying that. I think that's a consistent refrain that we ought to pray, Lord, reveal it and help me to take the tent spikes out of the ground and to move to relocate towards the path of blessing and the path of righteousness, and not get caught up in uh leaning into the wicked or those who are great sinners against the Lord.
SPEAKER_01:Great word there, Pastor Josiah. Thank you for that. Um, I'm thinking about just the the wickedness and and we see in Genesis 13. These men were known for wickedness, and we might look we might look around and and be in a situation where there's not wicked people surrounding us, but our our circumstances sure seem that way. Uh our circumstances in life are are are daunting, and they there's a physical response sometimes that we might have to the pressures and the and the strains and stresses of life. And and we might be looking to Psalm 13 and crying out, uh, how long, Lord, will you have me in in this place? Have you forgotten me? How long will you will you hide your face from me? Uh, as David is is calling out, he's crying out to the Lord, how long must I take counsel in my soul? Uh there might be times in your life where you are asking the Lord these very questions, and and I want to draw our attention to uh the conclusion of of Psalm 13 for uh for some encouragement and some um some grounding, uh, verses five and six. Um David responds to himself with an answer. He says, I have trusted in your steadfast love, my heart shall rejoice in your salvation, I will sing to the Lord because he has dealt bountifully with me. He's recognizing what he has, but more importantly, who he has in God, and among the circumstances, among the trials that he's facing, he's he is comforted.
SPEAKER_00:And these are the consistent words and phrases and refrains that we're seeing in the Psalms as we read through them. I mean, the last couple have been David crying out, David surrounded by enemies, David's emotional playlist, if you will. Yeah, David, yeah, David, that got me. David's uh his Spotify playlist of all of the But they're real, yeah, they're real.
SPEAKER_01:These are his real emotions.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, trying to dog David like that. Absolutely. Uh the consistent thing that we see is trust, uh, specifically in the character of God. He says, I've trusted in your steadfast love and just a consistent commitment to continuing to remind himself of what he knows to be true in the midst of sorrow. And so he says, My heart shall rejoice in your salvation. I'm surrounded, I'm I'm longing, I have sorrow in my heart all the day. Um, even think about the the disconnect there that we might feel, where he says in verse two, how long must I take counsel in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all the day? But then he says, in the same breath, my heart shall rejoice in your salvation. So which is it? Do you have sorrow or do you have rejoicing? Well, two things can be true at the same time. You can have deep sorrow while maintaining a sense of rejoicing in who you know your God to be and the salvation that you know that He has provided. So I think there's even a great comfort here. Yeah, oftentimes we think we we can only feel one or the other. We can only feel great sorrow or great joy or rejoicing. And David says, No, I'm I'm in the midst of sorrow. Um I'm he says, How long must I take counsel? How how long shall my enemy be exalted over me? But there's this commitment in the midst of that, this this glimmer of hope that David has that's rooted in the God that he serves and the salvation that he knows he provides. And so he says, I will sing to the Lord because he has dealt bountifully with me. Think about that. I mean, David's in, again, he's he's in this place of anguish and sorrow, but he just continues to say, The Lord has dealt bountifully with me. And so so often, Tyler, I feel like in our lives, bad things happen. And rather than just saying, the Lord's been so gracious, the Lord's dealt bountifully with me, we get upset with the Lord. We blame him, we point fingers, right? And yet what David's doing is saying, You know what I will sing to the Lord in the midst of his sorrow because he has dealt bountifully uh with me.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, we we uh at times uh look to the people around us uh that may that may fail us, uh they're not steadfast, they're not um almighty, but we we uh uh attribute these these thoughts and we we cast them towards God. We we look at the the failures around us, we look at our own failures, and when things don't go the way that we hoped, uh if our strength is fading and and our hope is gone, we we look to God and say, like we can we can be in this heart place where we're we're blaming God for for the circumstances and we're doubting and we're we're buying the lies of the enemy that was see that would say, Hey, look, see he's he's not really for you. He's not really he's not really for your good. Uh and and these are some some things that we really need to be on guard on and uh about I think this these middle verses here, verses three and four, um he's leaning in in the duress, he's leaning in. Um and David says, consider and answer me, O Lord my God, light up my eyes. Um he's looking to God for his hope, he's looking to God for his strength, for courage. Um, and he's depending on God. God, if you uh if you don't if it if it's not you, I have no one else. I have no one else but you.
SPEAKER_00:Where else can I go, Lord? You alone have the words of life.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah. My um this this word repeated less, lest, less, uh, three times in in two verses, um, it can have a a definition of in order to prevent something undesirable, like God, you're the only one that could that could remove this. You're the only one that has the power to change my circumstances. I'm in them, and I recognize that. God, will you choose to keep me here or or deliver me? That's that's your call. That's that's David crying out, and he he wraps it up again. His hope, his trust, um, his salvation is in the Lord, and his heart is full of worship, and he sings aloud to God.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, what a what a great reminder for us, and we're gonna continue to see that in the Psalms. There's there's a consistency in what you're reading. You're gonna feel like David is saying a lot of the same things. Uh, but I even think of in the New Testament as the apostles' right to different churches. Apostle Paul, for example, he talks about it's it's good for you to be encouraged by way of reminder. So be reminded in the steadfast love of the Lord. Be reminded that if you have salvation in Christ, that your heart has much to rejoice over, even in the midst of your sorrow. Well, thanks for joining us today on the Lamp and Light Bible Reading Podcast. For more information about Compass Bible Church South Valley, visit compass bible sb.org. Keep reading, keep growing. God's word is a lamp to your feet and a light to your path.