Sixth Week of Lent ~ Wednesday

Would you rather be a slave to sin and rush falling into temptation each and every day, or would you rather be a slave to God’s good law which was created to protect you and to bring you to life in His love?

- Read Romans 7

In the New International Version

- Devotional Thought

​Without rules, sport would be painful. There would be arguments, hatefulness and confusion. There would never be a clear winner or looser.

Without rules, the roads would be a dangerous place to be.

Without rules, nobody would learn to grow in their schooling.

Without rules, we would be misguided as to what is in the food we eat.

Yet our frame of mind so often when it comes to the ‘rules’ in Scripture are disheartening. We view them with bad intent, we description God as the big bad man in the sky who’s dampening our fun.

But without rules, everything else in life would fall apart… so why not view Gods guidelines in Scripture as the glue that so often holds us together when we re falling apart.

Without context thought, things may seem grim and harsh, but put a light of context and time period meaning into the picture and we find a gentle paradox of rules that were once seen as cruel to be those that protect and comfort.

God never intended to box us in, but when sin entered the world, He needed to protect us from ourselves!

You see that very phrase in itself ‘when sin entered the world’ means that the world was PERFECT at the start. But when we started following our own ways, we untied the perfection and let loose a plethora of traps for ourselves.

God’s Word, His Will and His Voice is not here to condemn, it’s here to renew. That why we call it grace and mercy…. Because it comes new for us each day.

Now, I don’t believe we have a sinful nature because if we are made in the image of God, we are made in the image of perfection. But we do live in a world which is lenient to sin and that is why we are so tempted! When Paul writes about how he does what he does not what to do and he does not do what he wants to do, he is referring the this interplay between our nature being submitted to God each day and yet our fleshly lives being lived out in the terrain of the world.

And God could’ve left us in that danger, in the unknown terrain of navigating the world each day, probably getting it wrong and having to return to him with a sacrificed animal as a sin offering. But He didn’t.

That’s why he sent the Lamb, why He sent Jesus. Because although we still live in a world where sin reigns freely, we don’t have to fall trap to it, but instead we can fall into God!

That’s why the ‘rules’ or rather, ‘guidelines’ in scripture fall in pleasant places. Because they are for us and not against us - just like God!

- Passage to focus on 

“I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in my sinful nature a slave to the law of sin.”

‭‭Romans‬ ‭7‬:‭15‬-‭18‬, ‭24‬-‭25‬ ‭NIV‬‬

- Image for today 

- Prayer 

Father

We are sorry for the times we have disregarded your kindness as harshness and done away with your guides for us as ‘rules’. We know that you are for us and we want to believe that every single day. Give us the courage to overcome temptation and the eagerness to seek your will and your Word in our lives today! Amen

- Active idea

Think of your favourite sport or game.... How different would that game be if there were no straightforward and sqarely fair rules!?

Thank you for joining me today! Hope to see you again soon!

Have a blessed Lent

~ X ~