September 23: Luke 6:6-11
Key Verse: Luke 6:9
Then Jesus said to them, ‘I ask you, which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save life or to destroy it?’
Devotion:
I wonder, have you used Sunday as an excuse to not do something you had promised to do, or not done what you promised because it is Sunday! We tend to use excuses of all kinds to get out of doing things we promise others just because we are feeling lazy or we don't want to do what we promised!
God has not promised us anything which He has not been willing to deliver on – we can depend on all His promises all of the time. When Jesus was in the synagogue on the Sabbath, He was not going to stop healing others who needed it just because it was the Sabbath. He was not going to use the Sabbath as an excuse to not show His love for others!
We tend to give in to excuses when it suits us and use those excuses to get out of doing things when it suits us – as if we are living on both sides of the fence! Jesus made sure everyone was going to witness His healing of this man on the Sabbath because the Pharisees were doing what they could to try and trick Him into working on the Sabbath... twisting God's law into something it was not meant to be!
God wants us to continue doing good at all times, continue loving others at all times and continue giving Him the glory at all times too. This includes doing things on Sundays, not to show people they should work on Sundays, but to show them we follow God above any rules written down! God does not want His own commandments to be used against Him!
Points to Ponder:
What do you do on Sundays as well as going to church?
Do you go out of your way to help others on Sundays?
September 22: Psalm 119:33-37
Key Verse: Psalm 119:36
Turn my heart towards your statutes and not towards selfish gain.
Devotion:
This chapter is roughly in the middle of our modern bibles and is the longest chapter too. It is a series of stanzas of a great poem talking about God's Word and what we should be doing with it – rather fitting it is in the middle of the bible!
If we take a look at the whole bible, we may well get a bit discouraged because it is a long book and is hard to take in because it separates us from God. God is Holy and cannot abide sin, our bibles are a reminder of this fact and continue to teach us what we do wrong in our lives. We can either take it as a book which tells us of all the ways we have done things wrong, or we can look at it as a book which describes all the ways our forefathers have done things wrong!
If we take it personally, we will get discouraged and we may well give up trying to follow it before we get this far in the book. But if we allow it to teach us of all the things which have gone wrong in the world, and aim to not follow in the path of those wrong-doings, then we stand a much greater chance of sticking with things!
We can follow the words of this stanza and plead with God to teach us what has gone wrong and how we can avoid doing the same things in our own lives. We can ask Him to protect us from the evil in the world and allow the word to guide us where we should go rather than what we have done wrong. Always look at the positive side and gain strength from it rather than allow it to beat you into submission!
Points to Ponder:
Do you have a positive attitude?
Will you allow God to guide you through His Word?
September 21: Proverbs 3:1-6
Key Verse: Proverbs 3:3
Let love and faithfulness never leave you; bind them round your neck, write them on the tablet of your heart.
Devotion:
How many times have you come up with a plan only to see it fail because you did not account for some 'unseen' circumstance? As a computer programmer, I try to make sure my code is going to stand up to all sorts of things which can go wrong, but there always seems to be something I have not thought of which someone else tries and it breaks the program!
Life is a bit like that too – we try to cover all our bases to make sure our lives are as good as we can hope for, but there is always something which we have not accounted for which sees us fail just when we think we should work things out.
God did not just have to guess what could happen for a few years (like our lives) but had to account for everything man was going to do for thousands of years. He had to make sure there was a way mankind could be saved no matter how many things we try and no matter how many things we get wrong!
He gave us His word it would all work out and has seen that through with the promise we will be saved. He even made sure this was all written down thousands of years before we were born! He made sure we would have a way out of the corner we backed ourselves into. All He asked of us was to trust in Him, believing what He did was for our sake and believing He would come again to take us to be with Him.
Points to Ponder:
How often do you fail at things?
Will you look to God and trust in what He has done for you?
September 20: Mark 9:33-37
Key Verse: Mark 9:34
But they kept quiet because on the way they had argued about who was the greatest.
Devotion:
How many times have you stretched the truth so you can be 'better' than everyone else? I can remember doing this on multiple occasions when I was young, and then thinking I would grow out of it as I got older... but the temptation is always there to stretch the truth so we can seem better than we are!
When the disciples did not want to admit what they were arguing about, it was because of this situation – they were trying to prove they were better than others. Instead of pulling them up about it and telling them off, Jesus simply told them what they should have been doing. Another trait we should learn and follow Jesus with!
We don't have to tell people off all the time so they can 'learn the right way,' we should be showing them the right way and allowing them to make the choice. Jesus wanted the disciples to learn from example and not from being constantly told off for doing things wrong. We have enough people in our lives who tell us what not to do, but not enough people who are willing to show us the right ways of doing things to encourage us in the right path.
Jesus wants us to not build ourselves up to show others they are not as good as us, but to lower ourselves to a position where we can lift others up and show them how good they could be if they chose to be! This is what Christ does to and for us all the time!
Points to Ponder:
Do you tell people off all the time?
Will you try to build someone up today instead?