ME-ssentials – Deceived – Day Twenty-Eight
ESSENTIALS for Me NOT to Be: Deceived
September 28th, 2021
What’s your ESSENTIAL?
Essential: absolutely necessary; indispensable; the essence of a thing; inherent and intrinsic, vital
Just as there are so many ESSENTIALS for me to be, there are just as many ESSENTIALS for me NOT to be. Let’s explore those the other half of this month!
Luke 17:1-4, ‘One day Jesus taught His disciples: “Betrayals are inevitable, but great devastation will come to the one guilty of betraying others. It would be better for him to have a heavy boulder tied around his neck and be hurled into the deepest sea than to face the punishment of betraying one of My dear ones! So be alert to your brother’s condition, and if you see him going the wrong direction, cry out and correct him. If there is true repentance on his part, forgive him. No matter how many times in one day, your brother sins against you and says, ‘I’m sorry; I am changing, forgive me,’ you need to forgive him each and every time.”’ (TPT)
There is someone in my life whom I love dearly. He is very important to me. I think he may have a glimpse of just how important he is, but whatever it takes, I will continue to take painstaking measures to love him to Jesus. See, he doesn’t know Jesus. He knows of Him, and once upon a time, he even showed a small interest in getting to know more about Jesus, asked wholehearted and sincere questions of interest. But Christians turned him off and, therefore, he has decided he wants no part of my God. He’ll be fine with his own (gods), thank you very much. He felt deceived by those who muddied their testimony and then judged him harshly for his own dirt. He did not lie about the condition of his heart or his worldliness or the addictions he battled; he was quite honest. The problem is, those who were talking Jesus were living no differently than he was and then shunning him on top of their lifestyles.
We live in a messy world. We all have brokenness and harbor pasts that hide secrecy in the belly of our vessels. We are masterpieces woven with threads of sin throughout our tapestries. We have no more room to judge others and deceive our great cloud of witnesses by pretending we are something we are not or that we have ‘arrived’. There is a crowd who view us and we might be the only Bible they ever read, and when we attempt to pull down a smokescreen, we potentially cause them to walk away, not only from us but also from Jesus.
Sadly, God is Who pays the penalty for our lack of transparency. It would be nice if He didn’t get blame by our acts of humanity, but He does every time. It is almost impossible to convince someone that He is holy always when they are viewing Him through our lens. People like my loved one don’t comprehend that God sees him through the lens of His Son which is forgiveness and grace, a lens that is far different whereby we examine others.
Psalm 24:4-6, ‘Those who are clean—whose works and ways are pure, whose hearts are true and sealed by the truth, those who never deceive, whose words are sure. They will receive Yahweh’s blessing and righteousness given by the Savior-God. They will stand before God, for they seek the pleasures of God’s face.’ (TPT)
