In Between

Prayer.  It’s that thing we do daily, and it’s usually full of complaints…and praise.  We’re not so different than the psalmist, as he cried out and then exalted God.  

Let’s read through Psalm 31 over the next several days:

Psalm 31: 1 In You, O Lord, I have taken refuge; Let me never be ashamed;
In Your righteousness deliver me.

This verse starts and ends with you/your – two good bookends for a prayer.   It’s YOU, oh Lord, to whom we pray.  And it’s YOUR righteousness alone that is the answer to all my prayers. 

When we start and end with acknowledging God and our total dependency on Him, then everything we sandwich in between will be covered, because we know we can’t do anything to fix that which is wrong in our lives…on our own.

The middle part of the verse is about I, and me.  I place myself in a safe spot – under his wings.  And I ask that he remove my shame.

When He is Lord of our lives, and we commit our well-being unto him, we can have boldness to rest under his shadow and request that he cleanse us, because we are his childrens.

Got a complaint today?  Sandwich it in between the praising and exalting God for who he is - and then take refuge in his arms.

This Glorious Name

Verse 58… If you do not carefully follow all the words of this law, which are written in this book, and do not revere this glorious and awesome name—the Lord your God… You will be uprooted from the land you are entering to possess.

Again, in previous devos we listed God’s blessings if we choose to follow his commands, and now for days we’ve been looking at the loss we experience when we choose not to follow Him.

I love the middle of this passage, “this glorious and awesome name – the Lord your God.”

Herein lies the problem.  We often do not realize how glorious and awesome God is.  We get stuck in questioning him constantly about the why’s of the things we don’t understand.  We spend most of our prayer time  moaning about the problems and the worries on our minds, instead of glorifying the name of Jesus. And finally, we get so discouraged that we question the very nature of God – his goodness.

If we want to be grounded, fruitful, and experiencing God’s blessings in our lives, we cannot lose sight of who God is.

God is holy.  God is love.  And he deserves and requires our praise and our obedience.

Sons & Daughters

Verse 32: Your sons and daughters will be given to another nation, and you will wear out your eyes watching for them day after day, powerless to lift a hand…Verse 41: You will have sons and daughters but you will not keep them, because they will go into captivity. 

This is one of the saddest results of forsaking the Lord – that of losing our children to foreigners.

Just taking this verse literally, we already see the influence of other cultures and nations on the faces of our offspring.  Parents grow weary from watching their kids slip away into depression, suicide, destructive habits and even violence, but these same parents have no power to help their children.

One of the blessings from following after God and his ways is that our children receive an inheritance from generation to generation. The same is true, for those who turn their backs on God, regarding an inheritance – but what their kids receive instead is the reaping of the disobedience of their fathers and mothers.

When we forsake what we know to be right and choose to disobey God’s commands, our children suffer. 

The only power we can offer them is to turn ourselves back to the Lord, establish his rule in our home, love him with all of our hearts, and love our neighbors as ourselves.

Then His power will be present, and we’ll see our sons and daughters turn and walk towards the light as well – no longer oppressed and under the influence of foreigners – but under the wings of God’s mercy and grace.

Success

More results from forsaking God and his commands:

Verse 29: At midday you will grope about like a blind person in the dark. You will be unsuccessful in everything you do; day after day you will be oppressed and robbed, with no one to rescue you.

What a bleak outlook…but this is the life of those who choose to forsake the Lord and his commands.  What about those who are successful in this world?  Success is defined as something totally different in the bible from the success we see with our eyes, in the world.

If we choose to forsake God and his commands to love him with all our heart, and others as ourselves, we are choosing to live in darkness.  And without His light shining on our path and in our hearts, we fall prey to every kind of evil in the world – oppression and depression – being stolen from- and being left alone.

This is why those who do have riches cannot sleep at night for fear of losing it all.  Those who see themselves as successful by their own hand are never secure, because their strength lies in themselves and not in God’s hand.

It’s easy to gaze at others and their “success” and to compare our lives to theirs.  This is not wise.  Our success comes in bringing glory to the Lord by obeying his commands and enjoy the blessings he gives from his hand.

It’s only those blessings that are eternal, satisfying and indestructible.

If We Forsake Him...

The sky over your head will be bronze, the ground beneath you iron. 

What a visual of a life that’s forsaken God and his commands.

Bronze is used to make weapons and armor, not something I want over my head.  And iron has a melting point of 2,797 degrees!  That means if the ground is like iron, it can get very hot and uncomfortable before it melts…

Imagine living under a sky of bronze, and walking on ground that’s iron.  There would never be rain to refresh, and no growth or green beneath our feet.

Sounds like the inside of a prison, right?  We might as well be chained up and left to die.

That’s the life “we choose” if we forsake the Lord.

He has such a beautiful sky full of blessings and a ground that’s beautiful for planting, if we only obey His commands.

No Other Way

Deuteronomy 11:21 The Lord will plague you with diseases until he has destroyed you from the land you are entering to possess. (Please read all of Deuteronomy if you’re just joining in…this is only part of an entire chapter devo).

As we continue to look at the results of forsaking Him, we now read of diseases that will plague us, and that we will be unable to enter the land that should be ours.

Life is hard.  It’s a series of highs and lows, accomplishments and disappointments, and good times and bad times.  However, those who know the Lord and follow after His commands will not be plagued by disease, and will possess the land that’s rightfully theirs.

This doesn’t mean that battles won’t occur, because they will.  It doesn’t mean we sit and watch the land prosper without going in and taking it, because we must.

It does mean that if we don’t want to be beaten down by the lows of life, and we don’t want to miss out on all that God has for us – we need to obey his commands.  We need to love him, and love others.

Plagues last a long time and they leave devastating results – they even wind up in history books.  And losing land that’s rightfully ours?  That’s just criminal and insane!

I want all that God has for me, and He’s made it all so available by simply choosing to “trust and obey.”

There really is no other way.

Forsaking Him

Deuteronomy 11:20 The Lord will send on you curses, confusion and rebuke in everything you put your hand to, until you are destroyed and come to sudden ruin because of the evil you have done in forsaking him.

I realize this is the Old Testament and we live under grace, now.  However, people still get hung up today and blame God for disaster that occurs in the world, when lives are ruined.

God’s message is really simple.  Obey Him, and good things follow.  Even when bad happens, good is at work.  And when we disobey him, bad stuff happens and there’s no good at work there.

Take for example, the law of gravity.  I doubt anyone would blame God if a person, knowing the law of gravity, walked off a tall building to their death. 

The end of this verse “forsaking him” is the key to sure ruin.  It’s the pull that brings you down to ruin.  In fact, curses and confusion come when those who know they should follow Him and instead turn and choose to walk off and “fall.”

God is not mean, nor is he out to destroy people.  He is holy.  He requires that we abandon all and pursue Him, and he will enable us to prosper.  If we choose to walk away from this truth, it’s our choice.