PITFALLS OF LIFE!
Without God’s Love flowing from our hearts, good works and sacrificial giving are of no benefit.
“And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not love [Agape], it profiteth me nothing.” 1 Corinthians 13:3
Dealing with the Pride of Life
1 John 2:16 For the world offers only a craving for physical pleasure, a craving for everything we see, and pride in our achievements and possessions. These are not from the Father, but are from this world.
In this Verse we see some specific references to “Pitfalls” we should be avoiding in our lives:
1. “the lust of the flesh”.
2. “The lust of the eyes”.
3. “The boastful pride of life”.
4. With the added warning that such tendencies are “not from the Father, but…from the world.”
In fact, we see the “boastful pride of life” running rampant in society—in people’s insistence upon “doing their own thing” in their own strength.
“I Did It My Way” seems to be the theme song of choice for so many.
*One of the greatest indictments of this kind of behavior in the Old Testament is God’s chilling statement to His people in Jeremiah 2:13: “For My people have committed two evils: they have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters, to hew for themselves cisterns, broken cisterns that can hold no water.”
**What a grave error: deliberately rejecting God’s provision (something which actually works) in favor of a contrivance made by our own devices (something which doesn’t work)!
Over the years, I have been convicted about so many areas of my life in which I have engaged in the fool’s errand of refusing God’s ways to build things my way instead.
*That has resulted in the necessity to ask the Lord for help in correcting the errors, cleaning up the messes and unsnarling the tangles caused by my own misguided humanistic efforts.
Have you had to endure some similar experiences?
His Strength, Not Ours—If the Lord truly intends to use us, it is absolutely necessary for us to learn and relearn the very basic lesson of operating in His strength rather than in our own.
Everybody should want to be like God.
Do you know what the essence of the temptation was? (This is very important.)
* The desire to be independent of God. That’s the essence of sin.
* As long as you are desiring in your heart to be independent of God, you are in a dangerous position.
Nothing in this universe has any right to be independent of the Creator.
**The way that they thought they could get independence was by knowledge.
*The way we take or receive an anxious thought is by speaking it. Doubtful thoughts will come, but we do not sin until we entertain them.
It is imperative that we watch the words we say.
*Begin to speak words in faith that line up with God’s Word, then Positive Results will follow.
*If we speak words of doubt, we will eventually believe them and have the Negative things that these words produce.
*There are no such things as “idle” words which will not work for or against us.
*Death or life is in the power of every word we speak (Prov. 18:21).
*Please understand: the desire to know wasn’t wrong.
**But the desire to be independent of God was the essence of their problem.
Obadiah 1: 3 You have been deceived by your own pride because you live in a rock fortress and make your home high in the mountains. ‘Who can ever reach us way up here?’ you ask boastfully.
I know many Christians who have not dealt with this root desire to be independent of God.
** This is the pride of life: “I can manage my life without God. If I’m in a real emergency, I’ll pray; but generally speaking I can handle the situation.”
*That was my thoughts in the past-But God hit me hard with this verse in
Galatians 6: 3 If you think you are too important to help someone, you are only fooling yourself. You are not that important.
For some people, the Holy Spirit is like an emergency vehicle. When there’s nothing else they can do, they pray. That’s not the way we were designed to live.
We were designed to live in hour by hour and moment by moment dependence on the Spirit of God.
Dear Lord, I confess my tendency to operate in my own strength. I ask Your forgiveness for the many times when my first response to a problem or a crisis in my life, instead of relying upon You, has been to turn to my own resources. Lord, I acknowledge before You that my strength is totally inadequate for anything I have to face.
Standing in Your presence now, Lord, I turn actively from my own strength, and I express my utter reliance upon You and Your power. Any action I take, I will take in Your empowerment and not my own. Thank You for opening my eyes to the folly of operating under my own steam. Kneeling before Your throne, I call this tendency what it is: the sin of independence from You. And I call upon You to set me free from that tendency, in order that from this day forward, I may walk in complete reliance upon You and Your strength operating through me. Amen