In all that I do in every area of my life, whether husband, Dad, pastor, preacher, friend, etc. I know that nothing matters more than me being right with Him.
Above all else… all family, all ministry, all friendships, all relationships, and activities, I must be saved.
James declares to us that there is no deception worse than self-deception. That keeps going over and over in heart and mind.
My prayer of late has been, “God, please don’t let me be so open-minded to the world, and even the church world around me, that I lose sight of the preeminence of the Word of God. Let your Word ALWAYS be the Light for my pathway. Don’t let me be disillusioned by those who seem to be walking the wrong direction. Don’t let me listen so intently to the voices around me that I become dull of hearing to what the Spirit is saying”
Your separation from the world should never be determined by your distance from how the world lives. It should be determined by how close you are to the principles of the Word of God.
Self-justification will say that as long as there is a distance between you and the world, then everything is okay. The fallacy of that is that the world is getting more distant from God on a regular basis. If you use the world as a gauge, then as the world slips further from God, you will slip into the place they just left.
It is a slow fade, a gradual decline. It is letting little things go today because, after all, “It really isn’t a big deal.” Do that long enough and the things that were a big deal yesterday are now today’s small deal.
If we ever needed to live by the true principles of the Word of God, it is today. Those principles are not legalistic. They are principles of love that God established to protect a right relationship with Him. They are the foundation of the kind of life that God designed to be the more abundant life for you.
“There is a way that seemeth right unto a man…” We need to be incredibly careful to not confuse what seems right and what is actually right.
Too often, we pursue the right thing with the wrong action. Oh, we may get good results and feel some satisfaction from that. However, we need to always remember that HOW we do what we do for God matters just as much to Him as WHAT we do for God. The Kingdom is not built on the mindset that “The ends justifies the means.”
One of the most chilling passages of scripture is where Jesus says, “Not everyone that says to me ‘Lord, Lord’ will make it to heaven. They will say, ‘We cast out demons in your Name. We healed the sick in your Name. We saw miracles and lives changed in your Name.” In other words, they knew the power of the Name and how to let the Lord work through them.
The Lord says to them, “Depart from me, I never knew you.” In other words, “I never had the relationship with you that was saving you. I worked through you because of faith, not because of you. I touched others through you, not because of you, but because of them.”
Above all else, I MUST be saved!
— rw