Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Lent Day 30 - Dying to Self...


Well, if anything in us has to be a ‘God thing’…this is it.

The bottom line of this is our becoming more like Christ. As we are doing that, our lives reflect him and his love, and our worship and service to him flows out of his presence in us. We cannot die to self and serve others in our own power. It goes against our very nature. First, we have to be totally sold out to the Lord and be willing to let him change us – every day – into a truer likeness of him.

Romans 12:1-2 “Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer you bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God – this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be willing to test and approve what God’s will is – his good, pleasing, and perfect will.”

Read Romans 14. It talks about the weak and the strong in the faith. We have a responsibility to one another that will sometimes require us to set aside our own rights to protect someone of weaker faith. “For none of us lives to himself alone…we live to the Lord…”

No personal freedom is worth breaking fellowship with God, and none is worth causing a brother or sister to stumble, or a lost person to turn away from God.

Luke 17:1-3 “Jesus said to his disciples, ‘Things that cause people to sin are bound to come, but woe to that person through whom they come. It would be better for him to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around his neck than for him to cause one of these little ones to sin. So watch yourselves.’”

We are free in Christ, but we are not allowed to exercise that freedom to the point of confusing others and leading them away from the Lord.

In your prayer time today, ask God to show you any area of your life that needs to be “crucified with Christ”. Ask him to show you anything that might be causing someone to be confused about who God is. It may be something very obvious; it may be something so subtle that you would not even give a thought to it, but we all have areas that need to be surrendered to the Lord. Thank God for the freedom you have in Christ. Ask him to help you share the good news of that freedom – from all kinds of bondage – with someone who needs to hear it.

I am praying for you today. 

Sherri



1 comment:

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