A nasty cold day here this morning but when you have the SON in your life it is a great day! I hope this mornings devotion finds you praising the Lord. The devotion should touch most of us as we all seem to want to look to see how others are doing in their faith and judge ourselves by how they are doing...as we shall see this is not the right way! So here we go!
LUKEWARM PEOPLE gauge their morality or "goodness" by comparing themselves to the secular world. They feel satisfied that while they aren't as hard-core for Jesus as so-and-so, they are nowhere as horrible as the guy down the street.
"The Pharisee stood up and prayed about himself: 'God, I thank you that I am not like other men---robbers, evildoers, adulterers----or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.'" "And the tax collector, standing afar off, would not so much as raise his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, 'God, be merciful to me a sinner!' "I tell you this man went down to his house justified rather than the other; for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted."
Early in my walk with the Lord I was bad about judging myself to others who either were or claimed to be of the faith. As I grew in my own faith and studied and read my Bible I found out looking to others to judge myself is the WRONG way to go about my walk. There is only ONE who we should be looking to to judge ourselves and that Is Jesus. I am not going to tell you anything new this morning but guess what??? He is Perfect...so when we judge ourselves to Him we come up drastically short. Following Jesus takes effort. The Bible tells us our righteousness is like filthy rags. The ONLY way to get cleaned up is through Jesus who cleansed us with His blood on the cross. Thank you Jesus!!!! So this morning I want you to look to Jesus and judge yourself. How are you doing? I can almost hear what you are thinking...."Well there is no way I can match up to Jesus." That's right you can't but the good news is through the shed blood of Jesus you are made perfect! Praise the Lord!!! One other thought before I close. Be careful about judging sin by what our human minds want us to do. We put value on different sin such as adultery is way worse then telling a lie. Well not in our Holy God's eyes cause to him sin is sin...no value points!! That is hard for us to comprehend I know but it is true!! So remember judge yourself to Christ not your neighbor!!
God bless!!! Tom
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