Monday 22 Oct 2012

Monday Reading: Matthew 12:22-30

Key Verse: Matthew 12:25
25  And Jesus knew their thoughts, and said unto them, Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand:

Devotion:
This has probably got to be one of the best passages for encouraging someone to do the right thing; doing it right will have positive rewards whereas encouraging bad things into your life will only produce bad things. It sounds so obvious when you say it out loud, but how many people ignore this fantastic truth and go off and test the evil or bad ways to see if they can get something good out of them?

One thing that you have to see quite plainly is that if there is division, things will fall apart. That is the basic premise of so many things in life that we cannot ignore such a simple rule. People will quote utterly barbaric examples like having a tornado sweep through a junk yard to produce a Jumbo Jet, but let us try to keep this real. If you are using a sledge hammer you are not going to be able to tap out some minute engraving on a silver plate; the fact that you have a somewhat uncontrollable weight being used for fine movements just does not marry up.

Our lives are not unlike a silver platter in this instance in that we are special to our Lord and He wants us to have good support so that He can mould us into something even more special. If we then try to use the quick and dirty approach of bad or evil ways in our life then it is going to be just like using a sledge hammer approach. Yes we may well strike it lucky in very few instances, but the majority of time we will end up ruining things instead of fixing things.

God wants us to use His ways and His rules in getting the best out of our lives. He does know what is best for us and He is trying to encourage us to use His ways in order to promote His will in our lives. Trying to take the short cut by blundering on is just not going to work. God is all powerful and He is not going to sit back and ignore things as they collapse around us. When we lift our prayers up to Him to ask for help, He does not ignore those requests – so if we then go ahead and try to short-cut things, we should not expect them to work! God is good and His ways are perfect; don’t try and spoil those ways because it will not work!

Points to Ponder:
Do you want to hurry God up?

Do you really think you have a chance?