Devotional 200810

Dear brothers and sisters,
Good morning. What a wonderful day to have some leisure time with God! 4 days of planning and evaluation meetings were quite draining mentally. On top of it, I still need to catch up with my school work which is over due at night…Thank God for extra grace and strength for me to press on. I believe our loving Heavenly Father will surely watch over each one of His children as we commit to walk with Him and live for His glory.

My son has left for college early this morning. Please pray for him. He is driving a very old Honda by himself with no air condition system from California to Tennessee, passing through desert and central plains. It will take him 3 days (driving at least 12 hours a day) to get there. And he will start school on Monday. Pray that the Lord will give him a safe journey and a long quiet time to interact with the Holy Spirit. “3 days” is a unique term in the Bible. It produces a life changing experience like Jonah in fish’s belly, our Lord Jesus in the tomb and Paul in total blindness…and at the end, a new life was born through it. Pray that it will have a similar effect on my son that his life is transformed and revived for the glory of God.

From day one, we human beings like to become God. We want to see like God and comprehend like Him. We prefer not to obey His Word but act according to our own wisdom and street smart. We always thought we knew better than even God. And because of this pride, we are tempted to go our own way and do our own things. We’re careless about God’s principles. We sugar coat this rebellion with words like “liberty” and “human rights.” In reality, we abuse liberty and human rights, to indulge our self-centeredness, just like we abuse God’s grace in many ways.

When Simon saw that the Spirit was given at the laying on of the apostles' hands, he offered them money and said, "Give me also this ability so that everyone on whom I lay my hands may receive the Holy Spirit." Peter answered: "May your money perish with you, because you thought you could buy the gift of God with money! (Acts 8:18-20). A curious thing happens to us when we get a taste of God. It happened first in Eden and it keeps happening. The experience of God—the ecstasy, the wholeness of it—is accompanied by a temptation to reproduce the experience as God. The taste for God is debased into greed to be God. Being loved by God is twisted into a lust to God-performance. I get a glimpse of a world in which God is in charge and think maybe I have a chance at it. I abandon the personal presence of God and take up with the depersonalized and canny serpent. I flee the shining face of God for a slithery world of religion that gives me license to manipulate people and acquire godlike attributes to myself. The moment I begin cultivating the possibility of acquiring that kind of power and glory for myself, I most certainly will want to blot out the face, flee from the presence of the Lord, and seek a place where I can develop pride and acquire power.

May God give you a good weekend to enjoy His presence…

Love you in His goodness,
Lawrence