Another good morning! And another opportunity today to live for the Lord!
Leviticus chapter 17.
God was frustrated with the Israelites because they were making sacrifices at their camp to other idols. God became jealous and commanded that every sacrifice made must be made before the Lord at the Tabernacle and to no one else. God demands from us 100% allegiance. 100%! To give 1% of our allegiance to anyone or anything else is to have an idol. Our minds are fighting a battle every day: one part of us strives to build an idol or idols, while the other part of us is striving to surrender all to the Lord! This is a battle for me every day. It's too easy for me to get sidetracked.
- Satan starts with a little bit of pride in our hearts or we start to feel confident in our own gifts or abilities forgetting that God is THE gift giver. Our focus on God and what he is able to do in and through us starts to go on ourselves. We start to strive for control over our own life and circumstances. We become our own idol or the things that we put our trust in becomes our idol while God gets pushed to the side.
- Sometimes the very thing that God has us doing in ministry or vocation for his glory, ends up becoming the very thing that pulls our attention away from God. Sometimes relationships, even healthy ones, become the very thing that captures or consumes us so that we end up breaking our allegiance with the Lord.
Truly anything or any hobby or any job or any relationship or any lust or any desire can take us away from our hundred percent allegiance to the Lord and becomes an idol. Because it's so easy to get distracted we need safeguards to help us:
- We need to daily connect with Christ in our quiet time and in the word while humbly praying that he would reveal to us any thought or motive that is not 100% devoted to him.
- We need a close enough friendship with someone we have given permission to to speak truth in our lives to help ensure we don't break our allegiance with the Lord.
- We need to surround ourselves with the body of Christ meaning godly friends and godly fellowship in church and outside the church.
BLESSINGS! Ask God today, “Where is my allegiance?”
I’m thinking today about how we read that the life of the flesh is in the blood and how we are so dependent on the blood of Jesus for life. We would be lost without His blood! Check out John 6:53-56. So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you. Whoever feeds on My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For My flesh is true food, and My blood is true drink. Whoever feeds on My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in him.”