If you have stopped nurturing your relationship with God, stopped being in fellowship with other believers, stopped learning about the Lord through His Word and stopped praying it is like not watering a plant. It looks okay for a while but then begins to wither.
Further, if you decide instead of loving God to love the things in the world around you - the lure of wealth, beauty, worldly wisdom, and power - you begin to develop a new strength, a strength against serving God all the more.
That kind of thinking is pretty common and very short term. Thinking on an eternal level, what will all those things do for you in a place where they don't matter any more?
So perhaps you find yourself convicted and think "you know, I need to get back to my relationship with God." So you go to church a little more, you pray a little bit, maybe you even crack open your Bible now and again. But you still serve those other things which have become gods to you.
Moses actually has some sage advice out of Deuteronomy 4:29
"But from there you will seek the LORD your God and you will find Him, if you search after Him with all your heart and with all your soul."
Half hearted efforts at returning to God will only bear half hearted results. Search for the Lord and let it be with everything within you. I promise if you look, you'll find Him because He was right there all along, just waiting for you to give up on worthless things and seek something eternal: a relationship with Him.
Pastor Tom
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2 comments:
One of the most effective tools of the enemy is to get us to isolate ourselves from fellowship with other believers. Once he has us there, he can lie to us with impunity; we tell ourselves we have Jesus to fellowship with, however, He has designed us to have fellowship with other believers as well, for encouragement and accountability. The problem is that in cutting ourselves off from fellowship with others, we soon find ourselves cut off from fellowship with Jesus; a very dangerous place indeed. The best thing the wandering believer can do is to return to Jesus will all their hearts.
You are so right. When we are separated from the flock we are easily picked off by the enemy as we are weakened. Many Christians believe they can be Lone Rangers and don't need the body of Christ. Jesus designed us as a body so that we would depend on one another for support, prayer, encouragement, exhortation and growth. Going it alone is a recipe for attack, weakness, temptation, and leading into false doctrine.
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