Saturday 6 Mar 2021

March 6: Luke 15:11-16
 
Key Verse: Luke 15:13
Not long after that, the younger son got together all he had, set off for a distant country and there squandered his wealth in wild living.
 
Devotion:
If God loves us so much, why doesn’t He give us everything we want. This is a statement I hear a lot from people who have not yet accepted Christ into their lives and are seeking for answers; this seems to be the simplest one to start off from because we each have very different experiences in our lives but a common theme in life is the giving of gifts to those we care about.
 
Sometimes giving gifts can be counter-productive because it gives a false sense of worth. The parable of the lost son is one of those which highlights human behaviour and one which we can relate to. God does love us, and He does try to allow us to have everything we need; but there is a big difference between what we want and what we need.
 
A common human saying is to teach a person to fish instead of giving them all the fish they need (or farming etc.) God wants what is best for us. Just giving us the food we need without us having to work for it or pay for it does not help in the long run. If we learn to totally rely on hand-outs from God, then we lose the value of what we have and lose the urgency of what we need in our lives.
 
Just like this teaching, if we are given everything we could ever hope for, we may well squander it because it loses its value. But if we have to balance what we can get with hardships in our lives, we add more value to those things we need. It teaches us to be more aware of the things we need in life. God wants us to assign greater value to the things we need and less value to things such as money even though it can be used to supply our needs.
 
Points to Ponder:
How often do you ask God for things in your life?
 
How often do you do things for others?