March 12: Mark 12:28-34
Key Verse: Mark 12:30
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.”
Devotion:
I do love coming back to these verses and trying to think about my relationship with God in comparison to what this man replied to Jesus when he heard what Jesus said. We can begin to see how Jesus was steering the people away from the habit of making sacrifices and toward a greater community spirit.
I despair at some groups who call themselves Christians but seem more intent on getting a greater number of people through the door than for caring deeply for those who are already coming. I know it is a difficult balance to make all the time – that of trying to get more people to hear about God and caring for those who are already in church, but we do have to remember just who God wants us to reach out to.
Jesus made sure they knew it was important to love God with every fibre in your body, but also how important it is to love the people around you. We don’t know what is going through their minds or in their hearts – God does, but we don’t. We should not simply expect people to be able to call on God like we can, or to rely on God like we do... We need to love and support every person around us, from the people who only come to church for celebrations, to the church leaders themselves...
We need to love and support each other as if we were family, after all we are in God’s family together. What do you do with your church? What have you been doing during these troubling times?
Points to Ponder:
What are you doing to keep your neighbours happy?
Will you reach out to someone next to you today?
March 11: Luke 11:14-23
Key Verse: Luke 11:21
When a strong man, fully armed, guards his own house, his possessions are safe.
Devotion:
We all like to think our home is the safest place we have and, indeed, there are many laws which support this for us in most countries of the world. Our home is supposed to be the place where, by law, people should not be allowed to get to us. But there are people in the world who do not have any respect for the law and they will try to break into your home to steal your belongings.
Just like our physical homes, our bodies are our spiritual home where we like to think we are safe – but there are those spirits in the world who would like to break in and disrupt your spiritual life. Jesus disrupted the evil spirits lives whenever He came across them; He would not allow them to continue living in other people!
It is not often thieves will work together to rob a place because their greed takes over and they want it all for themselves. In the same manner the evil spirits of this world would like your spiritual life to belong to them, and them alone. Jesus has promised to protect us from such entities when we ask Him into our lives because He knows how important our safety is.
The local police would love to have enough support and power to be able to protect our homes from thieves, but sadly they do not always have the power or funding to be able to do so. Fortunately for us, Christ has all the funding and power He needs to be able to protect our spiritual homes from anything and everyone; so long as we ask Him in to protect us and not try and do it ourselves – or worse still, ask some other spiritual entity to come in and try to protect us!
Points to Ponder:
Do you rely on Christ for His promised protection?
Will you make sure your spiritual life is safe and secure in Christ’s hands?
March 10: Matthew 5:17-20
Key Verse: Matthew 5:20
For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.
Devotion:
If we set rigorous rules to follow, we have to live by those rules and keep them to the best of our ability otherwise we will look like law breakers instead of law keepers. When Jesus stood up to the Scribes and Pharisees, it was because their laws kept on growing and changing according to what they though should be good enough for God, not what God wanted them to keep!
When we live in a land which has laws, it is our job to keep those laws and not re-invent them as we go along. When Jesus came to live amongst us, it was no to set aside all the laws God had given to Moses, but to uphold them and to set the laws of the land right once again. Jesus came to make sure God’s Word was brought back to being the ultimate law and not what mankind had though should be best.
No matter how hard we try to make laws we think are good enough for God, we will always fall short of the mark. The more complex the laws we come up with, the more difficult it is for us to keep them and to be righteous according to them. Jesus came to be the ultimate sacrifice for our sins so we would not have to try and give bigger and better sacrifices all the time as we got deeper and deeper into our pits of sin we dig!
God wants us to remember all of the laws and do our best to keep them; but Jesus came to cover all those laws we are not able to keep and protect. God knew we would not be able to keep them all, just as man sinned in the very beginning, so too do we continue to break the rules – because we just are not righteous enough to keep them all. This is why Jesus came – to cover those we cannot keep. We try and try, yet we do falter, trips up and sin... it is our nature. But that does not make it ok...
Points to Ponder:
How well do you keep God’s commandments?
Will you allow Jesus to take on your sin debt which you cannot hope to keep?
March 9: Matthew 18:21-22
Key Verse: Matthew 18:22
Jesus answered, ‘I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.
Devotion:
I find it difficult to really forgive someone when they have done something horrible to me – it doesn’t seem to make sense we should forgive them when they have willingly done something which has hurt us and maybe continues to hurt us... But stop for a while and think of some of the things we have done against Christ; and yet He continue to offer us true forgiveness for those things!
When we do something wrong against someone else, we then have to come to them and ask them for forgiveness so we can start to patch things up with them. It is those times when we begin to realise what it is that makes for a true confession! As a child we may have been told to “say sorry” on multiple occasions and we probably said the words without meaning it at the time – but Jesus wants us to mean the words and then say them.
When we come to Him and ask for His forgiveness, it should be a full and honest admission of our guilt. He has then promised us He will forgive us instead of us wondering whether what we have done was just a little too much this time!
When we begin to understand how difficult it is to ask for forgiveness, we should then begin to realise why some people find it hard to say sorry to us. Jesus made a promise to forgive us, no matter what! If we can at least try to forgive those who do things which hurt us, then just maybe we will think twice before we do something to hurt God!
Points to Ponder:
How often do you have to say sorry?
Have you tried thinking about what you do before doing it?