Tuesday 6 Dec 2011

Tuesday Reading: Genesis 17 17



Key Verse: Genesis 17 17

17  And Abraham fell upon his face and laughed, and said in his heart, Shall a child be born to him that is a hundred years old? And shall Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear?



Devotion:

I recently read a quote “Dear Life, When I said ‘can my life get any worse’ it was a rhetorical question and not a challenge” with a bit of a chuckle. God is not one that will make a joke out of your life but is rather trying to stop you from making a joke out of your life. How we view what God allows into our life will make for some interesting reading when we finally get to see why things came into our lives; whether that is waiting until tomorrow, waiting a year, a decade or even waiting until we get to heaven should not worry us in one bit. Just knowing that God is in control of our lives should be more than any comfort we desire.



When God told Abraham that he would have a child when he was one hundred years old I am sure that many things went through his mind – not least of which may well have been ‘how am I going to look after a child at my age’. Or at least that is how we would view things if they were happening in this day and age. Abraham laughed in his heart because he really thought that that would be impossible – but God made it so as we now know. Sarah was a fair old age as well but that still did not stop God making it possible for them to have a child.



It does not matter where you think you are in life but rather where God is going to put you in life. He requires certain things of us and will encourage us to fulfil those things. If we are going to do everything in our power to avoid those things or to side-step them, then we are the ones who are at fault and not Him. Seeing just what He has in store for us is quite often a task that we miss because of the many distractions in our lives. We like to think that we are busy doing the Lords will and that we are working with Him, but sometimes He requires us to stop and listen to what He is trying to tell us rather than us continuing to do what we think is best. Abraham’s challenge from God was a very real challenge – to stop and listen but also to believe in exactly what He was saying. That would come at a price, but the belief had to start right then and there…



Points to Ponder:

Do you find life hard to accept sometimes?



Are you willing to accept God’s will?

Monday 5 Dec 2011

Monday Reading: Luke 1 18-22



Key Verse: Luke 1 22

22  And when he came out, he could not speak to them. And they perceived that he had seen a vision in the temple. And he was making signs to them, and remained speechless.



Devotion:

How many times have you asked God for something and then wondered why He has allowed something else in your life that just does not seem to be right? I’m not talking about asking for riches and then seeing that you lose your job and cannot find another for a while; what I am talking about is those requests that we make that we don’t always follow up on. I know this is true for myself and I know this is also true for many of you as well; we make a request to God and then we give up on it because we think that He either will not answer it or that He has forgotten it. Well time has taught me the exact opposite and time has taught me that our God continues to answer prayers long after we may have forgotten about them.



The thing that gets me is that He always answers them at the time that is right for His glory and not ours. He always answers them in such a way as to make sure that we do know that He alone is God and that His ways are the right ways and not our own. Zacharias had probably prayed a good number of years for a child and may well have given up asking and assumed that Elizabeth was barren and that that was God’s wish. He continued on being righteous in his ways and faithfully serving God – but God had a plan from the beginning and now was the time to start that plan into motion.



What Zacharias did not count on was being rendered dumb for a season until after Elizabeth would have her child. I’m pretty sure that that was not what Zacharias had in mind, but it was the way in which God would be glorified and the way in which everyone in that family would have no doubt as to who was in control. We may not like some of the things that happen in our lives, but we sure can tell that God is in control when we are able to look back and see what He has done. Yesterday I mentioned that we are the ones that fall away from God and not Him. Today I encourage you to look deep into your relationship with Him and realise that He has never left us and He continues to answer our prayers in the best possible way – we just need to open our eyes to what He does for us each and every day of our lives.



Points to Ponder:

Are you feeling let down?



What has God done in your past to get you this far?

Sunday 4 Dec 2011

Sunday Reading: John 8 41-43



Key Verse: John 8 43

43  Why do you not know My speech? Because you cannot hear My Word.



Devotion:

There is always going to be a time in your life when you think that you are doing the right thing but you are not. Those times may well be more frequent that we would like to think because we are the weak ones who continue to give in to the temptations of this world rather than standing firmly in God’s hands. Does that sound harsh? Well it is only going to sound as harsh as what you know that you are doing! Therein lies the truth – we do know that we are doing things and we do continue to do them. I am certainly not able to tell anyone else that they are doing anything wrong because I know in myself that I still do things wrong. That does not change the fact that I do love my Lord and Saviour. But it does throw some doubt as to my sincerity in my relationship with Him.



Have you ever stepped just one tiny step back and thought about it in that manner, that what you are doing is casting doubt on the sincerity of your relationship with God? When Jesus faced the Jews He was trying to get them to take that one tiny step back and to look at what they were doing to themselves. God is never going to take a step back and leave our relationship with Him. He continues to stand firm and continue to have His arms out-stretched toward us in the hopes that we will submit to His will and fall back into His arms. God has declared publically that He is there waiting for us. What we do in response to that is a public response for all to see.



So what is it that is going to break down that relationship from our side? What is it that is going to stop us from having a proper relationship with God? What is it that is going to cast doubt before others? Well I am the least able to cast doubt into any relationship because I have failed in my past. But what I am going to say is that there are choices that we make in our lives that take us away from God instead of bringing us towards Him. Those choices may seem like the most minor things when we make them and it is only when we look back on our lives and our relationships with God that we see just how big a mistake things were. My prayer is that each one of us will be able to take that small step back in our lives and do some self-examination before we break our relationship with Him. Believe me it is a whole lot easier than you release…



Points to Ponder:

Do you know where you are going?



Is Christ watching you walk away?

Saturday 3 Dec 2011

Saturday Reading: John 8 37-40



Key Verse: John 8 40

40  But now you seek to kill Me, a man who has told you the truth which I have heard beside God; this Abraham did not do.



Devotion:

We like to think that we are doing the right thing because we like to think we are following the rules of great people… but that just does not cut it with God. God wants us to know that we are doing the right thing, not because we are following great men but because we are following His Word. Jesus was able to quite eloquently show the Jews that they had corrupted God’s Word and that they were in fact following their own will rather than the Word of God that they said they were.



It is one thing to read a section of scripture and take from it what you would like to hear, but an entirely different thing to take God’s Word and get from it what He wanted you to get in the beginning. God’s Word is not changing with the times. It has never changed and it will never change. We are the ones who continue to change and continue to make our own minds up about what we think God’s Word should say to us! Just because most of the people are saying one thing does not necessarily make it right. Yes there is wisdom in listening to what most people think or know about a subject because we can learn a lot in that way. But just hearing something because that is what we would like to hear is not right in any books!



God continues to lay His Word out in front of our lives, spelling out each step for us as we go. It does not mean that it is all in black and white and we don’t have a choice. God, instead, tells us what He would like and then gives us the option of either following His will or ignoring it. Unfortunately so many more people seem to choose to ignore those precious words instead of following them. That gives us a harder task to try and give out the truth because so many more people have heard nothing but corrupt things for most of their lives. God’s Word itself is not corrupt. Man has corrupted it in many guises, some of which are world religions…



Points to Ponder:

Do you want the truth?



Are you willing to hear the truth?

Friday 2 Dec 2011

Friday Reading: Deuteronomy 4 29-31



Key Verse: Deuteronomy 4 31

31  For Jehovah your God is a merciful God; He will not forsake you, nor destroy you, nor forget the covenant of your fathers which He swore to them.



Devotion:

We could look in many places throughout our bibles to bring up the truth that God’s Word continue to remain the absolute truth over all time; but instead I have gone back to some of the very early record written thousands of years ago and passed down faithfully from generation to generation. Is it any wonder to see that these words tell us the same story as words a few hundred years before Christ and the same as Jesus continued to teach us? God has done so many things in the face of adversity, disbelief and downright hatred from the very people that He has called His own; and throughout all of those things has been a constant stream of mercy from His side as He continues to lift up the truth in the hopes that we will eventually grasp it and hold on to it.



God has continued to uphold the absolute truth so that He can demonstrate that it will never change and that we can depend on it because of that fact. God has upheld His Word throughout history and continues to do so in this modern world and will continue to do so far into the future. He made promises to people and kept them. Those promises are recorded in history as well as in our bibles so that we can be sure that they are the truth.



And what does He want out of this? Just for us to believe in that truth with our whole hearts and souls. He wants us to know that that truth is worth everything and that we should depend on it always. What an awesome fact that we can know the truth just because He has given it to us freely. God wants our love because He loved us from the beginning. He continues to show us His love throughout time and will continue throughout eternity – all we need to do is to believe in that truth.



Points to Ponder:

How much of history and science can we depend on?



Are you depending on God’s Truth?