Now for some insight into my devotionals. As I said earlier, I started with Cru's four sevens devotional. While I am not being nearly as consistent with it as I would like, I am working through it. The whole study is reading through Luke and seeing Jesus' ministry. Right now, I just finished all the days of Jesus prior to his ministry, finishing off with Jesus spening 40 days in the wilderness and being tempted by Satan. One of the focuses in this section is the ministry of John the Baptist. He became a profit after having a vision from God. This may not seem like a big deal but he was the first prophet seen in over 400 years! His mere presence as a prophet is amazing and his ministry is even more so. He tells it as it is, there is a loving God and those that follow him will live in heaven and those who don't will reside in hell, plain and simple. This is a man of God and he does not fear man so he tells it as it is. This is the kind of attitude we should have, we should not worry about other people's opinions of us. We have a message to bring and people that need to hear it. Sure, not everyone will want to hear it and may hate us for trying to share what we believe but we need to push this aside because in the end, the only opinion that matters is Jesus'.
Another thing that I wanted to share some thoughts on was when Jesus spent 40 days in the wilderness without food. 40 days is reminiscent of Israel's 40 years of wilderness wandering and the 40-day fasts by Moses. Jesus was without food for those 40 days so you can imagine he was pretty hungry. This is significant because if you think about it, when are we most susceptible to temptation? Hunger is a very strong motivator for any action so when Jesus resists Satan's temptations of food, power, and safety it makes the resistance that much more significant. I think this is one of the first instances of where we really see the awesomeness of Jesus coming through in his life because he was able to remain strong in the Lord and resist Satan. This is an example of how we should be strong in the midst of our weakness. We should be on our toes when we are hungry and weak or tired because this is the time that we are most likely to give in to temptation. One more side note for this post then I will let you go. I believe I heard this from one of C.S. Lewis' books but it was really amazing to me. I believe that it was in his book Mere Christianity which I highly recommend. Before Jesus came to Earth, God could not just grant us forgiveness like he does now because he had never experience sin and temptation. He had seen the affects and such but had never experienced it because it was not possible for him to. If he sinned it would be contrary to his character so if he sinned, he would not be God. When he came to Earth as Jesus, he was fully man and fully God. Being fully man he was able to experience the temptations of sin and was therefore able to beat sin because he was also fully God. He experienced the temptations of sin but never gave into them because of the fact that he was fully God. Once he was able to experience temptation and beat it, he could become the perfect sacrifice for our sins. I am no C. S. Lewis and this doesn't do his idea justice so I would highly recommend you check our Mere Christianity. It is an excellent book. I apologize if that last part was a bit confusing but if it sounds interesting, you know where to look to get more information.
God Bless and Go Blue!
Tedd Sheets Jr
No comments:
Post a Comment