Tuesday 26 Jun 2012

Tuesday Reading: Psalm 86:14-17

Key Verse: Psalm 86:15
15  But thou, O Lord, art a God full of compassion, and gracious, longsuffering, and plenteous in mercy and truth.

Devotion:
One of man’s shortcomings is pride; I say one because we do tend to have many vices and not just pride. Those people that we do see succeeding around us lift up themselves in pride as if to say that they have been the ones being able to succeed when we have failed because we stuck to the righteous ways. Let us not lift them up to fuel their pride but rather stick to the righteous ways that our Lord and Christ promotes, or tries to promote for us.

The strong may tend to lift up their strength instead of showing that they are willing to rely fully on Christ instead. The intelligent may well lift up their knowledge and self-acclaimed wisdom instead of saying that it was Christ who gave them that wisdom to start with. But even though man continues to lift himself up in so many ways, Christ is the one who continues to have mercy and compassion on us. Despite all that we do against Him, He continues to show us love, mercy and compassion!

When we look at the promises of God we see that there came a point where He did show His wrath and did cut short the mercy; but it was not because He ran out of love for us but rather so that He could show us that He cares that we should be doing all that is right and not falling off into the ways of the evil one. We can also look back into the Old Testament and see just how long suffering God is with our condition and our selfish ways. It is with mercy and truth that He approaches us with the hope that we will turn toward that mercy and truth and follow His ways.

With all this being shown to us both through real life occurrences as well as with all that is contained within God’s Word we should be strengthened in our belief and faith. Do we not seek our proof for God’s love toward us? And yet we ignore so many things that are right in front of us because we think they may be a bit too easy to believe… That is often when we turn to God and ask Him to show others that we are believing in the right thing – but are we just doing that because we are lacking a bit in our own faith? These are hard questions to ask ourselves and often very hard to admit to the answers as well.

Points to Ponder:
Do you want God to show everyone you are not alone?

Are you actually exercising your faith?