Make like a tree...

Genesis 12:1-3

The Lord had said to Abram, “Leave your native country, your relatives, and your father’s family, and go to the land that I will show you. I will make you into a great nation. I will bless you and make you famous, and you will be a blessing to others. I will bless those who bless you and curse those who treat you with contempt. All the families on earth will be blessed through you.”

This time of year is one of my favorites. I love when the mornings are crisp and the smell outside is fresh. The leaves are changing color and everything is just so beautiful. I try not to focus on the fact that after this beautiful season of color the trees will be barren, the grass will turn brown and I will have to look harder to find beauty in the area around me. Not very long ago I began to wonder why the leaves change colors and why they fall off. They are so pretty when they are on the trees and such a hassle to have to rake and clean up when they fall off.

After a little research I found out that the reason the leaves fall off the tree is so the tree can protect itself. When the nights get longer the trees start to secrete chemicals that cause the leaves to change color and then to ultimately separate from the trees. The trees do this to conserve energy and protect themselves from damage during the winter. The leaves that fall off the tree end up becoming a mulch for the tree and help to further protect its roots as well. This process helps the tree to thrive in the next season when the leaves begin to grow again. If the tree didn't lose the leaves it would be weak and not as lacking the next year.

When I was reading this it made me think of people and relationships. There are seasons in our lives where we have to begin to step away from things, whether it is people or activities, so that we can protect ourselves and do what God wants us to. We see an example of this in Genesis chapter 12 when God told Abraham to go and leave his native land. He told him to leave his father's family and go to the land God would show him. God told him that He would make Abram into a great nation and that He would bless him there. When I was younger it seemed harsh to me that God would make Abraham leave his family and go away. Family is one of the most important relationships we can have and for God to ask Abraham to get up and leave them all behind would be so difficult, but it is precisely what Abraham had to do to get to where God wanted him.

I have read this passage many times and one day something stood out to me that I had never seen before. In chapter 11 and verse 31 of Genesis it said that Terah (Abraham's father) took his son and their family and moved away from Ur. Then it says that he was headed for the land of Canaan but that he stopped in Haran and settled there. It does not tell us that God told Terah to go to Canaan and that Terah disobeyed by settling in Haran, but it did make me wonder. I wondered if Terah was supposed to keep on going and take his family with him, but instead he stopped short of the promise that God had for him. I wonder if this is why God told Abraham and he had to leave his fathers household. God may have known that Terah stopped short of the blessing, and Abraham needed to get out away from his family so that he wouldn't follow in his fathers footsteps and stop short as well. God may have know that in order for him to continue on in the plan of God and be the man through whom the earth was going to be blessed, he had to let go and then go. Abraham had a season where he had to “shed his leaves”and leave his family, possibly to protect him from discouragement or even just from a bad example.

We may have seasons like that as well. Times where we have to give up certain relationships for a time so that we can pursue something that God has put in our hearts. Maybe we need to shed some relationships because they are toxic to us. There may be people in our lives that will suck the life right out of us, just like the leaves will suck the life from the tree if they do not fall off for the winter. Sometimes we allow ourselves to feel guilty if we start to remove ourselves from those friendships because the person “needs” us. We think that we can help them or save them, but often when this is the case we are just enabling the person to continue in wrong behavior.

Maybe it is not a person that you are supposed to be letting go of, but an activity or even a sin. What is it in your life that you need to shed. What is bringing you down and causing an obstacle in your relationship with the Lord? If you want to live in God's best for your life. If you want to live in the place of blessing for you- then you need to be willing to get up and go when God tells you to, even if it means leaving a comfort zone or stepping back from relationships that you are in. Just because God asks you to give things up for a time does not mean it is gone forever. Once the autumn and winter season is over then there will be a spring and a summer.

I challenge you to spend time in prayer and ask God if there is anything you are supposed to be letting go of so that you can be the best you can be for Him today.

1 John 1:9

1 John 1:9 NKJV

If we confess our sins he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

My son took our dog for a walk the other day. Taking a dog for a walk doesn’t seem like such a big deal, but it became a big deal for him. It was one of the first times he took the dog for a walk by himself where we live. We have lived here a year and we have gone on walks together and so he felt that he could do this with no problems. He started walking and thought he would just follow the path and take a short walk. The short walk ended up being a very long walk because he was not familiar with how the roads worked. When we lived in Oklahoma the roads were straight and you could count on there being blocks and mile sections. When we moved here to Arkansas we realized that it is very different. He thought that if he just turned right, then turned right, and then turned right again he should be going the right way. In Oklahoma that would have worked, but not here. Here if you turn right, the road curves enough that you may end up going left and be lost before you know it. Nathan finally saw someone else walking their dog and asked them where the entrance to our neighborhood was and they pointed him in the right direction.

My son took off with good intentions of doing his chores. He thought he knew the right way to go and thought it would be easy. Instead he ended up on the wrong path and his way was made much more difficult. Have you ever had a time when you thought you were on the right path and then you realized that you had stumbled into an area of sin in your life that you needed to deal with? Or maybe you knew you were way off course and had fallen in a pit. You knew that you were in full fledged disobedience and that the sin had become a pit that you had taken up residence in. It is very easy when we are in these sin seasons to want to give up. To feel that God must be so mad at us and that he couldn’t forgive us. The good news is that God is not like us. In our verse this week God says, “if we confess our sins He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” God will forgive us- He wants to forgive us.

Paul, a man who wrote a majority of the New Testament talked in Romans 7:15 about how there were times in his life where he didn’t understand himself. He said that he wanted to do what was right, but sometimes he didn’t do it and instead did what he hated. We all, no matter how spiritual we are, will have sins in our life that we need to deal with. Whether we have walked away from the Lord and gone back to our old sins and need to come to repentance or whether it is the sins that we have always done, but did not recognize as sin in our lives until God gently (or not so gently) pointed it out to us. In the Strong’s concordance the word sin means to miss the mark, be mistaken, wander from the path, or wander from God’s law. The sin in our lives isn’t always blatant and obvious to others, sometimes the sins are just areas where we area little off target and are missing the mark. They could be things that we know we are supposed to do but we don’t do them, or things we know we should stop doing, but we do them anyway. We may even be on the right path, walking towards God, headed in the right direction, but we just kind of wander a little off the path and begin to separate ourselves ever so slightly from God.

God tells us when this happens that He has a plan for us. We can confess our sins to Him. We can acknowledge our sin, admit to it, and repent of it. When we do this God says He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins. Then he doesn’t just say we are forgiven he takes it further and cleanses us from the unrighteousness. To cleanse means to purify, purge, and to make clean. When you ask for forgiveness God makes you completely clean. He purges your sin from you and makes you in right standing with Him.
Some people take 1 John 1:9 and try and use it as a license to sin. If you are doing this then you really need to take a look at your heart and judge yourself. When you are aware of an area of sin in your life it should bother you. In chapter 1 verse 6 it says that “we are lying if we say that we have fellowship with God but go on living in spiritual darkness; we are not practicing the truth” (NLT). Chapter 3:8-9 says, “But when people keep on sinning, it shows that they belong to the devil, who has been sinning since the beginning. But the Son of God came to destroy the works of the devil. Those who have been born into God’s family do not make a practice of sinning, because God’s life is in them. So they can’t keep on sinning, because they are children of God.” (NLT) This does not mean that if you slip up and say a cuss word, gossip about someone once, or have a thought you shouldn’t have that you are not saved. It does mean that when you do things that are contrary to God’s word, you will have a prick in your conscience. You will know that you are doing something that you need to change. You will want to repent and get right with God.

God is so good and so merciful to us. We always have areas in our life that we need to improve, places where we have started to stumble off the path. We should be always vigilant to make sure we are staying true to the path that God has us on and working at becoming better followers of Christ and better examples to the world of what a Christian is. We will mess up at times, but when we mess up we have an advocate who pleads our case to the father (1 John 2:1). Not because of our works or our righteousness, but because of Christ’s sacrifice and atonement for our sins. It is my prayer that you will judge your own heart right now. I pray that we will be like David in Psalm 139:23-24 and will ask God to point out if there is anything in us that offends him and that we will allow Him to lead us in the path of everlasting life.
　

Joshua 1:8

Joshua 1:8 NKJV

This book of the law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, that you may observe to do according to all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success.

So much of our lives we push ourselves to try and become prosperous and have good success. We work and work trying to keep up with those around us. Often people aren’t happy because they think they have to have this or that to be truly successful and happy.

When I think about learning to live a successful life, I realize that this verse is a very foundational verse for us. The reason I feel this verse is so important is because we do want to prosper and be successful, but it is more important to be prosperous and successful in God’s eyes than in the world’s eyes. In fact when we learn God’s ways of success we will also learn more about being successful in this world as well and in this verse God tells us how to make that happen.

God says that His word should not depart from our mouth. His word should be our first answer and our final answer. His law and Word should be in our mouth and we should be meditating on it. We should be studying scripture, reading scripture, and speaking scripture out of our mouths. The Hebrew word for meditate is hagah. It means to murmur, ponder, imagine, mutter, and plot. To meditate on God’s word we are going to take a morsel of the scripture and put it to memory. We will speak it out loud and mutter it under our breath. We will think about the verse and how it applies to our lives. We will even plot ways to put that word into action in our every day lives. When we do this we will be able to “do according to all that is written therein”. We will have the wisdom and knowledge that we can only get from God and His word and that will help us to live our lives in a right way.

Then we have a promise. When we speak and meditate on His word, then we can observe to do His word, then we shall make our way prosperous and have good success. Something I find interesting here is that God says WE will make our way prosperous and have good success. He isn’t going to do it, we do it. He has already given us the tools in His word, but we are responsible to take the tools and apply them in our lives. So many times people want to live and do whatever they want and then when they get in trouble they want God just to fix it. That isn't how God designed it to work. He has given us the resources, but we have to cooperate with Him by doing our part. If God hadn't set it up like this and we could do whatever we wanted all the time and then just pray to God and get Him to immediately fix everything, we would treat God like a genii in a lamp. We would just get to the place where he is our servant instead of the other way around.

Yes God wants us blessed. He wants us successful and prosperous. He wants good things in our lives, but he doesn't just want to be our errand boy. He wants us to take the steps- to memorize His words, to meditate on them, and then observe to do all that is written in it. He knows that when we do the things he has given us to do that we will be successful in our lives and we will be a blessing to others. When we study His word then we will know we are to love others, and how to love them. We will know things to avoid that will hinder our lives, and we will see ways that we can be a light to those around us.

This week I challenge you to start memorizing God's word. Make a quality decision to put His word in your heart so that you will not sin against Him. Meditate on these words and then do them. I know that as you follow His ways your life will be more successful and you will be prosperous in all you do.