"This is what the Lord says to the nation of Israel: ‘Come to Me and live. But do not look in Bethel or go to Gilgal, and do not go down to Beersheba. The people of Gilgal will be taken away as captives, and Bethel will become nothing.’ Come to the Lord and live, or He will move like fire against the descendants of Joseph. The fire will burn Bethel, and there will be no one to put it out." (NCV)
"Come to Me and live."
There is life, there is safety, there is provision only in the Lord. Nowhere else. From no one else.
We often change our situation in order to try to change our lives. We get a new job in order to improve our financial situation. But only God really provides for us. We get a new partner, a new family, in order to improve our relationships. But only God can improve how we interact with others. We change our situation in order to get rid of our problems. But only God deal with our sin. We change where we live in order to protect us from disaster. But only God can protect us.
We are only safe in Him.
I think as Christians we don’t always understand how crucial it is to live in the center of God’s will. And, in fact, we talk about the "center" of God’s will when that actually is a misnomer. There isn’t an "area" of God’s will where we can be at the center or to the right or left or at an edge. There really is only in God’s will or out of it, in sin or in righteousness.
Psalm 19:12-13a talks about the kinds of sins we commit:
"How can I know all the sins lurking in my heart? Cleanse me from these hidden faults. Keep me from deliberate sins! Don’t let them control me" (NKJV).
There are two kinds of sins in our lives, the sins that we don’t know are sins and the sins we choose. The psalmist acknowledges that our knowledge about sin is so limited that we don’t even know everything that is a sin. These are hidden faults. Perhaps it’s an arrogance in our lives. Maybe it’s a self-centeredness. While the Holy Spirit is revealing other sins to us, these still exist and wreck havoc with our relationships with God and each other.
This is why it’s important everyday (if not more often) to confess our sins. This doesn’t mean just confessing that we are sinful or making some kind of blanket confessional statement ("God, forgive me of all my sins"). It means spending time before the throne allowing the Holy Spirit to reveal, slowly but surely, all the sins in our lives. It takes us trusting Him for this to happen. If God revealed to us, in one quick moment, all of our sins, it would destroy us. We are too egotistical to stand such revelation. We also wouldn’t believe Him.
"Every way of a man is right in his own eyes, but the Lord weighs the hearts" (Proverbs 21:2 NKJV).
We often believe we are doing right, but if we ask the Lord—if we simply ask the Lord—we may find that we are living in disobedience (sin) when we didn’t even know it. Hidden faults.
The other kind of sin is sin that we choose to do, deliberate sin. It’s interesting that the psalmist then says, "Don’t let them control me." It takes only 5-7 times to make something a habit. It takes 37 times to change the habit. We are so often controlled by our sin! Have you found yourself, even without thinking, doing something you had decided you weren’t going to do? "Don’t let deliberate sins control me." The Lord knows how difficult it is for us to change our behavior. He wants to reveal our sins and to continue to convict us so that we will change. He uses all manner of devices to compel us to change including His love and His justice.
Lord, don’t let our deliberate sins control us.
The apostle Paul, perhaps the greatest writer of all the writers of the Bible, at one time wrote this about himself:
"Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief" (1 Timothy 1:15b NKJV).
I never understood why he would say this about himself . . . until yesterday. It’s so easy to get into that mode of really not believing that you are sinning until God begins to once again dig into your life with you. I’ve been studying Amos, with a side trip for a study in humility, and the Lord has been revealing all kinds of sinfulness in my life to me, things that I truly didn’t believe were sin. "Every way of a man (or woman) is right in his own eyes." My ways seemed right in my eyes . . . until the Lord began showing me that being right is very different from being righteous. And I so long to be righteous!
There is really no place for me but in God’s will. While others around me, encouraging me to do this or that, have the very best of intentions, I have to follow what the Lord says. The Lord says to us, "Come to Me and live." There isn’t life anywhere else, only a pretense at life. Where do you want to live?
© 2014 Robin L. O’Hare. All Rights Reserved.
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