Read the Rules! – Part 2
By Shirley Mitchell
"Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?" Jesus replied: " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments."
Matthew 22:36-40
Yesterday, I told you about the time that my daughter Mikayla broke one of her brackets on the braces of her teeth. I allowed her to buy rock candy and because neither one of us were familiar with the orthodontist’s rules, her bracket broke. When she told me the bad news, we faced each other and said simultaneously, “We have got to read the rules!”
Sometimes, we need to go back to our Rule Book, too. We may have learned the rules when we were a child or perhaps when we first became a Christian. However, it is easy to forget the rules, and we need a refresher course at times.
Jesus summarized the Ten Commandments, the Law of Moses, and all that the prophets told the people by these two commandments in Matthew 22. Yesterday, we talked about the first four commandments and our relationship with God. Today we will talk about the next six commandments. Jesus covered them by saying “Love your neighbor as yourself.“
God wants us to have esteem and to know that we are dearly loved. Therefore, it is okay to love our neighbor like we love ourselves. If we will take care of each other like we want to be taken care of, then everyone’s needs will be met. If we treat them like we want to be treated, then we won’t break this next list of commandments.
The fifth commandment is to honor our father and mother. It is the first commandment with a promise – that we will live long. We are to honor them regardless of whether or not they are saved. We are to learn to respect their position regardless of whether their characters are worthy of respect.
The sixth commandment is to not murder. This means we are to not intentionally kill another person. It is not talking about acting in self-defense or protecting a nation in times of war. It is addressed to individuals who have hate, jealousy, or uncontrolled anger in their hearts or do not honor the sanctity of human life.
The seventh commandment is to not commit adultery. Oh, my, I have a lot to say about this one. In our sex-crazed society, adultery is prevalent. It is no longer the great taboo. Precious one, we must protect our marriages. Wives, we must not nag but respect our husbands and take care of his needs. Both husbands and wives, we must not put ourselves in relationships with others that create a level of intimacy that belongs to our mates. Remember, precious one, if you get them through adultery, your chances of losing them through adultery is great. An unfaithful heart won’t change without God.
The eighth commandment is to not steal. We should not take something that doesn’t belong to us. If we steal, we are letting satan lie to us for the need for immediate gratification and steal from us our character and hurt our relationship with God. Stealers reject dependency on God to provide our needs and godly desires.
The ninth commandment is to not give false testimony against your neighbor. Simply, we should not lie about each other. I’m also amazed at the wickedness in people’s hearts to hurt others in order to elevate themselves or put that person down. I’m also amazed at how many lies are stemmed from inability to see the truth of situations, the denial of truth, or reliance on our limited perception. I tell my children all the time, there is nothing worse than a liar. A liar will betray friends, twist things in their favor, and eventually lie to herself.
The tenth commandment is to not covet your neighbor’s house, wife, animals, or servants – essentially anything belonging to someone else. I believe this is the biggest sin in our country. We are so stricken with the illness of coveting and longing for what others have. And most of us have no idea that we do it.
Did you notice how many of these are about control and the desire to have it our way? What motivates people to covet? Because they want to create the best life here and control what they have. People steal for the same reason. They want it now, and it doesn’t matter how they get it. Why does someone lie? To control what others believe about someone or manipulate the situation.
As we leave each other for the day, let’s really think about this refresher course on God’s commandments. Let’s implant these commandments in our hearts and be compelled by our love for God and love for people to live by them the best that we can. Let’s relinquish control to God and let His way for our lives win.
Pray with me: Oh, God Almighty, You are so wise. You knew exactly the Ten Commandments that the Israelites and we would need and the two commandments that Jesus used to summarize it all. Help us to love You with all our hearts, minds, souls, and strengths. Teach us to love our neighbors as ourselves. Help us to care about others and to desire to meet their needs as we would meet our own. May we not live in self-centeredness. Guard us from the temptations to dishonor our parents, murder, commit adultery, steal, lie, and covet. Help us to be people who know Your rules. At the same time, may we be motivated by love and not legalism. Help us to relinquish control of our lives to You! It’s in the Name above all names, in Jesus’ Name, Yeshua’s Name, we pray. Amen.
Copyright ©2009 Christ Compels
"For Christ's love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again." 2 Corinthians 5:14-15
Showing posts with label covet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label covet. Show all posts
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Monday, May 11, 2009
The Desires Battle
The Desires Battle
“What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? You want something but don’t get it. You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight. You do not have, because you do not ask God.”
James 4:1-2
For the past few days, God has been speaking to me about the effect of desires. I am not quarreling with anyone, but God called me to check my desires and to examine any desires battle in my mind. In today’s Scriptures, James is saying that fights and quarrels are the result of the desires that battle inside of us. Inside of our minds, desires are fighting for their position. Desires live inside of us. God created us with a soul and gave us desires. We can desire many good things. However, we can twist a “good” thing into a harmful desire.
We can desire a husband, a home or for a bigger home, children or for the ones we have to grow up to be “good,” money for the lifestyle we want, “better” job, “more” ministry, and the list could go on and on. None of these things are necessarily wrong. God created us to accomplish, achieve, and strive toward goals. It is when these desires get out of order, when they get excessive or disproportionate to what our truest desire should be - God,- then we see this disorder breeds fights and quarrels. We fight, quarrel, kill, and covet because we can’t have what we want.
Fighting can be just that - fighting with words, punch to a punching bag, or a fist to the table. It can take the form of rudeness, bickering, irritableness, or unkindness. The battle within has a way of leaking out past our masks. Somehow, our faces will reflect the battle within. Either they don’t bear true joy, or they bear our struggle in the form of scowls, clenched teeth, or a tightened brow.
I believe that many people – even believers – covet a lot more than they realize. Coveting is one of the biggest sins in our time. Think about how we are constantly being bombarded by advertising. If advertising did not make us desire to buy the products, then it wouldn’t be working. Instead, advertising is a billion dollar business. Even if we don’t purchase the products, advertising drives our culture and shapes our minds more than we realize. Marketing occurs in such clever ways that we are drawn to it. Before we realize it, we covet. Television shows, magazines, internet stories, and many other forms of media shape our culture, lure us, and we fall prey to coveting. We compare our lives and our possessions to others’. We covet careers, husbands, kids, friendships, personality, ministry, beauty, talents, God-experiences, and on and on. Then, it feeds the battle within. Our desires shift and are twisted.
While many of us may not be committing murder of another person, how many marriages and friendships do we see ending? Marriages end in divorce sometimes because wives set expectations too high for their husbands to meet their every need, replacing God for him (and vice versa for men to do it, too). Additionally, wives can wish their men were more loving, more godly, or a more Christ-like father. They try to shape them into what they want them to be instead of letting the Holy Spirit do His job. They get frustrated because they don’t have the power to change them. It drives a wedge between them. Gosh, Have I lived this one! We can also kill friendships. Or we go into debt and make ourselves slaves to it. We can figuratively kill our relationships or our financial freedom.
When our desires are misshaped, then we have trouble resisting sin. James 1:14 says, “but each one it tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed.” The evil one tempts us by our own evil desire. The desires within us lure us into being hunted, baited, and dragged away into his lair (according to the Greek words in this Scripture).
God’s Word tells us in Psalm 37:4, “Delight yourself in the LORD and he will give you the desires of your heart.” In other words, when we make God our truest desire and we make Him our God with no other gods before Him, then our desires are rearranged in the proper order. He is released to give us the desires of our hearts. Our desires grow by what we feed them. If we feed our desires our relationship with God, then our desires grow more godly. However, without an intake of perfect truth, we struggle to know what the bottom line is and don’t see things – our lives, problems, information, messages from the world – properly. Then disorder of our desires is prevalent. The battle within rages.
Beloved, I invite you to ask God to show you this year what are your deepest desires? Ask the Holy Spirit to search your heart and do a desires check. May we be able to say that in 2009 we know that our desires are in the proper order and positioned so that God can give us the desires of our heart.
Pray with me: Oh, Lord, our God, we love You, and we adore You. Search our minds and our hearts. Reveal to us our desires. There may be areas where we are weak, and it may be difficult for us to give up our desires. However, we cry out to You to help us to rid ourselves of harmful desires, to untwist a desire out of shape, and to make our desires pleasing to You. It’s in Jesus’ precious name that we pray. Amen.
Copyright ©2009 Christ Compels
“What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? You want something but don’t get it. You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight. You do not have, because you do not ask God.”
James 4:1-2
For the past few days, God has been speaking to me about the effect of desires. I am not quarreling with anyone, but God called me to check my desires and to examine any desires battle in my mind. In today’s Scriptures, James is saying that fights and quarrels are the result of the desires that battle inside of us. Inside of our minds, desires are fighting for their position. Desires live inside of us. God created us with a soul and gave us desires. We can desire many good things. However, we can twist a “good” thing into a harmful desire.
We can desire a husband, a home or for a bigger home, children or for the ones we have to grow up to be “good,” money for the lifestyle we want, “better” job, “more” ministry, and the list could go on and on. None of these things are necessarily wrong. God created us to accomplish, achieve, and strive toward goals. It is when these desires get out of order, when they get excessive or disproportionate to what our truest desire should be - God,- then we see this disorder breeds fights and quarrels. We fight, quarrel, kill, and covet because we can’t have what we want.
Fighting can be just that - fighting with words, punch to a punching bag, or a fist to the table. It can take the form of rudeness, bickering, irritableness, or unkindness. The battle within has a way of leaking out past our masks. Somehow, our faces will reflect the battle within. Either they don’t bear true joy, or they bear our struggle in the form of scowls, clenched teeth, or a tightened brow.
I believe that many people – even believers – covet a lot more than they realize. Coveting is one of the biggest sins in our time. Think about how we are constantly being bombarded by advertising. If advertising did not make us desire to buy the products, then it wouldn’t be working. Instead, advertising is a billion dollar business. Even if we don’t purchase the products, advertising drives our culture and shapes our minds more than we realize. Marketing occurs in such clever ways that we are drawn to it. Before we realize it, we covet. Television shows, magazines, internet stories, and many other forms of media shape our culture, lure us, and we fall prey to coveting. We compare our lives and our possessions to others’. We covet careers, husbands, kids, friendships, personality, ministry, beauty, talents, God-experiences, and on and on. Then, it feeds the battle within. Our desires shift and are twisted.
While many of us may not be committing murder of another person, how many marriages and friendships do we see ending? Marriages end in divorce sometimes because wives set expectations too high for their husbands to meet their every need, replacing God for him (and vice versa for men to do it, too). Additionally, wives can wish their men were more loving, more godly, or a more Christ-like father. They try to shape them into what they want them to be instead of letting the Holy Spirit do His job. They get frustrated because they don’t have the power to change them. It drives a wedge between them. Gosh, Have I lived this one! We can also kill friendships. Or we go into debt and make ourselves slaves to it. We can figuratively kill our relationships or our financial freedom.
When our desires are misshaped, then we have trouble resisting sin. James 1:14 says, “but each one it tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed.” The evil one tempts us by our own evil desire. The desires within us lure us into being hunted, baited, and dragged away into his lair (according to the Greek words in this Scripture).
God’s Word tells us in Psalm 37:4, “Delight yourself in the LORD and he will give you the desires of your heart.” In other words, when we make God our truest desire and we make Him our God with no other gods before Him, then our desires are rearranged in the proper order. He is released to give us the desires of our hearts. Our desires grow by what we feed them. If we feed our desires our relationship with God, then our desires grow more godly. However, without an intake of perfect truth, we struggle to know what the bottom line is and don’t see things – our lives, problems, information, messages from the world – properly. Then disorder of our desires is prevalent. The battle within rages.
Beloved, I invite you to ask God to show you this year what are your deepest desires? Ask the Holy Spirit to search your heart and do a desires check. May we be able to say that in 2009 we know that our desires are in the proper order and positioned so that God can give us the desires of our heart.
Pray with me: Oh, Lord, our God, we love You, and we adore You. Search our minds and our hearts. Reveal to us our desires. There may be areas where we are weak, and it may be difficult for us to give up our desires. However, we cry out to You to help us to rid ourselves of harmful desires, to untwist a desire out of shape, and to make our desires pleasing to You. It’s in Jesus’ precious name that we pray. Amen.
Copyright ©2009 Christ Compels
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