May 7, 2015

So the other day I caught myself thinking that people, including myself, we rate sin.  We rate how bad something is and we think to ourselves, “that was ok, it’s not like I did whatever.”  A good example is committing adultery, Matthew 5:28 says, but I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.  I hear people say all the time, “I was just looking, it’s not wrong if I don’t act on it,” but clearly it is.  Someone on a social media site likes to talk about pastors and how they don’t like to step on people’s toes, and I agree with that.  Some people are afraid to upset someone, but sometimes you have to step on people’s toes, whether to get the point across and shine some light on them or just to do what God wants you to do.

This main focus of this post is to make it to where God is number one, God doesn’t take a backseat to anyone or anything.  Where this idea came from was the other day the sin gluttony popped into my head.  I have mentioned gluttony before and what it is is habitual greed or excess in eating.  Now like I mentioned earlier, this is where the ranking system can take place.  No one thinks it’s a sin to over eat, but to have a few to many beers now that is terrible.  Galatians 5:21 says, envy, murders, drunkenness, gluttony, and such like, whereof I tell you before, as I also have told you before, that they which do such things, shall not inherit the Kingdom of God.  Now that passage has murdering and gluttony in the same sentence, it doesn’t say now gluttony is bad but murder is way worse, it says that if anyone is living this kind of life, they will not inherit the Kingdom of God.

A great verse that I read the other day, never seen this verse before, it reads this; But if you have doubts about whether or not you should eat something, you are sinning if you go ahead and do it.  For you are not following your convictions.  If you do anything you believe is not right, you are sinning.  That comes from Romans 14:23 and that totally blew my mind, because I have never thought that way before, that verse truly woke me up.  I feel like people depend on physical things too much, maybe that being food, and they don’t depend on God.  Philippians 3:19 says, they are headed for destruction.  Their god is their appetite, they brag about shameful things, and they think only about this life here on Earth.  Nothing or no one will ever be enough, only God can fill the voids that you feel in your life.

Talking about over eating, in America over 68.8 percent of people are overweight or obese.  When talking about debt,  over 46.7 percent of households have credit card debt.  The divorce rate is up to around 50 percent in America.  Now just from these simple figures, you can see that people turn to other things, being food, a piece of plastic, or just the “easy” way out, and they don’t turn to God for guidance and help.  We need to spend more time in prayer and strengthen our walk with God and listen to Him, most of the time it is just us not wanting to do what God knows is best.  It can also be a lack of self-control and you just want to do what you want to do.  Maybe you tell yourself that you cant do it so you don’t even try.  I found this very simple, yet very powerful wallpaper for my phone the other day, and all it says is, “I Can and I Will.”  If you let God work through and with you then anything is possible…Guarantee It.