Read your Bible, pray every day

We aren’t merely puppets in God’s hands and neither have we been programmed to do the things that God planned for us to do. It takes effort to be in His will. First of all it is a conscious decision that we have to make to accept Jesus as our saviour. Secondly we have the responsibility of growing spiritually by reading the Word and by keeping up a relationship with God. We have to make sure that we are 100% sure that we want to follow Jesus and that we aren’t lukewarm Christians who just go to church on Sundays and read a daily devotional when it suits us. We should all be very much knowledgeable and aware of the contents of the Bible. It isn’t privileged information for pastors only. It isn’t just ministry and theological students who have to study the Bible. It isn’t just for missionaries to know the Bible. It is for every believer. Someone once said to me that it’s impossible for anyone to spend more time reading their Bible than it is to watch television. I proved her wrong, but times change and I want to say that we should be spending more time in God’s Word and in prayer than we do on social media.

How often don’t people complain that life doesn’t come with a manual, but it does. The Bible is our manual for life. There are no questions we can ask that don’t get answered in the Bible. If someone wants to practice law they have to go to university for a number of years and they have to study and memorize all kinds of laws and precedents. Imagine going to court and having someone represent you who has never studied law. What a disaster that would be. Likewise how can we step into the courtroom of heaven and ask God for something if we don’t know what is written in His book?

James 4:1-5, Where do wars and fights come from among you? Do they not come from your desires for pleasure that war in your members? You lust and do not have. You murder and covet and cannot obtain. You fight and war. Yet you do not have because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask amiss, that you may spend it on your pleasures. Adulterers and adulteresses! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Whoever therefore wants to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. Or do you think that the Scripture says in vain, “The Spirit who dwells in us yearns jealously”?

If we don’t read the Bible and in the process discover that we should be asking God for His will for our lives, we are going to fall into this trap. We look at the world and at people who aren’t believers and we see the things they have and the things they view as being important and we are deceived into thinking that those are the things in life that really are important. Things, stuff, possessions and money are not bad, but they aren’t the most important things in our lives. The state of our souls is way more important than the state of our bank account. We are led to believe by the worldly way of thinking that we are less than good enough if we don’t have enough money. But here’s a newsflash, if money is our motivator, we will never have enough. There are billionaires that died of starvation because they were too mean to use their money to buy food for themselves.

1 Timothy 6:7, For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, for which some have strayed from the faith in their greediness, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.

Note that this verse does not say that money is the root of all evil, but that the love of money if the root of all evil. I know that there are people who have an anointing to make money so that they can finance the Kingdom, but that is different from having money as your motivator. Money can never be our reason to live. We can’t let money (the lack of it or the excess of it) keep us awake at night. We cannot be blindly led be the world and think that their way is the right way. We have to read our Bibles and we have to follow what they say. That’s the only way that we are going to be in God’s will.

Communication

My husband and I celebrated out 31^st wedding anniversary yesterday. I calculated that we have been married for 11307 days. Many people who congratulated us said that we weren’t in the majority because so many people don’t stay married these days. I believe for a successful marriage there has to be effective communication. There are scores of children who grow up in single parent families, mostly with single mothers. Many people just don’t want to take responsibility for their actions. There was a report on the news of a dead new-born baby who had been discovered at a garbage dump. It is so heart breaking when I hear of all the sadness and all the perversity in the world. The dictionary gives the meaning of perversity as, ‘a deliberate desire to behave in an unreasonable or unacceptable way; contrariness.’

There were also reports of various murders country wide. Conditions don’t seem very bright at all when I listen to the news. Christians must be wary not to fall into the trap of blaming all these things on the end times.

Matthew 24:6 -14 And you will hear of wars and rumours of wars. See that you are not troubled; for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. And there will be famines, pestilences, and earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginning of sorrows.

“Then they will deliver you up to tribulation and kill you, and you will be hated by all nations for My name’s sake. And then many will be offended, will betray one another, and will hate one another. Then many false prophets will rise up and deceive many. And because lawlessness will abound, the love of many will grow cold. But he who endures to the end shall be saved. And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in all the world as a witness to all the nations, and then the end will come.

We cannot ever become discouraged when circumstances look bleak. We cannot ever give up evangelizing and being witnesses and we must never give up praying for missionaries and other people who make it their life’s mission to spread the Gospel. We really should also lift up marriages in our prayers. The enemy hates Godly marriages and any kind of unity for that matter.

John 17:21-23

that they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me. And the glory which You gave Me I have given them, that they may be one just as We are one: I in them, and You in Me; that they may be made perfect in one, and that the world may know that You have sent Me, and have loved them as You have loved Me.

The devil wants to cause division among Christians at all costs.

1 Corinthians 1:10 Now I plead with you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you all speak the same thing, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment.

Here Paul is pleading with the believers not to have division amongst themselves. Where there is division, there isn’t proper communication. People who are angry or bitter can’t communicate in a reasonable way with each other. Effective communication is the key to unity.

Ehesians 4:29 Let no corrupt word proceed out of your mouth, but what is good for necessary edification, that it may impart grace to the hearers.

Proverbs 25:11  A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in settings of silver.

We really have to watch our words when we speak. I think we rate what we say way too low. Speech is our primary means of communication, and it’s so easy to say things we don’t really mean and then hurt people badly. We cannot take back words once they have come out of our mouths. They’re out there for eternity. God made the world by speaking words. What His words caused all those years ago is still here today.

Proverbs 18 21 Death and life are in the power of the tongue,

And those who love it will eat its fruit.

Our words are really powerful for bad and for good. We should never use our words to break down people, irrespective of who they are and what they have done to us.  We should use them to build up our families, friends and fellow believers. We should use them to lift up others in prayer and to tell Go what’s in our hearts. Let us spend much more time thinking about what we say and how we communicate.