July 27: Jeremiah 7:1-11

Key Verse: Jeremiah 7:6
if you do not oppress the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow and do not shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not follow other gods to your own harm

Devotion:
We do not have to read too much from the Old Testament to figure out what God likes and what He dislikes. We have all of this written down so we can find these things out for ourselves; after all, we don’t seem to like listening to people when they tell us what we can and cannot do! But God gave us our history so we can learn the good from the bad. He gave us families to help us spread the knowledge about the good and bad – but left us with the choice we have to make by ourselves.

He is not forcing us to do anything, but He does give us very strong words of what may happen if we ignore His ways and His rules. It is not so much that He will bring things upon us, but that the world will be able to treat us unjustly because we will not have His protection all around us!

God does not choose to do bad things to us. We choose to walk away from Him and His ways and invite those bad things upon ourselves. We are responsible for the choices we make and the things which happen to us. But, if we choose to follow His ways and His instructions, He will be close at hand to protect us from the world and will try to guide us to avoid all those bad situations we always seem to find ourselves in!

The more we do wrong, the further away from God we get and the less protection He is able to offer us – think about it and draw closer to Him!

Points to Ponder:
Do you knowingly invite bad things into your life?

Are you walking away from God and His protection without thinking about it?