Author: Lisa Groen
Category: Prayer and devotional blend
Lord, by your good grace, may I and others lose our appetites for anything that is not like you Lord Jesus. As we fast, I pray you would help us deal with our sin habits, so that we can nip our sin habits in the bud. You have given us the directive in the word to leave our lives of sin, and to come follow you, but have not left us like helpless orphans! Help us to lose the enjoyment of indulging in excess because all sin is a snare! Help us to not justify our sins, or excuse them because of the “pluses” we think they add to our lives, or to love the things that snare us! May we hate the things in our lives Oh God that you hate Oh Lord! May we look squarely at the word Oh Lord, and pluck out of our lives the things that we are discerning that offend you Jesus! Dear Jesus, your word tells us that people can become sick with pockets of sin in their lives if that sin is not dealt with! Isaiah 1:5-7 reads, “Why should ye be stricken any more? ye will revolt more and more: the whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint. 6 From the sole of the foot even unto the head there is no soundness in it; but wounds, and bruises, and putrefying sores: they have not been closed, neither bound up, neither mollified with ointment. 7 Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire: your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate, as overthrown by strangers.” This sounds so much like our lives in America!
May we not be like the people of Isaiah 5:18 who drag sin along as with cart ropes! We notice they were deceived in that verse, and notice that sin is heavy—like the weight of a cart that horses or multiple people would pull around! Or at least that would take the strength of two hands to drag along! May we count the cost of what sin habits rob us from and count the cost of what we might be losing by keeping sin habits in our lives! Even our complacency is a sin Oh God before you! And if we are not the deceived ones, is it not right and fitting for us to help others to become UNDECEIVED who are yet in the muddy swamp of deception?
Lord we are given evidence to believe in the scripture which tells us that you grant your people an inner holiness and to approach you in the same attitude of holiness poured into us from you, and this speaks of your Spirit alive in us having made us born again. Yet simultaneously you call us to chasten our souls with fasting! And we know this is not a work of asceticism! Asceticism is powerless in itself to do the work only grace can do in us as we see we are enabled by another (by God) to live out Philippians 2:13 –to desire and to act according to your good purposes! You call us to walk in the Spirit and be led by the Spirit, and to live in the grace of the Spirit, and yet it is a chastening lifestyle led by your Word for the holy crucifying of the flesh! We tell ourselves that grace should make it “easy and comfortable” and “easy to agree with!” But sometimes it seems I am far from the pure work of agreeing with your will for a flawless and undisturbed crucifying of the flesh, and how far I feel at times from boldly shouting “YES LORD! Your will and NOT MINE!” But I want to GO there! I want to be more willing and ready to run unhindered with you in the pathway of your commands Oh God! (Psalm 119:32)
Sometimes when spending a long time in one place, the scenery all begins to look the same, and we can lose track of the lessons God is giving us in life and the things we are positioned by God to remember. The scripture is the gift that is available 24 hours a day to remind us of what God has done throughout his plan of redemption. To know we have the benefit of God working in our hearts is a tremendous strength when battling the flesh. What God does in our hearts once we have been born again is to flood them with his Spirit and light. Thankfully this positions us for God to win the war in our hearts when we begin to separate from our idols. Looking at Galatians 4:6, and 2 Corinthians 4:6, we read, “Because you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” and, “ For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ.”
When struggling with the tool of fasting to crucify our flesh we are never expected by God to put confidence in the flesh, but we can put our trust in the Lord, so that through His Spirit we can crucify the flesh! Oh God, you put your light in our hearts for so many reasons but clearly to show us what we are, and who we are, to give us strength to live for you, to motivate us to strive to be like you and to leave our old lives of sin behind!
Even given our Biblical model, we are shown we cannot do the crucifying in our own strength! Jesus clearly carried his own heavy cross, but he did not nail his hands or feet to the cross! This tells me that some other factors Our God might allow in our lives to indeed help us “crucify” our flesh. That reality is both scary and relieving at the same time. Notice the purpose of suffering in 2 Corinthians 4 (beginning in v 7)But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, so that the surpassing greatness of the power will be of God and not from ourselves; 8 we are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not despairing; 9 persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; 10 always carrying about in the body the dying of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body. The purpose of enduring these painful motions and means of crucifixion is SO THAT THE LIFE OF JESUS ALSO MAY be manifested in our body!
Oh Lord, how encouraging it is for us to read the scriptures declaring the provision you have given for putting off the flesh and crucifying it and for seeing the reality of Jesus at work in our personalities! And we so much want to keep away from religiosity, legalism, and asceticism and the motions of works-righteousness, enduring a cold heart! On the other hand, we also want to stay away from laziness, slothfulness, gluttony, impulsivity, and a lack of self-control which springs from us doing our own things and keeping our own will in the center of our mind as if we were our own God or as a people who serve mainly themselves. Please may we take the next step in the journey you are taking us on, for sanctification, living in the spirit, pursuing holiness, pushing away from sin, in going the other way and in crucifying sin. We can do this successfully only by your Spirit at work in our hearts, and are empowered and led forth to obey you oh God, and this is a great and beautiful mystery! Praise to you Lord, for truly setting us up for victory in Jesus, gracious Lord! Amen!
Keep growing in the Word! LG
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