Saturday Reading: John 14 25-27
 
Key Verse: John 14 27
27  Peace I leave with you, My peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.

 

Devotion:
Have you ever been in a situation where someone told you that they could do something for you but you insisted on trying to get things sorted out yourself. Finally in frustration after not being able to fix things, you go back to them and they fix it within a few seconds! I certainly have been. It's our pride or conceit that stops us from listening to people who can actually do things for us, and even want to do things for us!

 

Can you now imagine just how frustrated Christ gets with us! He has continued to tell us that we can depend on Him for anything and that we must do – and yet we continue to tell Him that we can manage it by ourselves! We continue to think that we are in control and understand all things, when, truth be told, we fail miserably most of the time! God understood that in the beginning and gave us the opportunity to have someone come to help us out; first Christ, then the Holy Spirit.

 

Christ plainly reminds us that He would leave the Holy Spirit to indwell us when we believe in Him. He reminds us here that the Holy Spirit will not only be with us, but will help us to remember things about His teachings. In other words, we may well not be able to remember all the things we read from the bible, but the Holy Spirit certainly will be able to help you remember them when we need to... all we have to do is listen!

 

If we had listened to the person that told us they could fix things in the beginning, we would have got things done a whole lot quicker. If we listen to Christ now and believe that He is able to help us, then we will be able to move forward in His will a whole lot quicker... We just have to listen! He wants to guide us. He wants to help us. He wants to protect us. Why not let Him?

 

Points to Ponder:
Are you too proud to accept help?
 
How well do you actually listen to God?

Friday Reading: John 14 23-24

 

Key Verse: John 14 23
23  Jesus answered and said to him, If a man loves Me, he will keep My Word. And My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our abode with him.

 

Devotion:
If we really do love someone then we will be more than willing to do things for them. We will be encouraged from within to listen to what they have to say and obey them when they tell us things to do. The same is with Christ. If we love Him then we should be willing to do things for Him and to listen to what He has written and declared. We should be willing to live according to His will. As we grow up, we (eventually) leave home and make a home for ourselves. When we find the one that we want to spend the rest of our life with, we get married and live together – that is the way that God designed us and the way that we should continue to be.

 

Christ put things quite clearly, if we are willing to love Him, then He will not only continue in His love for us, but also be willing to come to us and live with us. That is not to say that Christ will knock on your door and move in with you, but that the Holy Spirit will live within you. Christ never lifts Himself above God the Father nor above the Holy Spirit. He declares that “We will come...” meaning that He, The Father and The Holy Spirit are one and the same. What a privilege it is to know that Christ wants to live inside each of us.

 

So when we turn to Christ in love, He in turn comes to live in us. That means that we need to be ever more vigilant about how we live our lives. For with God with us, we have a Comforter, Guide and Protector living in our lives. With Him living in our lives we are exposing Him to everything that we do, right and wrong! How would you like to take your best friend to the worst place you can think of? It's not what we would think of doing – so why do we continue to expose Christ to things that we do in our lives?

 

Points to Ponder:
Do you protect your loved ones from bad things?
 
Do you allow yourself (and God) to be exposed to bad things in your life?

Thursday Reading: John 8 30-36
 
Key Verse: John 8:
34  Jesus answered them, Truly, truly, I say to you, Whoever practices sin is the slave of sin.

 

Devotion:
You will be amazed at how things control your life, the things that you hear, the things that you see and the things that you do. They normally get to you in that order as well. First you hear about something, then you get round to seeing it and then you get round to doing it. By that stage you have accepted it into your life and it becomes a part of your life. What you probably have not done is to think about whether it is the right thing or not – you just heard that others were doing it, saw someone doing it and now you want to do it... we have come back to us wanting things in our lives...

 

We think that we own our lives and that we are able to do anything with our lives. We think that we alone are the ones that should be in charge of our own selves; that is why we do not listen to good advice! The advice may well be good, it may well help us, but we object to others having control of our lives so we rebel against those suggestions. Straight away we have rejected something from our lives because we think we know better. The most common thing that is rejected in anyone's life has got to be Christian advice.

 

First you hear about the rebel who has a good time. Then you see a film portraying someone who rebels against society and seemingly wins out at the end. So you start to think that you should be able to rebel as well; you start to change your life to fit it with some rebellious ideas that you have thought up. You may well know that they are not correct, but the more you allow them in your life, the more normal you think they are! The only normal thing that we should be doing is listening to the best advice on earth – our bibles. Christ came to make sure that people stood up and took notice. He made sure that we would have enough information recorded so that generation after generation could hear the truth and act upon it – not against it!

 

Points to Ponder:
Do you think you would make a good escape artist?

 

How can you escape from the truth?

Wednesday Reading: Jude 1 5-7
 
Key Verse: Jude 1 5
5  But I intend to remind you, you once knowing these things, that the Lord having delivered a people out of the land of Egypt, in the second place destroyed the ones not believing.

 

Devotion:
One thing that nobody is going to escape is final judgement. Not a nice thought, but something that has got to be remembered all the time. We are living in a world that has been created by God, is maintained by God and will ultimately perish through God. This world is but here under God's grace and nothing more. We like to think that we are in control of things and that we can control various things about this world, but we are only changing how we live in it.

 

At the allotted time we will all have to face up to God's wrath. From the beginning of time He has shown that people will not get away with evil and that we have to pay for our ways. Just because civilisation was almost entirely wiped out more than 4000 years ago, we don't tend to think about it. God saved the Israelites from Egypt around 3500 years ago, yet few people believe it. Christ came to earth only 2000 years ago, yet man insists on taking those truths away from us now too. God has show what has happened in the past and has warned about what will happen in the future – yet man continues to try and ignore the truth.

 

Pride, lust and want will continue to separate us from Christ until we do acknowledge Him as Lord. No matter how clean a life we try to live, no matter how good we are, our hearts are evil until such time as we inwardly acknowledge Him as our Saviour. No amount of outward displays of Christianity will prevent us from facing God's wrath. The only thing that will keep us from paying the penalty is our total inward belief that Christ is our Saviour. Only then will He be able to stand up and say “I know this person. I have paid for their sins. They are not guilty”.

 

Points to Ponder:
How much do you believe your friends?
 
How much do you believe the bible?