Read the Bible in a Year (30JUN19)

PSALMS MOMENT – (30JUN19) “…give me an undivided heart, that I may fear your Name” (Psalm 86:11b). Many Christians are walking around with split hearts. Half of their heart is for God, and the other half is hanging on to the things of the world. They know what the Lord’s decrees are and how He wants them to be separate and set apart for Him, but many have a hard time letting go of the world and its ungodly pleasures. They feel that they can have their place reserved in Heaven, while they dance with the devil – unknowingly, having both feet in hell. The Bible says, “But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light” (1 Peter 2:9).  As Christians, we are as Israel were – a chosen people. 

We cannot live, talk, act, and think like the world if we truly desire to live for Christ. If we are indeed a royal priesthood, that means that we must behave as the priest did in consecrating ourselves to the Lord and living opposite of our secular counterparts. We are to be a holy people and the unsaved should be able to look at us and say that we live what we preach. Unfortunately, we say that we believe in God and His word, but do we really? The Bible lets us know that God is a jealous God who does not want us to have any idols before Him; yet, so many Christians think that giving God only half of their heart is enough to satisfy Him. Well, it isn’t!

God is not jealous “of” His children, but He is jealous “for” His children. He wants us to stay on the side of safety under His wings, so that He can provide protection against the enemy. The Apostle James wrote, “A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways” (James 1:8). When we only give God half of our hearts, we are like double-minded individuals; whereas, on one day we are Christians, and the next day, we are living for the world. This is a form of idolatry. When we refuse to be obedient and fully submit ourselves to God, undivided, we are giving the devil access to our lives where we then become compromised. God loves us so much that He gave all of Himself by sending His son to earth to fully die upon the cross and carry the sins of the world upon His shoulders. He did not carry half the sins, ¾ of the sins, He carried ALL the sins of the world on Him. Therefore, because God gave His all for us, we should be willing to sacrifice our all for Him wholeheartedly. Something to ponder….

QUESTION OF THE DAY – (30JUN19) Do you sometimes allow the enemy to get the best of you? Do you allow him to frustrate you, cause stress, anger, fear, anxiety, and doubt in your life? The psalmist wrote, “The enemy will not get the better of him; the wicked will not oppress him” (Psalm 89:22). We can sometimes give the enemy keys to our temples by what we allow him to place in our minds. We do this whenever we do not make prayer a priority during times of great testing. Therefore, the devil doesn’t ring the doorbell of our minds, he just opens the door with the keys we have given him because we failed to have prayer as our security system. Yet, when we go to the Lord in prayer, we enable the Lord to act on our behalf where the enemy cannot get the best of us. He seeks to destroy us on every front, but prayer is the security that we have in Christ where he will not be able to overtake us in the end. Something to ponder….