May 3: 1 John 4 7-12

Key Verse: 1 John 4 11
Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.

Devotion:
The apostle writes about full and fervent Christian love here describing it as coming from God because He is the foundation and author of love. When Christ described the most important law, He said it was love because all of the other laws hinge on love as being at the core of everything. Each one of us who get to know God get to know part of this love and, hopefully, exercise this love in everyday living. It is this love which allows us to have a better understanding of our relationship with God and with others.

If we do not know love then how can we get to understand God and His ways? If we do not know love then how can we go out and love others showing them what Christ came to do for us? It is Christ who came to earth as a man and showed us the ultimate sacrifice sharing His love for us in a way many could not understand. But as we get to know the scriptures and understand how much Christ has done for us, we get to know the love He showed us and step forward into this love.

I do like the way that one of the commentators describes us as ungrateful rebels until we get to know Him and His love for us. When we are able to accept His love we put away the ungrateful side and live in love with God. Jesus did not wait until we stopped being ungrateful. He did not wait until we stopped doing things wrong. He did not wait until we had fixed our lives. He laid His life down in the beginning so He could show us the love and direct us toward a proper relationship with Him.

He first loved us when we had no love for Him and when we lay down our sins before Him, His love extends over us and cleanses us from all unrighteousness. What does that mean to the normal person in the street? It means God is willing to forgive us for all the bad stuff we do in our lives. He does not put a price on it. He does not put any requirements on it. Instead He waits patiently for us to come to Him and ask forgiveness.

Points to Ponder:
What price would you put on heaven?

What cost has Christ asked from you?

May 2: Romans 13 8-10

Key Verse: Romans 13 10
Love does no harm to a neighbour; therefore love is the fulfilment of the law.

Devotion:
The more we dig into history and archaeology the more we find out about the past lives of so many people and the more we begin to understand mankind. If we live in the now only we see the world for what it is with all the corruption and chaos which goes with it. There is no denying we live in a very corrupt world but we also live in a world where many people are pushing us down a road of self-sufficiency or independence.

As far as I can see this is not what God is showing us. Yes He wants us to be able to cope with life and hence we need to be able to do things by ourselves and be able to handle what comes our way, so to some extent we do have to be self-sufficient. But not to the extent where we close off the people around us!

Opening up your life to the truth around you can hurt and can make you feel like you are going mad. By opening up your life you become vulnerable to the world and the people. God does not tell us love is going to be easy. Love is wonderful but it can also cause us a lot of heart-ache and a lot of sorrow; but then how are we ever going to experience that true love without gaining a few scars along the way? There are many people I love in this world but to each one I try to give my love and not expect anything back; as soon as we expect a return we are ‘buying’ something and not giving something.

So when we read passages like this telling us we need to love others we must not try and buy love back but simply give our love to others. Christ came to this world to pay for our debt and not to buy our love. He did not come to make a transaction but to lay down His life to cover our sins. We must not look at this as if it were a money transaction because we always relate money to buying something. If we took all of our money and gave it to others we would then be getting closer; but love is so much more than money, gifts, transactions and all the worldly ways. Love should never stop!

Points to Ponder:
Do you show others in the world your love?

Will you show someone God’s love today?

May 1: Matthew 22 34-40

Key Verse: Matthew 22 37
Jesus said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’

Devotion:
The Sadducees may not have believed in the resurrection of Christ, but the Scribes and the Pharisees heard how Jesus silenced them they wanted to try and trip Him up into saying something wrong to prove He was not the Messiah. One of them, a lawyer, asked Jesus which was the greatest or most important law. Now whether they had put weight on the order of commandments from Exodus or whether they had made up their own minds about importance of laws is really immaterial here because Jesus turned things on them.

Jesus’ response was to say that the most important thing in God’s law was for each of us to love God with all our hearts and to love the people around us in a similar manner. I we do not start by loving God then we are not going to be likely to follow His rules anyway; but if we do love Him then we will be more willing to follow the rules laid down by Him to start with. When we love the people around us it is going to be a similar thing; they may not write down many different laws we have to follow, but when they say something we should be listening to them and acting accordingly.

In some cultures we have lost that spirit of love and it shows because people do not care about other’s feelings or about the likes and dislikes of others – many are just living according to their own wants and desires and forgetting about the needs of others. Christ always made sure He knew about the people around Him so He could try to please as many people as possible.

All the great words of prophecy rely on the fact that someone is going to follow the rules to start with. If we living a life of chaos then we may not get to see the outcome of the prophecies of many of our great prophets; they depend on righteousness and on Holiness and without that we will not see the prophecies. Christ spoke many words and they come true day after day…

Points to Ponder:
Do you understand love?

Do you know Christ’s love?

April 30: Matthew 22 23-33

Key Verse: Matthew 22 32
‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.

Devotion:
There are many occurrences in the Gospels where Jesus gives a brief explanation of something which confounds the people who should know all about the scriptures. Why did this happen in so many cases? Because the people had built up barriers within their own minds about the scriptures instead of allowing the Spirit to guide them through the truth. We have access to the Holy Spirit to enable us to have a better understanding of God’s Word – but only if we are willing to listen and learn.

The Sadducees did not believe in the resurrection, much like some religions nowadays do not believe in the things Christ did. They had built up these barriers in their own minds and now believed in their own words rather than what God had people write down. If we are self-conceited in our own beliefs then we too will put aside God’s Word and believe in our own words instead of Christ’s teachings. We put up barriers because we need to have our own ways…

Believing in God is all about putting aside our own wants and desires and taking on the truth God is trying to explain to us. Our faith in Christ is all about believing in some remarkable miracles and events that happened many many years ago and trusting the things Christ said will come true. We have seen many things come true after the scriptures were written many years before Christ was born as a man and so we should believe the words written through Christ’s teaching.

Don’t try to trip up God and His disciples by asking what we think are impossible questions because those questions come through us not understanding His Word in the first place. Rather try to listen to God through the Holy Spirit and through Christ’s teachings so we can better understand what He has in stall for us rather than what we think we want. Don’t give up because you don’t understand – seek His wisdom.

Points to Ponder:
Do you understand all the scriptures?

Are you open to God’s continued teaching?