Daily Living

1 John 2:15-17

Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride in possessions—is not from the Father but is from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.

Every day of our life that we wake up, we make a decision, a decision that is a declaration of what/who we will live for that day... We wake up to check our phones, eat, go on facebook, or just go through our day. However, how much more significant is it to stop, before anything else begins and just spend a bit of time with God? Though this may not be your personal devotion time, why not spend a few minutes at His throne in order to start your day out focused on Him and prepared by stating your purpose for that day in Christ. Honestly, very rarely do we ever even have a legitimate excuse not to do this. If we think about it, we sleep in to give ourselves more rest, we have other options and even if we wake up earlier, 5 minutes won’t kill us. We check our phones and facebooks and reboot our social life within a matter of minutes it seems, but we tell God to wait for us to finish with our friends and our social life. My family, this should be so heavy on our hearts if we do this, I am one who does this many times and am greatly convicted of it. We are telling God, the Creator of the Universe, the One who gives us life, our Father who saved us from an eternity of hell and has forgiven our heinous actions against Him, and we look at Him and tell Him that our social life is more of a priority to us than spending five minutes with Him. When we think about it that way, it’s a lot more serious. 

In this passage John warns us of loving the world. It is so attractive. Everything is presented to us so nicely. Alcohol  is advertised to take away your problems and help you have a great time, where really it makes you look like a fool, brings problems back stronger, and leaves you with a headache. Sex is presented to be the greatest thing ever and to be pursued in every relationship and hookup. Only thing is, it doesn’t fill that gap that is there. It just widens it. It doesn’t take away pain or make you more or less of a man/woman, it only says that you have given in to whatever everyone else wants you to do, a real man/woman would stand up for their beliefs. Lying is the easy fix, but never really seems to get easier as lies compound among each other. Pursuit of one’s own happiness never gets you to where you hoped you would be. You may reach the pinnacle of fame/success/love/etc... as you hoped, but it isn’t exactly what you had thought it would be. You still aren’t happy with it. This, my family, is the great lie of the world, that if you do/get these things, you will be happy. This is the truth, you will be far from happy. God wants you to find true joy and that can only be found in Him, by searching for Him, by knowing Him, by spending quality time at His feet. Will we do this today? 

May we seek Him from our very innermost being, allowing Him to have the core of who we are and everything else