Words Of Encouragement To Start The Day (Wednesday 08/18/2010)

Confession With No Conviction…

Matthew 15:7-9 (New International Version)

⁷You hypocrites! Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you:
⁸" 'These people honor me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me.
⁹They worship me in vain;
their teachings are but rules taught by men.'

My girlfriend and I were having a conversation some months back, about ministries that we had been in and the things that had potential taken us out of ministry for periods at a time. One of the most interesting things we discovered was that people in certain ministries under the name of the Lord had treated other people with great distain and even meanness. They had confessed how much they loved Christ but yet flesh was all up in the treatment of the individuals they called brother and sister. The mess that was being perpetrated openly and behind closed doors was as far from God as the east is from the west. There were times when I know I thought “people out in the world didn’t treat me this bad.” But yet they would profess how much they loved their God and wanted to please Him. In my opinion, these individuals, are no better than those who are in the world that curse, drink, smoke anything, womanize, exploit themselves and then get up and say “I would like to thank my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, for without Him none of this would be possible.” A matter of fact they are potentially more dangerous, because as a representative of Christ they had the potential to harm the kingdom and to damage kingdom lives, which did happen. How do you confess God and live contrary to the Word of God and His will. The greatest command is that we love one another…

I have been to a lot of places around the world and encountered many people, in Japan, and in Hawaii you find that family is everything they don’t just say you are a part of them, they show it through their actions, their treatment of others and the way that they live. In Honduras you find a sense of community and the little children living on the street, don’t just say they take care of one another and have each other’s back they do. How is it that we can say we love Christ whom we have not seen, but yet treat our brothers and sisters with such disregard, absence of responsibility and even abuse. How can we say we love and adore a God that sent His son to die for us, but yet we do not keep His commandments, instead we adjust His word to the way we want to live. We make divorce an option going into marriage; we spew words of hate and anger easily with no though for the health safety and security emotionally or otherwise of another. We walk passed people in need daily and never lend a hand, because it is more about us than anyone or anything else, and yet and still we love God with all of our hearts and we believe we are doing His will and He is well pleased with whatever we throw at Him, even if it is stench to His nostrils and brings pain to His heart. We are something as a creation, we despise our place as the clay, and instead we assume the role of the potter molding the Word of God, and the true creator around all of those things in us we don’t want God to touch or reveal to us that are blatantly out of His will.

Isn’t it time that if we say it, we live it. Stop perpetrating a fraud, if you don’t want to be right with God and you want to do you, just do it. God knows anyway, He knows our thoughts and the very intent of our hearts. If it is our desire to live right before God and to be in right standing with Him, then it is time to lay down all of those things that have been easily besetting us and those things that have driven some of us from the very presence of God’s protection and power. Don’t act like you know, when you don’t, if you are going to say you love God, then live for Him, in and out of the four walls of the church in which you worship. Do as He commands and as He leads. Allow the spirit to lead and the flesh to be silenced. Don’t you think it is way overdue?