Monday, March 8, 2010
Blog Question for the Week 4 March 14
Starting this coming Sunday night @ Fusion, we will be starting a new series entitled \"Not That Into You.\" Here is the blog question for the week, \"Joshua 24:15 says, But if serving the LORD seems undesirable to you.\" Why would serving the Lord seem undesirable to a person? Adults and Students alike feel free to respond. You can respond to this message.
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"The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak." (Math 26:41)
ReplyDeleteThe temptations and weakness of the flesh sometimes shouts very loudly and if we have not trained ourselves to mortify the flesh, it becomes too easy to listen and give in to that weak flesh.
Serving the Lord does require surrender and dying to ourselves. This can be a painful process, albeit very fulfilling and life-giving. And if we have not cultivated the deep intimate love relationship with Him, we don't see the joy in that surrender.
If you've ever gone off of sugar in your life this analogy will really strike home. We spend our lives stuffing our bodies with added sugar in our foods. We become dependent on it, we find that apart from that sugar, foods are tasteless and unsatisfying. Then we decide we are going to cut it out all together; cold turkey. The first 7-10 days are rough. The cravings are strong, but we hold out and don't give in. Lo, and behold we find out something after our bodies have been cleansed from the artificially sweetened foods we've indulged in all our lives. All foods taste better! Everything! Things we never liked before now have flavor and taste that we never experienced before. The gentle sweetness in fruits and even vegetables is more satisfying and fulfilling than anything we've eaten before. A whole new realm of tastes have opened up to us, and without that over-full, over-indulged feeling from before.
But in a moment of weakness we see a sugar-laden snack and we take a bite. And we discover an amazing thing. IT TASTES TERRIBLE! It is cloying and gagging with the abundance of sugars. We cannot eat it, it tastes so bad. We even spit it out of our mouths and wash that taste out with some cleansing water. We may even reach for a sweet and tender carrot to cleanse the pallet.
The person who finds serving the Lord undesirable is like the person who has feasted their whole lives on sugar-laden foods. When tasting of the Living Water that is Jesus we cannot fully taste the goodness and beauty because we have built up a taste for the false and over-stimulating temptations of sin. We need to cleanse our pallets so that the Lord can bring us the joy and refreshment He intended in following Him; a joy that can satisfy more fully than anything else we've experienced thus far in our lives. Once we experience the Lord as we walk in surrender and service to Him nothing else will satisfy us - even that weak flesh - again apart from Him.
o that one is easy cuz we love that sininin that we are liven in lol. but the reason i think its so hard for people to follow God is because the media and other "sources" show us that God is a God that hates people who have sex b4 marriage or are homosexual or murder or ect. whatever you want to put there. also people see God as this all knowing strict teacher type thing that has insanely strict rules. also wrong.
ReplyDeleteYo this was spit to you by Nile YO