Saturday Reading: Psalms 5 1-3
Key Verse: Psalms 5 3
3 My voice shalt thou hear in the morning, O LORD; in the morning will I direct my prayer unto thee, and will look up.
Devotion:
When you lift up your prayers to God, how do you do it? Have you ever thought about exactly what you are doing when you do lift up your prayers to God? Have you ever wondered how God would see your prayers? I can normally think of all sorts of prayers that I should be saying before I get down to pray and then have difficulty remembering everything when I actually do get down to it! Yes I know I am getting older but our prayers do not have to be structured and written down, learned and repeated. God wants us to come to Him just as naturally as we ask things of our friends!
But just because we can come to Him at any time and with any prayers does not mean that we should talk to Him like a long lost relative or the bloke down the road! When we come to pray we need to remember just who it is we are lifting up our prayers to. We need to remember just what we are asking for as well. He is our Saviour and King, almighty God! If we spend our time practicing our prayers and then finally stringing the words together that we have learned, then I fear that what is coming out is just another string of words and not what is on our hearts.
God wants us to bring our prayers to Him as we need to, not once a week or when we are called to pray, but always and with reverence and fear because He is God! And then there is the issue of when we do pray. Do we leave it for once a week or do we lift up our heartfelt prayers to Him as soon as we can?
And then we have the issue of making sure we remember Him in love and fear so that our prayers do come from our hearts and not just from another book we read or someone else. God listens to each one of our prayers and He remembers them from that moment onward. It is not what we have learned that we have to string together but the words that God impresses in our hearts and minds that God really wants to listen to. He wants us to be honest and open so that we can live for Him continually. Do you lift up your prayers as soon as you wake up or do you try and construct a list of things before you speak. Be honest, open, patriotic and loving just as Christ was!
Points to Ponder:
Do you lift up your voice to Christ?
Do you wait patiently for an answer?
Friday Reading: Psalms 4 4-5
Key Verse: Psalms 4 5
5 Offer the sacrifices of righteousness, and put your trust in the LORD.
Devotion:
What do you do at the end of the day? Do you sit in front of the TV and watch something, anything really, until you feel tired? Or do you sit down and think about what has happened that day? Sometimes it is at the end of the day when you need to sit back and find what was on your heart that day, what or whom touched your heart and what you should be doing about that. If you have been touched by someone then you should meditate on what has been going through your heart because that may well be where you should be focusing your love.
God has given us our hearts and minds which are so very special to each one of us. We are allowed to feel things for others like no other species on the planet in that we can share this amazing love that Christ has shown us with others. It is at the end of the day when you will be able to focus on what has happened and examine the principles that God has shown you so that you know what He would wish you to do now.
There was a time when I would sit in front of the TV and allow it to blank my mind instead of seeking God. What I did not realise was that I was opening my mind up to whatever was on the TV and certainly not what God wanted me to meditate upon. So the last thing I try to do each day now is to spend time with God and allow His Word to guide me toward another day. By reading His Word I am able to make sense of my day – not always at that very moment but always able to bring order back into what could have been a chaotic day.
Sometimes it is the act of breaking away from the world and stepping back into God’s arms that will bring back that normality, joy and peace that we know He shares with us. It is the fact that we are offering the sacrifice of giving up on the worldly surroundings and saying something like “OK Lord, I want to do what you would like me to do right now and not what the world wants of me.” It is not the works we can do nor the physical sacrifices we can offer but those spiritual ones we find hard to lay down that God will accept more readily; because He knows they will come from the heart!
Points to Ponder:
What do you do for God?
How many others do exactly that?
Thursday Reading: 2 Kings 21 1-9
Key Verse: 2 Kings 21 6
6 And he made his son pass through the fire, and observed times, and used enchantments, and dealt with familiar spirits and wizards: he wrought much wickedness in the sight of the LORD, to provoke him to anger.
Devotion:
Manasseh was very young when he came to the throne and it seems like the power and temptations went straight to his head. Just as we try to get up to all sorts of things when we are given free reign, so too have many people throughout history. But each thing we have looked at over the past few days has had one starting point through which everything went wrong – man’s choice to do wrong, to sin.
When children are brought up in a God fearing home they generally turn out quite differently to people brought up without guidance; our choices that we make when faced with the temptations of the world are not good! Satan has got his fingers in so much of the world that we don’t realise just how much he can destroy our lives unless we do have God in control. We are weak and we give in to everything around us, but God can bring us through it all if we continue to rely on Him.
Instead of trusting God for control in our lives we try to stand up and run in our own direction. That generally leads to a fall before we get up to speed; not because we are not able to stand up but because we are too weak to avoid the pitfalls that Satan spreads out before us. What this all boils down to is that we do need God in our lives, not just as a guide but as a central part in our lives.
God does not want to be a second thought or an excuse but rather He wants to be the reason for us living. When we do not focus on His ways and His path we lose direction in our lives and we fall into temptation. Once we start slipping down the slippery slope we grab at anything that comes by and wonder then why we have so much sin in our lives. It’s normally out of desperation because we have lost control already. When we invite God to be a part of our lives and allow Him to control our direction, we find a whole new life opening up for us and one that we can and do find peace and rest within – only with God!
Points to Ponder:
What are you reaching out to?
Why not give God control?
Wednesday Reading: Genesis 13 10-13
Key Verse: Genesis 13 10
10 And Lot lifted up his eyes, and beheld all the plain of Jordan, that it was well watered every where, before the LORD destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, even as the garden of the LORD, like the land of Egypt, as thou comest unto Zoar.
Devotion:
When we look at the area around Israel now we wonder what people could see in the land because all we see is desert and heat! But the land was not like that in the beginning and changed because of what man was doing, not because it was always like that. Just like much of Egypt was a fertile and prosperous land, much of the land at this time was fertile and prosperous. But as always, there was a thorn in the middle and that was man!
This passage describes the men of Sodom as being wicked and exceedingly bad sinners; yes man has always attributed levels of sin to the laws of God! Whether Lot knew that the men of Sodom were wicked or not is not given to us, but he would have worked that one out quite quickly after he met them – wicked people cannot hide their wickedness from anyone despite what they may think. There are other record available to us which describe the types of sin that were going on and so we know just how wicked they were.
Is it really any wonder then that we find out that God is going to level this area? And yet what we find is that His grace and mercy go out before His wrath! God wanted people to go into the area and give the people the chance of repenting. First He allows Lot to settle in the area and then He sends more people in getting more serious each time. Now if you haven’t worked out that this is what God does in each of our own lives, then let me say it… This is what God does in our lives!
He will send us warnings when we start to go wrong. He will give us a way out. Just because we have temptations around us does not mean we have no escape. Then when we continue to ignore Him we find more changes in our lives until we either stop and realise that God wants us to change, or we find out the hard way that God will not put up with sin when we are not ignorant! He has already given us His Word so let us not ignore it any more!
Points to Ponder:
What do you do with your bible?
Are you listening to God’s Word?
Tuesday Reading: Genesis 6 1-7
Key Verse: Genesis 6 5
5 And GOD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.
Devotion:
One thing I will always find hard to imagine is the state of the world before the flood. In the very beginning it must have been such a perfect place with everything that we could desire being abundant and at hand in the Garden of Eden. And then we started to sin because of the temptations that the evil one threw our way. Since then the world has never been the same again!
We can marvel at what we have around us now and see how many species we can discover and learn about; but we must also look back and see how many more species used to exist in our perfect world before we broke it all. We should look back and see how much we have already destroyed with the sin and lies that we have brought to this world. We should look at how much we have done to break everything that God has prepared for us. Maybe then we will see how much God actually loves us!
The flood itself destroyed so much that we find it hard to come to terms with a world that was so very different and so suited to us beforehand. We find it hard to accept that there was such a diversity of plant and animal life and that we are destroying so much through our wicked ways. Why should we to be to blame? Well, we are the one who continue to sin and work against God. He is the one who created a fantastic place for us and we continue to break it and destroy it. We could apply that to so many things in our lives that we are given and break…
We need to be diligent with what God has given us and make sure that we do try to do our best for Him. He has given us the opportunity to do what is right, we have to be the ones to get up and do it now! God continues to watch over us and continues to be distraught with the sin that we bring into His world. Lord, help us to see what we are doing wrong so that we can set things right before we break too much once again. Help us to live for you and not to continually break all that you give us in our lives!
Points to Ponder:
Do you think you are a good steward?
Are you doing your best for God or just what you want?