Friday 19 Apr 2013

Friday Reading: 1 Corinthians 8:1-6

Key Verse: 1 Corinthians 8:2
2  And if any man think that he knoweth any thing, he knoweth nothing yet as he ought to know.

Devotion:
What do you see when you look into God’s Word? Do you see the titles and then read the words to fit into the titles or do you read the words and then see if the publisher agrees with what you see in it? If you are someone what studies the bible and reads it according to what others have said about it then you are a good scholar; but what are you actually getting out of your new found knowledge? We can learn all we need to know about the laws that God has given us but until we apply them into our lives we do not get the fullest from those laws.

This passage starts off by going one stage further before applying this idea back to the ignorance of the people toward things offered to idols. It starts off by saying that knowledge puffs you up but love is what will build you up more than the knowledge. Another way of looking at it is that you can learn all you like about a subject, but until you apply that knowledge into your life as a way of living rather than applying it because of knowledge’s sake, you will not get to know what that knowledge can mean in your life.

Satan does not want us to learn how to apply God’s Word into our lives so he will be throwing misfortunes and doubt into our minds so that we struggle with the learning. As we struggle we start to doubt more until we give up and try something different, exactly what he has tried to do – get us away from God’s Word! When we get away from God’s Word we lose understanding and we then stop studying which causes us to stop dead in our quest for knowledge about God.

It’s not always about the big subjects in God’s Word but also these little snippets that we often read straight over because we are in a rush to find out the big news. Don’t ignore part of the sentence just to be able to read it quickly through within your allotted time span. God’s Word took many thousands of years to be completed and it deserves all the time we can to study it by applying it directly into our lives.

Points to Ponder:
What is your IQ?

How big is God’s heart?