August 17: Matthew 4 1-11
Key Verse: Matthew 4 11
Then the devil left Him, and behold, angels came and ministered to Him.
Devotion:
What did Jesus do in the desert? What was He alone in the desert for? Why open Himself up to the temptation? These are all the questions that we come up with because we do not fully understand the ways of God; we do not have the task of finding out all these questions but rather believing what Jesus has done and trusting Him for further teaching. We do not have to figure out why Jesus did this or why it was allowed. What we do need to do is to believe that this is an account of what did happen and that Jesus was able to reject Satan by using God and His Word.
Jesus was a human being and as such did not have power over Satan in His human form. But what He did have was God and His protection. We too have God and we too have His protection. We too can reject Satan; but it has to be our choice to do that, not that we have the power, but that Christ has already done that for us. We have this knowledge that Christ has defeated Satan by doing exactly what he did on the cross and rising out of the grave afterward. We know that nothing is impossible for God.
Jesus came back to give the apostles power over evil spirits and the like because He left the Holy Spirit with them. We have been offered the Holy Spirit if we accept Jesus as our Lord and Saviour which means that we will be able to turn away from evil as well. Many times in our lives it is because we are stuck in our ways and do not call on God as we should be doing. Jesus took Himself out of His human life and stayed alone with God in the desert until the time was right. We should be willing to go that extra mile to be alone with God and His people until the time is right.
Through this act of going out into the desert Jesus teaches us that we should be willing to rely on God’s Word for answers to things in our lives. We do not have to try and figure out every new thing in our lives without God; He wants to be with us every step of the way and He can do that through the Bible. When we are willing to listen to what God teaches us through our bibles we will get answers for many things we come up against; but we need to trust God and His Word.
Points to Ponder:
Do you trust other people?
Do you trust God’s Word?
August 16: Mark 1 1-8
Key Verse: Mark 1 4
John came baptizing in the wilderness and preaching a baptism of repentance for the remission of sins.
Devotion:
John the Baptist was given a role by God and that was to fulfil the promise of the prophet Isaiah who had said that there would be one who came to prepare people for the coming of Jesus Christ. He obeyed God and did what was required by God. To many people this would not have seemed like a normal thing to do, to go out into the wilderness to preach about asking for forgiveness and giving up the old life and taking on the new life with God. Why should he be asked to do that when there were synagogues in towns? To escape from the old life and allow the new life to blossom!
If we do want to be able to change the way we live life with Christ then we should be willing to give up the old life and move to this new life. I know that I have struggled with this in my past because I could not understand why I should have to move away from all that I had until it struck me that all that I had was keeping me away from getting to know God better. It was my old life that continually took me away from being with God in the way that He wanted instead of the way that I wanted it to happen.
John took people out of their normal lives into a place where people would only have God for protection. This was what God did to the people when Moses led them out of Egypt; He told Moses which way to go through the desert so that the people would be separated from their old lives, the lives they felt comfortable in and into a strange situation. If you want to be able to be with God then maybe it is time for you to go to a strange place where you will be alone with God.
It is not necessarily about being alone in the desert like Jesus was when Satan tempted Him, but may well be you just getting away from what you call home and being with other people who want to be with God as well. It may well be that you have to give up normal home comforts so that you can get to know what God wants in your life instead of what you want in your life. Trust God, He knows what He is doing!
Points to Ponder:
Are you ready to listen?
Will you listen to life or to God?
August 15: 1 Peter 3 18-23
Key Verse: 1 Peter 3 19
by whom also He went and preached to the spirits in prison,
Devotion:
One of the things that I have learned from God is that we do have to reach down into the gutters to lift up some people. God is the one who knows people from the inside, knows their hearts and what they are capable of. We see this exterior upon which we build our own version of the world. We see the people that do good deeds and expect them to be good people; most of the time they probably are. We see the people that get put in prisons and expect them to be evil people, and some of them are. But God is the one who knows what they actually are like.
There are people in our Bibles who have committed murder but have been used greatly by God, being called followers of God by us because of what we have seen them do after their crimes. There are people that have hung out with Jesus and yet turned out to be the ones that worked against Him.
We have to trust God in choosing the right people to go forward and talk to. If they are the ones who come to church every week then that may be an easy task for us to do. But if they are the ones who have landed up in prison because of what they have done, then that may well be a hard task to take up. It is our lot to listen to God for instruction as to where we are required and that is what I try my best to do. I know that there are many youth who go to church or come from good and kind families and they are great to hang out with and teach… but I know there are also special people who are caught up in a world that they cannot see any escape from. Those are the ones God has asked me to reach out to; and yes it is hard work.
Do not label people because of their families. Do not label people because of their circumstances. Try to look for the potential in people and encourage them to find that potential. We all have the right to become upstanding Christians. We all have the right to be called sons of God because Christ died for us all! Reach out, reach up, reach down, but keep trusting God.
Points to Ponder:
Who do you talk to about God?
Is that really where God has sent you?
August 14: Matthew 24 36-44
Key Verse: Matthew 24 37
But as the days of Noah were, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be.
Devotion:
When we look around us at the state of the world and the people we could be forgiven for thinking that Christ is going to return tomorrow; the evil that is embedded in society nowadays must be getting close to the days of Noah when God sent the flood to wipe away all the evil. The truth is that we do not know that much about how bad things were in those days because there were not that many people writing about it back then. Yes we have snippets of information in our Bibles but we do not have the media coverage that we do now.
When something bad happens we either hear about it non-stop through TV, radio and the Internet, or someone covers it up and squashes the stories. But still we get to hear about things happening through one way or another and it is not just the people next door that hear it because the media we have now is global and the stories spread round the world within minutes. I can remember listening to the news and watching live stories over the Internet and on TV when the Twin Towers were struck by aeroplanes hijacked by terrorists. So is the world as corrupt or can people get worse?
That in itself is such a sad question to have to ask… can people get worse. It is how we are being brought up and what we are expecting from others. As a child I was brought up in a country where fighting was the norm, where people would get killed every day by bombs, landmines and shooting. We got used to the stories as they were told and to some extent our hearts were dumbed down into accepting that this was normal in some way. Having your bags checked as you enter into a shop to make sure you were not the terrorist was quite normal; sad but normal.
We do not have to accept life like this as being normal. We have our Bibles which tell us what should be normal according to what God expects from us. Let us stand proud of the crowd and continue to put forward God’s Word as the truth and what we aim for instead of accepting the garbage that other people come out with as being normal in some way. If we were able to spend some quiet time with God and then listen to a recording of our lives, we may well stop many things that we now accept as normal. Spend more time with God to know what is going on in your life and stand with God.
Points to Ponder:
What sort of life do you lead?
Is God proud to walk with you?
August 13: 1 Kings 21 20-29
Key Verse: 1 Kings 21 25
But there was no one like Ahab who sold himself to do wickedness in the sight of the Lord, because Jezebel his wife stirred him up.
Devotion:
How many times have you skipped over the parts of the Bible that you don’t like to read, you know, those parts that tell you that God does not forget when you do bad things or that God punishes people who work against Him? How many times have you read it through just once so that you can say “I’ve read the whole Bible” and then not gone back again for fear of having to understand the hard parts! I’m sure there are parts of the Bible that each of us would rather no go back and read too many times, but the words are there for a reason!
God wants us to know the truth and part of that truth is that He watches over us all the time. That means that when we are doing bad things, when we are disobeying, when we are fighting, God is watching us. He may well be sighing, crying or grimacing at some of the things we do, but He still knows what we are doing. Ahab thought that he could get away with many things and went ahead and did things, being stirred up by evil people such as his wife Jezebel. That is no excuse!
We can’t turn round and say that we did something because someone else told us it was a good idea. God has given each of us a conscience and a brain that allows us to figure out what is right and wrong. We do not have a weak excuse like that to fall back onto. Ahab did not realise how bad the situation was until Elijah came and told him what God was going to do. Ahab did have a change of heart when he knew how dire the situation was, but it was already too late.
We may think that it is too late for us to repent nowadays when we figure out how much we have done wrong; but we live in a different age now, one covered by the grace of God. Jesus Christ has already paid for our sins by giving His own life on the cross. That means that we are able to have everything forgiven and it is not too late. But if we leave it until we meet Him face to face, then it will be too late. Admit your sins to God now and work with Him in His grace!
Points to Ponder:
Do you follow bad people?
Will you listen to God?