Tag: Holy living in an unholy world

Repentance From Sin, Unto Eternal Life in Christ

Author: Lisa Groen

There must come a time where we make a conscious choice to turn away from our lifestyle of sin, to live for God who has always been perfectly and completely free from sin. God has never done anything dishonest, immoral, or unrighteous, or any other thing sinful, and we can only enjoy being free from sin if we consciously make a choice to turn from our life of sin and serve God with our heart and life.

The Bible talks about people being a slave to sin.

There is only one way to break our slavery to sin and that is to believe Jesus deserves that you turn from a lifestyle of sin to follow Him. Jesus (and both of the 2 other members of the Godhead, The Father, and the Holy Spirit) have the authority to break up our relationship with sin, because each of them have more power and authority than sin does and then Jesus becomes our Lord. (Lord means Master). We then are enabled to serve God and live a life pleasing to God.

The Bible talks of God purchasing us back from our slavery to sin to belong to Him. This means he “redeems us”. The redemption transaction Jesus went through happened when he gave his blood on the cross to buy us wholly from the slavery of sin to belong to Him and he made it possible to buy us out of the kingdom of darkness. He paid the price with his blood and his own physical death. If Jesus is not your Lord you are in the kingdom of darkness. You need to come to Christ the King in the kingdom of light. He died on the cross to translate us out of the kingdom of darkness and translate us into the kingdom of light. If God is drawing you to follow and serve him in righteousness, you need to believe Jesus as you’d believe someone who holds your life in his hands. He has authority over death. He has more power than sin does to break up your relationship with sin. He has authority over everything that happens to you.

I googled the phrase “what does the Bible mean by the word “redeem””? and this was the first quote that came up from the address https://www.bing.com/search?q=what%20does%20the%20bible%20mean%20by%20the%20word%20redeem%3F&pc=0CAE&ptag=C999N4AE93C7C9D5F&form=0A0505&conlogo=CT3210127 (I removed the hyperlink numbers in the quote): “In the Bible, redemption refers to God’s merciful and costly action on behalf of his people. The term “redeem” means “to buy out” and was used specifically in reference to the purchase of a slave’s freedom. In the New Testament, redemption means that Christ’s life or blood was the ransom price so that anyone who believes in Christ will be freed from sin and the bondage to death. Redemption is liberation from the slavery of sin and is given to us by the perfect sacrifice that Jesus made on the cross of Calvary”. Part of that redemption is that Christ takes death and changes it so that it is not a dead end, but that Jesus takes our death and He through His resurrection and eternal life becomes our open door for us to be with God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit forever and ever in all eternity with all the other Christ followers who have believed in and followed Jesus as Master and Lord.

The following is a promise Jesus makes to those who follow Him that takes place on earth, and continues for Christ followers through eternity in Heaven: John 8:12 reads: “Then Jesus again spoke to them, saying, “I am the Light of the world; the one who follows Me will not walk in the darkness, but will have the Light of life.” LG

Prayer of Dependence on God-5

Author: Lisa Groen

Category: Christian prayer aiming for true Christian growth

Lord, we come to you to seek nearness to you. We seek your presence in a deep and profound way. We pray for a visitation from you Lord.  (Psalms 80:14 Return, we beseech thee, O God of hosts: look down from heaven, and behold, and visit this vine;) We want to leave behind our fleshly tendencies and actually draw closer to you. (James 4:8 Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded) We are tired of a powerless existence in which there seem to be just a few we are ministering to, and some people seem uninterested. (I Cor 4:20 For the kingdom of God is not in word, but in power.) It is not that it’s about us, and it’s not that we are ungrateful, but we seek you because we believe that you really can move among us through your word, through our seeking you, through our worship, and other ways and we believe that your ministry among us can be greater and more noticeable and we would like to see that shown in fruitfulness in more lasting, deeper and life impacting ways on a broader scale. (Acts 4:13 Now as they observed the confidence of Peter and John and understood that they were uneducated and untrained men, they were amazed, and began to recognize them as having been with Jesus.) My prayer for us is that when people see us they would not see just us,— but you Lord– looming bigger than we ourselves in the light of all that’s happening. I am impressed with the reality of the scripture “He must increase, and I must decrease”. (John 3:30) I pray you would lead us all in seeking that. I ask for you to be magnified, and for us to step back out of the way to get a better glimpse of you. (Luke 19:1-10) We devote our hearts and minds to you Lord afresh today. We devote our attention and thinking processes to you Lord. (Provers 4:20 My son, pay attention to what I say; turn your ear to my words.) I repent on behalf of myself and others for how the daily responsibilities press on us and we are in a battle with both the enemy and with you and the battle is the pull on our attention. Oh Lord, it is right to place our eyes and attention on you when we have things happening that are little things in comparison to who you are, pressing on us. (Hebrews 12:2-3 fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. 3 Consider him who endured such opposition from sinners, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.) I want to lead us all in a surrender of our daily pressures. Lord, we believe you care —the Bible tells us to not worry and to be of good cheer—you care about the whereabouts of our phones, you care about if something was stolen from us today—you care about how much money we will need to cover our next 6 months of bills, you even care about every need for the rest of our lives. You care about our protection—whether we are remembering to put on our armor, or not. (1 Peter 5:7  casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you.”) Lord you remind us to put on our armor so we can stand in the evil day and to continue to stand. You care about our transportation, our homes, and everything around us. You care about the people in our lives, you care about what is going through their minds and you care about us and what is going through our minds. You desire truth in the inner man, what a man desires is kindness, (Proverbs 19:22) you care about that we are walking in your Spirit, and you care that we are able and willing to lean upon you Oh Lord! You would have us to recognize that you are fit to run every section of our lives, the parts that we do understand, as well as the parts we don’t understand. (Genesis 1:1, Psalm 146:6) You would have us to grow in our understanding, and grow in our awareness of what you do and who you are. You would have us to be teachable, to receive the impressions of your word being written upon our hearts. (Proverbs 8:32 “Now then, my children, listen to me; blessed are those who keep my ways.) You would have us to ask you: “What is it you want to do with me and in me? With as many weaknesses as I have, and as many insufficiencies as I have—am I seeing it right –what you want to do with me, Lord?”—yes the Lord looks at us differently than we look at ourselves. Can we still depend on God in the same way after we receive a gift as we did before we receive the gifts he will give us? We can pray a very strategic prayer—“Lord how would you have me to minister to you and to other people right now?” and “what would you have me to learn or practice?”. Lord help us to not be so taken with your Sovereignty that we adopt a “whatever will be will be attitude” and not be against your sovereignty that we forget that you fully know everything that we are going through and forget your interest in our lives. May we also not forget the war we are in and the draw from You Lord to fight the good fight of faith in every area. Help us to be pliable clay in your hands, (Jeremiah 18) that we would think on how to please you, but surrender our questions. Help us to not come out of our Christian personality in the midst of the challenges we face. We ask for your nearness and fully bring ourselves to you, our weaknesses, our ugly parts, and our clean and tidy parts. Lord, blow upon us, wash and cleanse us, send your river of life through us and fill us with yourself afresh. May your virtue and strength be infused within us and turn us back to you! May our hearts not waver in our pursuit of you and if it does, strengthen us again until we are more molded into your image. Lord, we lay aside impatience, bitterness, jealousy, exhaustion, and exasperation, and greed, selfishness, overeating, pride, doing things our own way, and looking down on those that we think are not as spiritual as we are. We repent of any of these things that may have jumped off the page and waved hello at us. Please forgive us, wash us, cleanse us, as we lay our filthy rags at the foot of the cross. (Isaiah 64:6) We ask you for the white linens of your righteousness that Jesus paid for with his blood for us to put on and keep upon us day and night, and every day of the week! Please renew us Oh God! Please grant us to draw near to you today and may we really start going deeper into partaking of your spiritual victories, and letting the victory you won Lord on our behalf to change us from the inside out! Amen!

Keep growing in the Word! LG

Fasting To Grieve Before The Lord

Author: Lisa Groen

Category: Devotional and prayer

May we be careful of not trying to add fasting to times of the motions of drama where we might be prone to exaggerate our cries to God. I have been prompted to sort out my own emotions looking for signs of drama in my requests to God as I have taken on a long-term substitute teaching assignment in my community and I daily encounter the occurrence of drama and of over-realized “sensitive-trigger buttons which the students become overly vocalized about”. And I know at once it should not be something I let sway me as I realize that there can be floods of “whims” of students that may be unaware of the temptations pushing them to leverage control over the direction of the class. OOOh, how this renews my perspective of the carefulness of Our Loving Heavenly Father who must daily weigh what is best for us when it might or might not be a “virtue producing thing” for Him to answer our many rivers of egocentric prayers, and discern the best times for an optimum approach of His to produce more fruit in us even when He says “No!” Even in his “Nos” when he chooses them he is building in us a confidence that we can know he has our best interest in His mind. As I am in position to promote my hopefully healthy response to the flood of requests in my class, I need to use discernment and guard against forces who may try to veer my tasks off course in my teaching and building the classroom into a healthy environment.

God is in the salvation business so to speak, and God saves us by grace through faith—but not by our prayers exactly. God can clearly save people who can’t talk—so the verbal measure of prayer is not as important as the faith measure of a prayer because prayer can be done in the heart. Mourning over sin can be done in the heart as well, and yet in our running to God, let us remember that we need not to have every request heard by those around us nor every motion of fasting noticed by others! Public fasting and prayer is definitely not a bad thing, because we can see it OFTEN presented corporately in the scripture, so we know corporate fasts are something God uses in the Old and New Testaments, but let us also remember it can be done as a show, and people of faith should avoid that. But on the days we might slip in our footing and go sideways into “having too much of our prayer and fasting noticed by mere flesh and blood”– we may realize then that the power is not solely in the corporate fasting and praying we do with others or even with spouses, but truly having to do with the measure of our faith in God.

Isn’t this folly also in us at times? Is it not also a natural temptation for Christians to get tempted toward narcissism when offered free “asking privileges”, and shouldn’t the awareness of this really cause us to seek to make our requests do the opposite of narcissistic motions? May we seek to discern more greatly about “any drama or narcissistic tendencies” in us, and may we push vigorously away from them, and discern more greatly our true needs for real and fitting motions of mourning, grieving, and fasting, and seek to sorrowing over different categories of things in our lives worthy of our mourning, grieving and fasting…Have we freely found the right temper and persistence for….

Grieving over our sins, our lost ground, our missed chances for carrying out a prompting of God?

Grieving over our loved ones’ losses, or grieving about how distant we or they are from God?

Grieving over the lost on a larger scale, in our communities, in our nation, grieving over our lack of having a voice in our school board meetings, or over the missing power in our voice to prompt the legal system in our governments towards more righteous law making?

Grieving over the broken state of our churches, our missing times of “repairing the broken walls (as Nehemiah did)” or that we are missing the very “Nehemiah—like Leaders” who will bring a cry to the nation for our participation in the corporate need for spiritual building, fortifying, and healing?

Grieving over our callousness, blindness, coldness, too thick-skinned-ness, our roughness, sharpness, failures to say the right thing at the right time, our failures to aim to “seek and save the lost”, for the feeling others may have had about us as in perceiving some “seeming deadness or insensitivity”, or in having an unawareness to the true needs out there, our denial, minimizing, living as if nothing is wrong, our justifying sin, our rationalizing, our spiritualizing, failure to grieve over holes and cracks in the broken walls, our failure to grieve thoroughly over the harvest that we are not just sure we may have seen falling to the ground, grieving over not crying out for needing more workers in the harvest fields, grieving over our failure to pursue a steady flow of steady spiritual growth if called to a long term many years of this and we have gotten tired—-and drifted from our calls, or to grieve because of the presence of more of these kinds of failures we tell ourselves aren’t happening—because no one ELSE is grieving about these things, that come to mind except maybe a few…

Is it that we believe too heavily in the Sovereignty of God that we convince ourselves our “fasting can’t add another person to the kingdom that God has not already predestined to come to Him?” If people believe this last statement, then I would say, “it must be you shouldn’t pray either then because if God uses NOTHING of the faith of people to get his will done, then, you must be saying our prayers to Him are meaningless!!” Didn’t Jesus demonstrate the very OPPOSITE belief and works of power throughout his ministry? We should never MINIMIZE our role in fasting and prayer or the use God may choose to put our fasting and prayer to.

It is a strange kind of thing that God does in his validating the faith of Ahab, in 1 Kings 21:25-29 in his remorse, prayer, fasting, and humility after saying he previously “SOLD HIMSELF TO DO EVIL”. Could it be that by the mourning, grieving, fasting, and sorrow of one of the most broken sinners, who was so unique in all of history that GOD Himself first says in 1 Kings 21:25-26 “Surely there was no one like Ahab who sold himself to do evil in the sight of the Lord, because Jezebel his wife incited him. 26 He acted very abominably in following idols, according to all that the Amorites had done, whom the Lord cast out before the sons of Israel.” —then later, how did this Ahab discover through fasting, mourning, grieving, and humbling himself, that he could receive some amount of God’s mercy, enough to save his life after God said he should die, even after being called so evil and “abominable” by God, that God made mention of him to the prophet Elijah after his repentance that his going about meekly, and remorsefully caught His attention so that He even spared his life? It is worth repeating even if to ourselves alone that God makes mention of the formerly evil person’s humbling himself with prayers and fasting even to the prophet, that God changes his plans for Ahab!  It says in 1Kings 21:27-29 “It came about when Ahab heard these words, that he tore his clothes and put on sackcloth and fasted, and he lay in sackcloth and went about despondently. 28 Then the word of the Lord came to Elijah the Tishbite, saying 29 “Do you see how Ahab has humbled himself before Me? Because he has humbled himself before Me, I will not bring the evil in his days, but I will bring the evil upon his house in his son’s days.” That is a good place to pause and meditate!

Prayer: Oh God our Gracious Heavenly Father! How deep is our need for you! How slow is our believing! How broken our lives and cities, and of the nations of the world! How dull we have been to hearing you! How slow we have been to keep in step with You! How many are Your mercies! How real is the hope that lies before us to grieve for the lost for their salvation! How entreatable You ARE! How quickly we forget we are in a war over our hearts! How much we need to do regular re-adjusting of our spiritual trajectory to fulfill all Your good will for our lives and to be fully shaped by You to bear the fruits of our ministries! Oh God! Please forgive us, renew us, grant repentance, faith, hope, grace, perseverance, pure motives and help us with walking daily as we should to reflect in our actions what we believe about you in our hearts! I pray Oh Lord, may Your mercy prevail! And please grant good fruit through this time of seeking You with prayer and fasting Oh Lord! May we truly be able to stretch forth our tent straps and may You fill our tents with more brothers and sisters in the Kingdom and may the fruit be to the praise of Your glory Oh Lord! I ask dear Lord in Your Name Oh God! Amen!

Keep growing in the Word! LG

In Our Fight Against Our Sin, We Do Not War With Carnal Weapons

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

Fasting as a Way to Improve Spiritual Eyesight and Turn Away From Carnal Indulgence

Author: Lisa Groen

Category: Devotional and prayer

If any of us happen to consider fasting today, we can be sure that The Lord will use it in some way for His Kingdom if He leads us to do so.

As young or as old as I am I have gotten to the point of having this pervading thought–When you get older you generally get less excited about things. You also get excited less often about things. This may be because we feel like we have seen it all, or we tell ourselves it will take too much energy to get excited or passionate, or we convince ourselves that if you’re smart you can just end up getting the best things in life coming to your door through Amazon without needing to get very excited. We might tell ourselves that getting pumped up or zealous about something is for the young and naïve and foolish. Everything we do as we get older is about saving our energy, or saving ourselves some trouble or making our schedules run as smoothly and conveniently as possible. Life becomes a lot about what we like and what we have a taste for and what we think will make us comfortable. We need our favorite drinks or teas, our favorite foods when we go shopping, our favorite kinds of books or bicycles, our favorite cookware, clothing, soaps and toothpaste and our favorite pastimes. (Notice I didn’t even get to the topic of electronics—I made this list true even if one doesn’t have a plethora of money, even true for people living in third world countries) Our lives smell heavily of the smell of “ME, MINE and MY, what I like, what I want, what feels good to me, smells good to me,, tastes good to me, relaxes me, what makes me look good, what keeps people liking me, and what KEEPS ME HAPPY!

And although all that is unfortunately true we can all say that if we were honest, I’ll bet each of us could easily think of 3 or 4 big areas in our lives that if God had absolute control of, or to put it in a theologically more correct way—if we absolutely and completely surrendered those areas to the absolute control of our Sovereign and deeply good Father of pure love and lights, then, our lives and potentially the lives of all of those around us would be radically different from an eternal rewards perspective or at least would be taken up several notches spiritually speaking! But, we think what we have is good enough!—“What more do I need!?”, we tell ourselves! I am comfortable, I am warm, I have nice cologne, I look good in my clothes, my car doesn’t need any repairs, my shrubs are well manicured, my home is well furnished, my vacation is planned, and my hotel booking is paid in advance for the holiday coming up, that we forget what it’s like to be cold, to be poorly dressed, have leaky roofs, and holes in our shoes, to have an infestation of insects eating our garden but our garden was all we had to eat from, to have to walk 5 miles for some medicine that our relative really needs or they will die, to be inconvenienced for one entire day to take someone to the doctor, but not too many days out of the year, because we have to get back as quickly as possible to our wonderful lives, and because we can’t afford to take a day off work without pay too often regardless because we have no PTO and no sick pay on this job!!

Now, to use your imagination, if every physical comfort I just mentioned in the comfortable scenario was a metaphor for a spiritual comfort and spiritual health provision, does that mean that if you have all your physical comforts in place we’d automatically be supplied with just as many spiritual provisions and spiritual comforts from God to match all of our material comforts? The answer is an obvious NO! But, I dare say it is soo easy to respond to a spiritual emergency in a “comfortable way” when we have physical comforts. Would you RATHER do the spiritual work with spiritual zeal and spiritual persistence to get rid of the spiritual poverty and spiritual holes in your shoes, or to obtain by spiritual efforts the rare and distant spiritual medicine that you or a family member needs even if you might be saddled with physical poverty, or would you do the spiritual hard labor so to speak that it would take with passion for a whole day if needed to get an enduring spiritual roof with as much zeal and gusto and passion as you would the physical roof in the rainy season of Africa?

Part of the issue I dare say is that when we get comfortable and lose our zeal a lot of times we lose our desperation for change. Nothing is “REALLY THAT BAD!! I LIVE IN THE NICEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD AND I DON’T HAVE TO BE DESPERATE ABOUT ANYTHING!!” we tell ourselves. But can you see properly whether your spiritual roof IS leaking? Can you see properly if you have spiritual holes in your shoes? Can you see properly if you have spiritual insects raiding your spiritual garden on a continual basis? Can you see properly if you have a desperate need for spiritual medicine that is so deep of a need that you might die if you don’t obtain it and that you must compel yourself to go track down that distant rare medicine by walking five spiritual miles because no one else will walk it for you? This physical world BLINDS us with physical comforts and we don’t even perceive WHAT OUR SPIRITUAL NEEDS ARE much of the time even when our spiritual needs are desperate. But we have been called to walk by faith and not by sight!!

Rev 3:14-22 “To the angel of the church in Laodicea write: The Amen, the faithful and true Witness, the Origin of the creation of God, says this: 15 ‘I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot; I wish that you were cold or hot. 16 So because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will vomit you out of My mouth. 17 Because you say, “I am rich, and have become wealthy, and have no need of anything,” and you do not know that you are wretched, miserable, poor, blind, and naked, 18 I advise you to buy from Me gold refined by fire so that you may become rich, and white garments so that you may clothe yourself and the shame of your nakedness will not be revealed; and eye salve to apply to your eyes so that you may see. 19 Those whom I love, I rebuke and discipline; therefore, be zealous and repent. 20 Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and will dine with him, and he with Me. 21 The one who overcomes, I will grant to him to sit with Me on My throne, as I also overcame and sat with My Father on His throne. 22 The one who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.’”

In the passage above the elements are in verse 17 that they first said they had become rich and wealthy, then the people grew comfortable and had become lukewarm, then they also said they had no need of anything. Now it is true that not everyone who is rich, wealthy, or comfortable is lukewarm and in danger of being spewed out of the mouth of God. But we must ask ourselves why Jesus warns us that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven, (Math 19:24) but no evidence of Jesus saying, “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a poor man to enter the kingdom of heaven.” Don’t think that I am necessarily against money; I, just like any number of persons (and it should be no surprise) have no doubt found numerous benefits can be had when money is had. But all Christ followers and even the unsaved should be aware of and alarmed about the blindness that wealth can bring when the wealth is gazed at too long. Could it be part of the cost Jesus speaks of in v. 18 “…to buy from Me gold refined by fire so that you may become rich…white garments..and eye salve…” might be accessed as we draw near to Jesus more fervently, or to draw more closely to Him? Isn’t prayer along with fasting a proven and effective way to draw near to God and to pursue the Lord? Isn’t fasting a discipline we can apply to become spiritually sensitive? We need to be able to see our condition before God in order to “wash and make ourselves clean” (2 Cor 7:1), to cleanse our hands when we are double minded, (Jam 4:8) to cleanse ourselves from common purposes to be a vessel fit for a noble use (2 Tim 2:21). And it’s plainly true, what we gaze at we become like. (Gen 30:38-39, Heb 12:2) When gazing at the natural world, we lose our spiritual awareness, and lose sight of our spiritual optimum and what we should aim for in our spiritual shape, sensitivity, spiritual liveliness, and spiritual virtues. I Samuel 16:7 But the Lord said to Samuel, “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him. For the Lord sees not as man sees. For man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” May we seek you for the spiritual vision we need for walking closely with you Oh Lord. Amen.

Prayer: Lord I pray for five simple things today—I pray for the spiritual vision so we can see our spiritual health for what it really is, I pray for the spiritual vision to see what spiritual shape we should take as well, and I pray for the spiritual zeal and fervency to respond to the truth whether it is, either mild or needing our passion that we may respond rightly regarding it. I pray that the kind of change spoken of in 2 Corinthians 7:11 would unfold in whatever way may be necessary in our lives—that we would embody earnestness, godly sorrow, vindication of ourselves, indignation at our own wrongs, fear of doing anything unholy, longing for change and righteousness in our hearts and deeds, zeal and energy and all the sister adjectives that go along with those for the purpose of our needed changes, and avenging of the wrongs we have done! In everything may we demonstrate ourselves to be innocent in these matters, Oh God!

Amen and Amen!

Keep growing in the Word! LG