THURSDAY August 29th
2 Chronicles 7:17–20
‘And as for you, if you will walk before me as David your father walked, doing according to all that I have commanded you and keeping my statutes and my rules, then I will establish your royal throne, as I covenanted with David your father, saying, ‘You shall not lack a man to rule Israel.’ “But if you turn aside and forsake my statutes and my commandments that I have set before you, and go and serve other gods and worship them, then I will pluck you up from my land that I have given you, and this house that I have consecrated for my name, I will cast out of my sight, and I will make it a proverb and a byword among all peoples.’
Following on from the previous devotion, I decided to read on down through the passage from 2 Chronicles 7 and as I looked at these verses, the LORD God gave a challenge which was two-fold, 1) ‘If you will walk before me’, then there would be blessing, compared to 2) ‘But if you turn aside and forsake’, there will be consequences, even to the point of being cast out of God’s sight.
We cannot play fast and loose with God. We must either choose to live all out for him or not at all! I mentioned it a few times awhile back, that the Lord Jesus cannot accept lukewarmness, we are either for him or against him. (Revelation 3:16)
I guess that most who make an initial commitment to the Lord Jesus Christ have every intention of living all out for Jesus, but too often, and so easily we can get distracted, we can take our focus off him and lose something of the initial desire and love for him and all that he demands from us. But the consequences of taking our eyes off Jesus and of our deliberately forsaking his ways are serious, therefore we need to keep focused, as we are reminded by the Hebrew author, ‘. . . let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God’, Hebrews 12:1–2
Maybe someone is reading this devotion today, and sometime in the past you gave your life to the Lord Jesus Christ but you are only really following him from a distance, you are more focused on what this world has to offer, you are easily distracted by all the pleasure and that which the devil has made look attractive to your eyes, spend some time redirecting your focus, not on the transient things of this world, but on the eternal promise and the eternal hope which is for all who remain faithful and steadfast.
‘Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it. Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. So I do not run aimlessly; I do not box as one beating the air. But I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified’, 1 Corinthians 9:24–27.