Monday 16 Apr 2012

Monday Reading: Matthew 5:43-48

Key Verse: Matthew 5:45
45  That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.

Devotion:
whilst we would all like to think that we could become children of God by following His commandments or by obeying Him through doing what we can for Him; that is not going to cut it! Yes we are to obey our Lord and God. Yes we are to keep His commandments. Yes we are to continue doing what is righteous. But no, that is not all we must be doing. Just because we have been able to find out some sort of truth and maybe we even look forward to keeping to that truth and to His Word, does not mean that He has to do likewise. If we are able to forge a bank note such that it looks identical to the original, it is still a forgery and worth absolutely nothing!

God wants us to come to Him in honesty and in purity. He wants us to live our lives for Him and with Him. He wants us to know Him and not just to know all about Him. A person can know a awful lot about God and about Jesus just be reading the bible, but unless that person is going to accept all that they are reading as the truth as told by God, then they are still just another person who is living in this world. God did not say that He would only look after the people that obey Him and stick to His Word and His Commandments. God continues to keep this whole planet full and people going!

God does, however, want us to stop from ‘playing on the merry-go-round of life’ and think about what it all entails. He is our Creator and our God so He wants us to be able to recognise that fact and to recognise Him. We do this by learning about Him and accepting our bibles as the truth. He is the one who is actively doing so much in each one of our lives to bring us to the point where we believe on the truth and accept that He is our Creator God. Once we do that He is willing to change our lives so that we come into a right and everlasting relationship with Him.

Personally I don’t know of any religion that asks its flock to come into a personal relationship with their God. All religions will lift up something or someone as their god but will never require a pure, honest, open and everlasting personal relationship with that god. Jesus came to this world to demonstrate just how we need to have that personal relationship with God our Father. To do that effectively we need to come to Him as children, willing to obey their parent and learn the right ways from the source. God is our Source of all we need to know.

Points to Ponder:
Are you always asking things of God?

Do you actually depend on Him for everything?