God, My 7-11? (Part 7)

Our Text: Matthew 6:33 "But seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you."

We have turned around, changed directions and now are headed in the direction of the Lord.  But how do we proceed?  In Matthew 11:29, our Lord said, “ Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.”

He wants us to learn from Him, and notice that He says that He is gentle and lowly in heart. God the Father required Christ to empty Himself completely, to divest Himself completely of His Heavenly glory and He did!  He followed God’s requirement to the uttermost, and so must we, if we are to victoriously follow Him. We must be gentle in that we must not be hardened to the things and requirements of our Lord. We must be lowly in heart in that we must be humble, we must completely deny ourselves and take up His interests and His alone.

Following Jesus means losing ourselves in Him. People like to “find themselves,” or “preserve their self -esteem,” or “maintain their personal identity.” All these must die, must be totally shed from us, then as we follow Him, we take on His identity and become more and more like Him. This is what it means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ. This is the process whereby we are transformed by the renewing of our minds until we are conformed to His image.  Only as we progress along this path do we progress along the path of separation and/or holiness.

Now, our sense of self- preservation will kick and fight and the enemy will bring to bear upon us all manner of argument as to why it is dangerous to do this. If however, we have faith in Christ as we profess and we have turned from the way which seems right to us, (which way leads only to destruction), we will willingly divest ourselves and put Him on.

Let us remember that although this sounds complex, difficult and painful, it shouldn’t be so. We should abandon ourselves to Him.  The reason we don’t is because we don’t understand some of His requirements, we cannot reason them out and so we resist. We will not, on this side of Jordan understand our Lord fully, but our spirit in agreement with His Holy Spirit, will testify that that is the way we should go.  We need to humble ourselves and follow Him.

How can we follow His lead except we know what it is He is saying to us?  Much of our problems with the will and Word of God today stems from lack of study.  We are told in 2 Timothy 2:15 to “Be diligent to present yourself approved to God, a worker who does not need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.”  But we don’t want to study, we want someone else to study for us and come and feed it to us. We don’t even want to chew! How can Jesus Christ pay such a price for us and we can’t even study about Him? 

We claim to love Him and I know that when we love someone we want to know all we can about them. So if we love Jesus, should we then not try to know Him?  Let us examine ourselves and see if we truly love Him. Are we pursuing His interests, do we seek to please Him, do we care to know His will? Let us think on these things soberly and make necessary adjustments.

How about we find a Bible with the words of Christ in red? Let us study His Words and we’ll be well on our way to knowing Him.

Prayer

Heavenly Father, strengthen me to pursue my Lord, to seek to apprehend Him as He has apprehended me, in Jesus’ name. Amen.

#momomily2013