Meditate on this!
Is
it a trap or is it a sincere question? Would you tell me again how it
is that you can see? You know this is the third time you have asked me…
so do you want to be like me? The truth John 9:3 and the truth rejected John 9:34 (John 9:1-34)
Short
stories about life is what I like to do, but not just to relate an
event in my past or in the past of someone else but also to show people
who may not know it but God is actually intimately involved with our
lives because He loves us. For example; in a Christian magazine I read
of a young couple who were travelling one early morning just before dawn
on a country road. The road was a two lane highway through the tobacco
farm land of Kentucky. The young man driving was in his early twenties,
he and his young bride were on
their way home from a wonderful honeymoon in Pennsylvania. They were
about an hour from home and he had decided to take this short cut
through the rolling hills. He was speeding, about twenty miles an hour
over the limit. Suddenly he had the urge to slow down, he ignored the
urge. Again a stronger urge came as he approached the next hill. This
urge was so strong he decided to stop the car. Just over the hill a
little girl of two or three years old was standing in his pathway. He
could hardly believe his eyes and his young bride screamed as the car
approached the little girl… stopping no more than a few inches from her.
The farmhouse just a few yards from the road was dark, but the
screeching of the tires caused someone to wake and the lights came on.
After all calmed down, the young man knelt where the little had stood
and gave thanks to God, who warned him of the little girl who woke up
and wandered from her home early that morning. Jeremiah 29:11-12
James
James 1:13
– It does require some thought… does God tempt us? The answer to that
question is so simple that it is almost an insult for me to ask it. The
answer is emphatic – NO! Okay, then it must be the devil! Again the
answer is; although not as emphatic – no! The conditions for temptation,
or we could say the climate for temptation is a constant and closed
system in this world in which we live. Or, we can say that mankind is
tempted because it is a natural reaction and his or her nature to do so.
Temptation then cannot come from an outside source, it must come from
within.
James 1:14
– James says that temptation comes from our own desires and enticement.
We do not like to be reminded to own up to our own private desires and
enticements do we? We like to say that the buck stops next door. You
know, my friends’ desire enticed me and yada, yada, yada! We are drawn
away from what; James? We are drawn away from God and as our own
personal desires increase the enticement to be independent of God’s love
overpowers the moment.
James 1:15
– A desire fully developed will result in some action from the one with
the desire. With all of the tripwires in the public eye about giving
birth these days, I will use a different analogy here. “Joy is found in
the bosom of people who have victory over temptation. Death is found in
the bosom of people who allow temptation to boil over. Sin is death! Do
not be deceived my beloved as James says in verse 16.
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