Tuesday, May 8, 2018
“If you
carefully obey the commands I am giving you today, and if you love the Lord
your God and serve him with all your heart and soul, then he will send the
rains in their proper seasons—the early and late rains—so you can bring in your
harvests of grain, new wine, and olive oil.
He will give you lush pastureland for your livestock, and you yourselves
will have all you want to eat. “But be
careful. Don’t let your heart be
deceived so that you turn away from the Lord and serve and worship other gods. If you do, the Lord’s anger will burn against
you. He will shut up the sky and hold
back the rain, and the ground will fail to produce its harvests. Then you will quickly die in that good land
the Lord is giving you. Deuteronomy
11:13-17(NLT)
“Believing your
own press reports” is what the preacher called it. My mother called it: “being full of yourself”! Joshua was delivering God’s message to Israel,
a warning against imagining all is well, just because you feel content. The heart that has lost it’s desire to serve
God may feel content for a while, but it won’t be long before
that heart crosses over from feelings of contentment to the cold storage of
arrogance. It is then that the hammer
will fall. God is truly long-suffering,
meaning He will forgive our poor choices and failures. What God will not tolerate is wanton hearts
that blatantly turn away from Him; there are consequences for disobedience!
Sometimes we can make
the mistake of reading our circumstances of God’s blessing as if it is simply
the state of our having arrived at a level of human accomplishment. The fact is that all so-called achievement is
a matter of God-given strength, ability and His favor. You don’t have to carve an idol to serve
other gods; sometimes idolatry is as close as admiring that fellow in the
mirror.
For You Today
If it has been a
while since you did this…or if you’ve never done this…take some time to look
over the blessings God has given into your life. (We can call it our Promised Land). Add it up…all the years, times of deliverance,
joys, learning, financial strength, children, promotions in your career…then
put it in its’ proper place…build a mental altar and lay all those blessings on
top of that altar as a sacrifice. It is
our way of saying, Lord, I have no other God but You!
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