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I put this devotional up on our church website this morning and thought I would share it with you here. For me, many so-called 'Christians' and 'Christian' leaders, have abandoned the character of Christ for the pleasures of worldliness. This is how false teachers have been successful over the years and continue to be so today in the 21st century. As I have had the unfortunate opportunity of having to sit through philosophy of this nature of late, it is again clear that the god (lower-case g) who is acceptable to the culture at large, is the god who exists for our purposes, our pleasure, and in our pursuit of worldliness. The god that these people have created and teach is one that endorses everything we say and do, and tells us not to worry about our sins. For the true follower of God (capital G) , the love of God is truer and harder. Our God paid an excruciating price to deliver us from our sin, and from the Phariseic understanding that others teach, so that our lives could reflect his truth. God loves us beyond our understanding, but that doesn't mean that he will always endorse our agenda and soothe our egos. As Christians, and leaders in churches and denominations, we are called to stand up for the difference, to become teachers of the true Word of God, expressers of God's true love, and exposers of the counterfeits. May we determine to represent God as he really is not some convoluted, distorted, and diluted version of him?
Today's devotion on the church website;
John 5:19; “I tell you the truth, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does.”
It is amazing how the theme of God’s will and his plan for our lives has thread its way through most if not all conversations I have had over the past while. For Jesus, the Father’s will was a river of life, a bloodstream from which Jesus drew life. God’s will for me, means that, as disciples of Christ, we are to put aside all the non-essentials, and come to the essence of things which is the understanding that we “can do nothing by ourselves”. As Christians, we redefine our identity in Jesus and measure ourselves against him, not against church doctrine, or TV evangelists, but the revolutionary lifestyle that was Christ. For this lifestyle to be maintained and sustained it is essential for us to read Scripture, to pray daily, and to lean on true like-minded Christians for support and direction. Likewise we need to be distancing ourselves from the constant distraction of our appetites for curiosity, and philosophies which scratch our itch for possessions and wealth. I was ashamed recently to see people at a meeting on their feet baying for, and praising a philosophy that was being preached, that was nothing short of the quenching of a rather sick appetite. You need to know the true Word of God, not someone's diluted or distorted version of it, in order to be able to discern the 'rot from the real', and man's philosophies from God's truth. So may you, from today, determine to saturate yourself in the Word, and make it your life ambition, as a follower of Christ, to dig deeper into what it means to really be like Jesus, not someone’s philosophy of what that means, not a twisted view of the Bible, and not an agenda that is man’s means to an end? The Word of God is your lifeline to determining and following God's will and plan for your life. |
