Glorious God, Wonderful Messiah, how Faithful is Your Name. In You we live, move and have our being. Blessed be Your Holy Name. Thank You for another blessed day, for we will receive from Your bounty in Jesus Name.
Beloved, if you are happy and you know say praise the Lord! Just teasing you. The bible says “in all things with thanksgiving let your request be known to God” (Phil 4:6). So your giving Praise is not a function of whether you are happy or sad; you are disposed or not rather it is a function of Who God is.
He is able to do all things, that challenges is still there does not change His personality. It has nothing to do with His unfailing love. His Faithfulness standeth sure. Remember what we read yesterday concerning the demonized man at the cemetery.
One day, Jesus remembered Him and He was set free. The legion that was tormenting him was begging our Lord Jesus “please do not destroy us”. Same way when your case will be remembered you will like them that dream dreams. Your mouth will be filled with laughter. They that mock you now will exclaim indeed your God is a Living God for indeed He has done great things for and praise be His Holy Name forever.
One thing you and I must know and work towards is “winning Souls to the Kingdom”. It just have to be our life styles. We are awake, we are at it; we are sleeping we are doing same for the Lord.
How? someone wants to know. There are people who ordinary cannot give their lives to Christ. For such people you pray them into the kingdom. While resting or waiting to catch up sleep, you are offering prayers on their behalf, sleep will naturally take you over but you have refuse to give up on them.
I have a case like that and gradually God is proving Himself strong in it, so you can do the same. I will not give up on you until you (mention the person’s name) and one day his spirit man will yield over to the power of salvation. Please be the Name of the Lord.
Beloved, to function adequately, in this office, you must be ready to deny yourself pleasures of this world and carry your cross. Carrying of cross as you will read later in our tomorrows devotion is not living with failures, sickness, evil habits etc. none of such, for God’s desire for us is to prosper and be in health even as our soul prospereth. Carrying your cross depicts doing the will of God for you. Functioning in your area of calling. Being where God wants you to be and doing what He also wants you to do, that is living obediently to His Word.
How do I deny myself? Find out more from the message below:
Then Jesus said to His disciples, “If anyone wants to come with Me, he must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow Me.”—Matthew 16:24
Sin causes us to be self-centered, shifting our hearts from God to self. The essence of salvation is an about-face from self-centeredness to God-centeredness. The Christian must spend a lifetime denying self. Our great temptation will be to affirm ourselves while we follow Jesus. James and John did this when they chose to follow Jesus but asked for the two most prominent positions in Jesus’ kingdom (Mark 10:35–37). James and John wanted a discipleship that would not impede their personal desires and aspirations. Like them, we say, “Lord, I want to be pleasing to you, but I want to stay where I am.”
Self-centered people try to keep their lives unruffled and undisturbed, safe and secure. Our temptation is to give our time and effort to the goals of this world. Then, when we are successful in the world’s eyes, we seek to bring God into our world by honoring Him with our success. We may say, “Now that I have succeeded in business [or sports, or politics, or with my family, or even Christian ministry], I want to give God the glory for it!” God is not interested in receiving secondhand glory from our activity. God receives glory from His activity through our lives.
The world will entice you to adopt its goals and to invest in temporal things. Resist the temptation to pursue your own goals, asking God to bless them. Rather, deny yourself and join the activity of God as He reveals it to you.
Some people wants to know God’s agenda before giving in to the services of God. Unfortunately God does not function that way. Frist, you must believe in Him, deny yourself then He reveal Himself and His purpose to you. ?One way of discovering His purpose in your live, is to find out whom He is sending you to: How? You will discover in the next message:
“I brought him to Your disciples, but they couldn’t heal him.”
Jesus replied, “You unbelieving and rebellious generation! How long will I be with you? How long must I put up with you? Bring him here to Me.”—Matthew 17:16–17
Jesus gave His disciples the power to cast out demons and to perform miracles of healing (Matt. 10:8). He gave them His authority to minister to people, yet they became so self-centered that they lost the power to do the work of God. When God sent a father with his epileptic son to them for healing, they failed miserably. They were so concerned with position and status (Mark 9:32–35) that they lost their focus on what God wanted to do through them.
Jesus’ response to His disciples included some of the harshest words ever to come from His mouth. He called His own disciples “unbelieving” and “perverse” and questioned how much longer He had to endure them! Why? Because they were supposed to be on mission with Him to bring salvation to others, but they had become so disoriented to Him that they were spiritually powerless, lacking the faith to bring physical and spiritual comfort to those God had sent to them.
God ought to be able to send a hurting person to any child of His and expect that they will be helped. Like the disciples, we can become so preoccupied with our own ambitions and distracted by the busyness of our lives that we become ineffective in ministering to those whom God sends to us. It is even possible to become so involved in religious activity that we are of no help to anyone.
Regularly take inventory of your life to see if you are being a faithful steward of every life God sends to you. As we do that God will make us effective weapon in His hand in Jesus Name.
Remain blessed in the Lord.
