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Closing the Gap 1.3.19

Week 52 Day 4

Pray:

Ask God to reorient you to Himself. Confess any known sin. Thank Him for His forgiveness. Be still and reflect on Jesus and His sacrifice for you. Ask the Holy Spirit to open your heart and mind to God’s Word. Pray for others in your life that they, too, would know and love God today.

Read:

Gal. 5:1-6 It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery. Mark my words! I, Paul, tell you that if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no value to you at all. Again I declare to every man who lets himself be circumcised that he is obligated to obey the whole law. You who are trying to be justified by law have been alienated from Christ; you have fallen away from grace. But by faith we eagerly await through the Spirit the righteousness for which we hope. For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision has any value. The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love.

Reflect:

We leak perspective.  We have it, we see things clearly…then we don’t have it and things become a fog once again.  So we need a continual infusion of perspective in order to live with consistent clarity. Time with God and his word bring perspective when that time is more than “putting in time.”  It is possible to “say some prayers” and read some verses from the Scripture and have your perspective untouched by these things. We must come to God with the intention of “seeing” what we need to see.  We need to see ourselves clearly from his perspective. We need to see our circumstances clearly from his perspective. We need to see others clearly from his perspective. This takes time and it takes putting aside a hurried approach to hearing from God.  We must learn to be still and listen. There is a cost for this. It will cost us time. It will cost us “productivity” as other things are not being done as we are being still before God. There is a far greater cost for not doing this. We will hurry through life seeing life through a fog.  The fog will lift but it might be after we have squandered a good bit, if not all, of our lives. Day by day, and even more often than that we must turn our full attention to God. We must ask him to lift the fog on our perspective. As he does and we begin to see what is important to see we must move resolutely into what God has shown us.  With this clarity of sight will we take decisive action? Will we move as he moves and go where he leads? Most often this will not mean to quit jobs, or sell homes but rather to go to others and ask for forgiveness or serve them or simply listen to them. We tend to look for clarity leading to something spectacular, miraculous, and life changing.  But what is spectacular, miraculous, and life changing? It is to move towards others in consistent agape love. To love others with “God’s kind of love.” There is no greater thing to see or do than to see the opportunity to love the people God has placed in your life and to do what love would have you do for and with them. The Bible in a sentence is, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.”  God loved…God gave. “God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him”. (1 John 4:16) Do you want to live in the fullness of God? Love the person God has put in your life today? Do you want to see where God is moving and join him? Take your eyes off of yourself and see others around you today. It is hard to see what God is doing when our eyes are on ourselves. Lift up your eyes to the Lord.  Then he will lift up your eyes to others. Yes you have needs, struggles…important things to be addressed. God will help you there but first you need his perspective. Look to him in faith look to others in love. This is the beginning of 20/20 vision.

Pray:

(Personalize this prayer today; make it specific to the circumstances that face you.)
Ask God to lead you through His Spirit as you go through your day. Ask Him to bring to mind the truth of the gospel and its implications for what you will encounter today. Tell Him “Yes” to His will and ask Him for His power and protection to live this “yes.” Ask God to create and reveal opportunities to proclaim the good news today.

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