Thursday 15 Nov 2012

Thursday Reading: Proverbs 23:4-5

Key Verse: Proverbs 23:4
4  Labour not to be rich: cease from thine own wisdom.

Devotion:
It is amazing how many people will use this verse to try and tell you how God has said that we should not be rich or that we should not own many things. Well that is simply not what God is saying to us; rather He is trying to show us that what comes with riches and wealth is not always in line with Christians’ ways and God’s plan. It is not that He wants us to be poor and totally dependent on Him because of the state we are in but rather that he wants us to choose to be dependent upon Him for everything in our lives.

If we are going to place out trust in the money and the riches, then we are going to follow the rules and the ways of that money and that wealth; and that is where we suddenly see that God’s ways and man’s way are very different! We like to think that our understanding of money and wealth is growing all the time and that we can control the economy of the country or even the world by doing things our own way… but as we see from the state of the world at the moment, the more that we try to get things going our own way, the more we find out that man’s ways are inherently evil.

It is not so much the fact that we don’t know what is going on or that we don’t understand the rules of global economy but more the fact that men are not always honest and they break the rules; in breaking the rules they destroy the fragile balance that the rest of us are trying to keep up. It all comes down to someone thinking that they know best or trying to pull the wool over other people’s eyes!

God does not work like that at all because He has given us the truth up front so that we can know what is true and what is not. He then continues to warn us of the traps and pitfalls that are ahead of us so that we will be able to keep on the straight and narrow. God is giving us all that we need to make sure that we can do things right, but as soon as we figure that we can go and do it alone we are going to find out the hard way that we face other forces far beyond what we realise. God wants us to know this ahead of time so that we are confident it placing our faith and trust wholly in His arms!

Points to Ponder:
Do you look for riches?

Or do you look for God’s ways?