DAILY DEVOTIONAL – November 16, 2020
“Delightfully Disturbing”
Prayer: Lord Jesus, You taught us that God, our God and Father, is the God of the living and not the dead. You also said, Lord, that You are the resurrection and the life. Lord, we confess that it is hard for us to die so that we might live. In Your grace and mercy, help us to lay our lives down at Your feet, so that Your will would be done on earth, here in our own life, as it is in heaven. Amen.
Scripture: Luke 17:28-33
Likewise, just as it was in the days of Lot—they were eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building, 29 but on the day when Lot went out from Sodom, fire and sulfur rained from heaven and destroyed them all— 30 so will it be on the day when the Son of Man is revealed. 31 On that day, let the one who is on the housetop, with his goods in the house, not come down to take them away, and likewise let the one who is in the field not turn back. 32 Remember Lot’s wife. 33 Whoever seeks to preserve his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will keep it.
Devotional – “Delightfully Disturbing”
Jesus tells us in Luke 17 to, “remember Lot’s wife” who though she was being guided by angels to salvation from the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, couldn’t pull her eyes away from her wealth, from what she had built, and the plans she had made for herself. As a result, she was consumed by her own life, and missed the salvation of God. Jesus makes clear the lesson we are to learn from this. He says, “Whoever seeks to preserve his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will keep it.”
Would it strike you as crazy to pray and ask God to grant you poverty? Would you ever consider praying for weakness, suffering, or hardship?
As audacious and outrageous as this may sound, praying for God to grace us with suffering or to disturb our lives with trials and obstacles is not as crazy as it may sound. Jesus says in Matthew 19, “Truly, I say to you, only with difficulty will a rich person enter the kingdom of heaven.” Should we then pray to be poor? Well, no, but we should pray as we see Agur son of Jakeh does in Proverbs 30:8-9:
“…give me neither poverty nor riches;
feed me with the food that is needful for me,
9 lest I be full and deny you
and say, “Who is the Lord?”
or lest I be poor and steal
and profane the name of my God.”
Scripture says Romans 5, “we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, 4 and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, 5 and hope does not put us to shame.” Should we then pray for suffering? No, but when we do come upon suffering we should faithfully confess with James in James 1, “ Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, 3 for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. 4 And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.” As difficult as it may be at the time, we should praise and thank God, even for our tribulations, trusting in faith that just as God made complete our salvation through the sufferings of Christ, He is also completing our faith and filling us up with the joy of His presence when hardships empty us of ourselves and send us running closer to Him.
Prayers for God to take from us things we may see as good and give to us things we may perceive as bad, only makes sense when we trust God with everything in our lives because we truly believe that He knows better than we do what will make us truly content. God’s Word says that in our sinfulness we take to much comfort in our own God-given intelligence, strength, and abilities, and therefore trust in ourselves and our own resolve and grit more than we trust in the Lord who defeated the Devil and rendered the grave powerless through the power of His own suffering. The blessing of being able to pray for God to disturb and disrupt our life is only possible when we come to be honest with ourselves and confess the truth that it is our wealth, our strength, our comfort, our complacency, our plans, and our satisfaction with ourselves that stands as the biggest barrier to receiving the full life of blessed joy and eternal satisfaction that Jesus has promised to give us today, and that in fact He has given us through His death and resurrection.
Pray for the Lord to disrupt your life my friends. Pray for His grace and mercy to give you the strength to be weak. Pray for His provision to lead you into whatever will strip away the dead and dying things of this world that blind us and deprive us of the eternal blessings God is giving to us today…and remember that God has forgiven yesterday, is with you today and has already taken care of tomorrow. Amen.
