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.
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