Eight Words that can Save Your Life!

I’ve recently been casting my mind back over the years of Ellel Ministries and thinking of all the stories I would want to put in a book about what God has done since the work began back in 1986. As I did so, I found myself also thinking back about some people who we would love to have helped more than we were able – people for whom the key to their situation lay within the eight words of our short Scripture for today!

They were people who said they really loved the Lord. People who had been touched by Him at different times of their lives, but people, nevertheless, who were still struggling with issues that seemed to overwhelm them at regular intervals. They found that the temptations of the world were too often greater than they were able to handle and kept on slipping back into a variety of sinful behaviours. Some came back several times – each time deeply repentant, but at the core of their being there was something out of order.

When talking about healing I often say that the best definition of healing principles that I know is “the restoration of God’s order in a person’s life”. This doesn’t mean living life according to how I would like things to be, but living according to how God has said they should be. On this rock many people stumble. They want God to fit in with their ideas and desires – not the other way round! And at the end of the day, for some of these dear people, the real issue is not the size or the nature of their problem, but the simple fact that while they say they love the Lord, but they haven’t yet learned to hate evil!

Many of our daily Seeds of the Kingdom have touched on the simple relationship there is between the fear of the Lord and love for the Lord. If you really love someone you naturally don’t want to do things that grieve them. And so it is that if you REALLY love the Lord, the last thing you will want to do is to embrace any of the evil which separated man form God, and which Jesus died on the cross to set us free from. If we are struggling with temptation of any form today let’s ask ourselves the hard question - have we fallen into the trap of loving this particular evil thing more than we love the Lord? If so, it may be time to repent – not so much of the sin associated with your problem, but of thinking it’s OK not to hate evil, which is so often the real issue that underpins the problem of temptation! Loving evil will always separate us from God!

Prayer: Thank You, Lord, that You loved men and women such as me, so much, that you sent Jesus to die for our sins, in spite of the evil that separated You from mankind. Help me, Lord, to recognise evil when I see it, before it becomes a temptation and a trap I can fall into. Help me, also, Lord to hate evil and to choose to walk in the opposite direction when I am faced with ungodly choices. In Jesus’ name, Amen.