Daily Devotionals
Daily Devotional: Psalms 5:1-7
Ps 5:1-7
Give ear to my words, O LORD, consider my sighing. Listen to my cry for help, my King and my God, for to you I pray. In the morning, O LORD, you hear my voice; in the morning I lay my requests before you and wait in expectation. You are not a God who takes pleasure in evil; with you the wicked cannot dwell. The arrogant cannot stand in your presence; you hate all who do wrong. You destroy those who tell lies; bloodthirsty and deceitful men the LORD abhors. But I, by your great mercy, will come into your house; in reverence will I bow down toward your holy temple.
James 4:4-6
You adulterous people, don't you know that friendship with the world is hatred toward God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. Or do you think Scripture says without reason that the spirit he caused to live in us envies intensely? But he gives us more grace. That is why Scripture says: "God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble."
Do not be fooled by the rhetoric of the world. You must choose. You will receive the consequences of your choice. We all either choose to serve the Lord and follow his will or we choose to serve ourselves. Serving self may be in the form of hedonism or it may be in the form of legalism, but both are self-serving and are not devotion to God. In doing either, we make ourselves equal with God.
The devil is a master of deception, so we reason deceptively. We believe the Bible is the word of God and we must follow it. It is truth and we must believe the truth in order to be pleasing to God. We study diligently and arrive at our conclusions, which we understand to be truth. We then (and here is the deception) make our conclusions the truth that everyone must follow to be pleasing to God. This was the error of the Pharisees in the time of Jesus.
The opposite of this is when we choose to not follow God or his word because we are capable of being our own gods and making our own decisions. There is no God to dictate morality or any absolute right or wrong. The thinking is that we will get better and better over time, but in reality, we go from bad to worse with God.
O Lord God, give me a hatred for evil. Keep me from loving this world and the things of the world instead of loving and trusting you. Develop in me the fruit of your Spirit so I will treat others with the grace you show to me. Help me remember that my thinking, no matter how much I study or believe my conclusions to be true, is not necessarily truth, because I can be wrong. Use me to help others and to encourage those who are battling depression. Help me be a defender and a supporter of those who are mistreated. I pray in the name of Jesus.
Robert
