Monday 6 Mar 2017

March 6: Proverbs 19:19-21

Key Verse: Proverbs 19:21
There are many plans in a man’s heart, Nevertheless the Lord’s counsel—that will stand.

Devotion:
There are many people you will meet in life who seem “hell-bent” on getting into trouble or just causing trouble wherever they go. If you try to get them to be aware of their troubles, they ignore you. If you try to change their ways, they ignore you. If you are lucky, they will listen to you for a short while, but they will carry on doing their own thing again. Does this sound like someone in your family or a friend? As with the reading yesterday, unless these issues are caught at an early stage, they become more and more ingrained into that person and harder and harder to combat each time – until finally they turn into the person we describe above.

If we want to avoid being described in such a manner as above ourselves, then we have to listen to counselling. I'm not saying we should all go and visit a counsellor every day, but rather be willing to listen to advice from others who know things and to act on those instructions – not just sit and listen and then go off and do your own thing again next week! The more we are willing to listen and learn, the more we are going to get to learn about what is right and wrong. For as long as we continue to ignore instruction, we end up falling by the wayside.

You may turn around at this stage and say you are good and you continue to obey people or that you are even a pillar of society! Well nobody else can argue with you because you may well be that. You may well be doing all the right things and saying all the right things, but unless your spirit is clean as well, it is all to no avail! Unless you can say within your heart you have no guile at all then you have still got issues; no matter how small those issues are, they are still issues. God is there, watching, waiting, listening to everything which goes on in your heart. His advice continues to stand... but are we listening and learning from it?

Points to Ponder:
How well do you act in front of others?

How good is your heart in front of God?