Verse of the Day: 1 Samuel 16:1, Now the LORD said to Samuel, “How long will you mourn for Saul, seeing I have rejected him from reigning over Israel? Fill your horn with oil, and go; I am sending you to Jesse the Bethlehemite. For I have provided Myself a king among his sons.”
King Saul was a fine example of what happens when we make choices based on our own wants and desires. The people had God as their King. When they decided that they wanted to be like everyone else around them, they rejected God’s leadership and sought a human king. God, who allows us freewill, gave them a king after their own heart. Hence, they got a king who was just like them. Saul was a king who had a superficial relationship with God at best. As a matter of fact, as time went on, it became clear that King Saul did not even see God as his God, but Samuel’s God (1 Samuel 15). Now, as the kingdom was stripped away from Saul, God is sending Samuel to seek out the king God has chosen for Himself. Here is the sad fact about many of us as we live out our Christian life; far too often we make our choices based on our own wants and desires and forfeit what God desires for us. James 4:2-3 says, “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. 3 You ask and do not receive, because you ask amiss, that you may spend it on your pleasures.” Not only do we do this with choosing the things we want materially, but we do this with our relationships as well. Israel traded their relationship with God for a relationship with a human king, so they could be like other nations (1 Samuel 8:4-5). How often do we, in spite of knowing that God does not want us to be unequally yoked (2 Corinthians 6:14-18), choose to be with an unsaved person or with a Christian who clearly has a shallow relationship with the LORD? Yet, in spite of the warning signs, or the advice from people who are trying to give us sincere guidance, we still go forward to choose that which we know would not be God’s choice for us. Many of us Christians have missed opportunities to live joy-filled, blessed, lives, serving God with a spouse that also has a heart to serve the Lord, simply because we made our choice for a mate over God’s choice for a mate. We became impatient and allowed ourselves to be convinced that we were getting too old, or we would never find “that” person, when all along God may have been preparing us for the mate He had for us and preparing them for us. It truly is sad when we see Christians buy into the hope of finding someone to live out the whole “romance novel” dream of a relationship. They trust social media’s and reality TV’s lies about what true happiness in relationships looks like. We end up making the disastrous decision to be yoked to ungodly people in hopes of finding “prince charming” or our “dream girl”. The most dangerous thing we can allow ourselves to fall into is the trap of fantasizing what the perfect relationship would look like outside of Jesus being the center of that relationship. Before we make our choices in respect to material things that we want, as opposed to what we really need, or make our choices in respect to relationships we think we want or need, why not spend some time in prayer? Why not stop and ask the LORD, “LORD, who is it that YOU have for me?” “LORD, have I not found a mate because you are still working on me, or maybe still working on them?” The bottom line is that the best choice we can make in getting what we want or need is to let the LORD make that choice for us. With God’s choice we can never go wrong because our choice is usually selfish, while God’s choice is always selfless and best for us.
Today, God extends an invitation to you to accept His gift of salvation (Rom 6:23). Will you accept it? Anyone who calls on Jesus, by faith, in repentance, confessing your sins, will receive eternal life. Do not put off calling on Him, and receive Him and His gift of salvation today (Rom 10:13).
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