Devotionals Archives

June 5, 2022June 5, 2022

Hope in His Power

¹⁴But Peter, standing up with the eleven, raised his voice and said to them, “Men of Judea and all who dwell in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and heed my words. ¹⁵For these are not drunk, as you suppose, since it is only the third hour of the day. ¹⁶But this is what was spoken by the prophet Joel: ¹⁷‘And it shall come to pass in the last days, says God, That I will pour out of My Spirit on all flesh; Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, Your young men shall see visions, Your old men shall dream dreams. ¹⁸ And on My menservants and on My maidservants I will pour out My Spirit in those days; And they shall prophesy. ~ Acts 2:14–18

The blessed Holy Spirit rushed upon all mankind when the Day of Pentecost came, yet there are people, pastors, and religious teachers who claim that the outpouring of the “Power Holy Spirit” was only for that time. Please take special notice of the time frame that Peter indicates:

In the last days.

If Peter was living in the last days, which he indicated that he was, then how much more are we who live in the 21^st century, living in the last days? The power of God didn’t dwindle nor run cold. God still performs miracles, healings, signs, and wonders. There is still power in the name of Jesus. There is still freedom in His presence.

Peace. Love. Go Forth and Hope in His Power.

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Accept Your Promise By Faith

¹⁹ Everyone tried to touch Him, because healing power went out from Him, and He healed everyone. ~ Luke 6:19

All who touched Jesus in faith were healed by the power of the Holy Spirit. Not one who had faith was disappointed; all were healed. 2,000 years later, Jesus is no longer physically walking around His people. Instead, He is living inside of us and through us. His Holy Spirit, by whom He was filled with power and healed the sick, is with us and in us as well. So how much easier should it be for us to get our healing in today’s world, yet we rarely see healing today.

The Church is filled with sickness and disease, yet we have God Himself dwelling inside of us. The Church should be able to claim the promise ‘By His stripes, we have been healed.’ We have this as a promise from God, but it’s up to us to take hold of the promise and accept it by faith. It’s all been paid for. The only way we can be healed is if we have the faith that we will be healed.

Peace. Love. Go Forth and Accept Your Promise By Faith.

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Be Ransomed

⁴⁵Then the people said to Saul, “Shall Jonathan die, who has worked this great salvation in Israel? Far from it! As the Lord lives, there shall not one hair of his head fall to the ground, for he has worked with God this day.” So the people ransomed Jonathan, so that he did not die. ~ 1 Samuel 14:45

Saul spoke death over whoever ate, not knowing that his son Jonathan hadn’t heard the charge and ate. When the people of Israel found out that Jonathan would die for the sin that he didn’t know he committed, they cried out to Saul and ransomed Jonathan from death. Jonathan was ransomed from a sin that he committed unknowingly.

2,000 years ago, Christ ransomed us from sins that we didn’t realize we even committed, as well as sins that we intentionally committed. During the time of Jonathan, no one took his place, but 2,000 years ago, Christ took our place. He took our punishment and paid our debt Himself. He didn’t have to. Jonathan had just saved the people of Israel, while we did nothing of the sort for God. God took our punishment upon Himself because He loves us. You don’t have to accept the death warrant against you; Christ has already ransomed you; all you have to do is accept His free gift of salvation.

Peace. Love. Go Forth and Be Ransomed.

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The God of Time

⁸He waited seven days, the time appointed by Samuel. But Samuel did not come to Gilgal, and the people were scattering from him. ⁹So Saul said, “Bring the burnt offering here to me, and the peace offerings.” And he offered the burnt offering. ¹⁰As soon as he had finished offering the burnt offering, behold, Samuel came. And Saul went out to meet him and greet him. ¹¹Samuel said, “What have you done?” And Saul said, “When I saw that the people were scattering from me, and that you did not come within the days appointed, and that the Philistines had mustered at Michmash, ¹²I said, ‘Now the Philistines will come down against me at Gilgal, and I have not sought the favor of the Lord.’ So I forced myself, and offered the burnt offering.” ¹³And Samuel said to Saul, “You have done foolishly. You have not kept the command of the Lord your God, with which He commanded you. For then the Lord would have established your kingdom over Israel forever. ¹⁴But now your kingdom shall not continue. The Lord has sought out a man after His own heart, and the Lord has commanded him to be prince over His people, because you have not kept what the Lord commanded you.” ~ 1 Samuel 13:8-11

Saul’s lack of faith in the LORD and in the man of God led to Saul becoming impatient and destroying his future and his children’s future. Samuel gave Saul a set time to wait for him, but when Samuel didn’t show up at the exact time Saul expected him, Saul began to panic and took matters into his own hands. He allowed his fear of the enemy and the lack of time to overtake him. Today we are no different.

Some of us are given a call or promise from God that we feel should come in a certain amount of time, and when it doesn’t, we begin to panic and try to force it to come sooner or come through closed doors that we force open. The fear of missing our opportunity can lead us to not only miss our opportunity but endanger our children’s future as well. We can’t allow the fear of running out of time to keep us from following God’s perfect timeline. God isn’t slow to fulfilling promises as we count slowness; instead, He is always on time, bringing things to fruition at the perfect time.

Peace. Love. Go Forth and Have Faith in the God of Time.

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Obey Over Sacrifice

¹⁷And Samuel said, “Though you are little in your own eyes, are you not the head of the tribes of Israel? The Lord anointed you king over Israel. ¹⁸And the Lord sent you on a mission and said, ‘Go, devote to destruction the sinners, the Amalekites, and fight against them until they are consumed.’ ¹⁹Why then did you not obey the voice of the Lord? Why did you pounce on the spoil and do what was evil in the sight of the Lord?” ²⁰And Saul said to Samuel, “I have obeyed the voice of the Lord. I have gone on the mission on which the Lord sent me. I have brought Agag the king of Amalek, and I have devoted the Amalekites to destruction. ²¹But the people took of the spoil, sheep and oxen, the best of the things devoted to destruction, to sacrifice to the Lord your God in Gilgal.” ²²And Samuel said, “Has the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to listen than the fat of rams. ²³For rebellion is as the sin of divination, and presumption is as iniquity and idolatry. Because you have rejected the word of the Lord, he has also rejected you from being king.” ~ 1 Samuel 15:17-23

We all know the saying, “It is often easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission,” but is this the Truth? From the moment that Saul disobeyed the LORD and then tried to make it up to the LORD by making a sacrifice, things went from bad to worse. Saul was like a lot of us today. We think that because God loves us and He shows us grace that it’s better to live our lives in fear of the unforgiving world instead of the forgiving God.

Like Saul, every time we sin and just think we can ask for forgiveness after, we fail to realize that we can’t receive forgiveness without the shedding of innocent blood. Could this be why rebellion is the sin of divination? Because we treat shedding the blood of the innocent as a magic potion that erases all of our sins instead of what it truly is, a sacrifice. Obedience is better than sacrifice, not because God wants mindless robots following Him but because He doesn’t want the shedding of innocent blood.

When we begin to get used to living in sin with the idea of just asking for forgiveness later, we’re spitting on the innocent blood that has to be shed for our forgiveness. The innocent blood that was shed 2,000 years ago on calvary. We have to stop treating the precious blood of Jesus as if it was a magic potion that can just wash away our mistakes so we can live our lives however we want and start treating it as it is. It is the very embodiment of true love, for God Himself poured out His own blood that we might be saved. This isn’t a gift we should take advantage of, but that should be revered. A gift that should fill us with praise and thanksgiving for our God.

Peace. Love. Go Forth and Obey Over Sacrifice.

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Embrace the Love of God

²⁴Saul said to Samuel, “I have sinned, for I have transgressed the commandment of the Lord and your words, because I feared the people and obeyed their voice.” ~ 1 Samuel 15:24

Saul was a beloved king chosen by God Himself to be the first king of His chosen people, yet Saul feared the people. He was a great leader that the LORD had shown His grace and love upon, yet for Saul, it wasn’t enough. From the moment Saul was chosen by the LORD, he responded with self-doubt that he wasn’t good enough. This led to the need to be loved and accepted by the people of Israel regardless of whether or not he was dwelling in the will of God. This was because he feared being rejected by the people and risked being rejected by God.

This is how we are today. We are so afraid of being rejected by society that we push away the love and grace of God. The spirit of rejection is one of the most dangerous spirits that can take root in us because the spirit of rejection breeds fear in us. When we are filled with fear, we can’t please God because we have a lack of faith and love in God. The only way to overcome the spirit of fear is to embrace the love of God. Only in the love of God does fear disappear, and faith begins to grow.

Peace. Love. Go Forth and Embrace The Love of God.

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Follow The Man Jesus

⁵Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, ⁶who, though He was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, ⁷but emptied Himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. ⁸And being found in human form, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. ⁹Therefore God has highly exalted Him and bestowed on Him the name that is above every name, ¹⁰so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, ¹¹and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. ~ Philippians 2:5-11

Paul wasn’t speaking on his own authority but according to the Spirit of God. This is important to understand that Jesus, while on earth, acted as a man. He lived as a man. He felt pain, sorrow, and temptation as a man. He had to get up and pray to receive strength to make it through His days. Why?

Because if He overcame sin by being God, then we have no hope of overcoming sin because we will never be God. This is why Jesus said in John 8:28, I do nothing of my own accord. Because He had to learn. He didn’t come down omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. He was in His Father’s house, learning from His Father. When He was baptized, the Holy Spirit came upon Him.

This is also why He says in John 18:28 that He has to return to the Father because the Father is greater. As Paul explains in great detail in Philippians 2:5-11, Jesus had set aside His Godliness to come down to the earth and become man. So, Jesus, as a man, had to return to the Father in order to present Himself as the sacrifice so that the Father could accept His sacrifice and elevate Him to His rightful place in order to forgive the sins of all who believe and repent so that He could send the Holy Spirit. If Jesus overcame the world as God, we would have no hope, but because Jesus came as a man, all men now have the opportunity to overcome the world through Him. We now have hope.

Peace. Love. Go Forth and Follow The Man Jesus.

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Problems of People Pleasing

¹⁸And the Lord sent you on a mission and said, ‘Go, devote to destruction the sinners, the Amalekites, and fight against them until they are consumed.’ ¹⁹Why then did you not obey the voice of the Lord? Why did you pounce on the spoil and do what was evil in the sight of the Lord?” ²⁰And Saul said to Samuel, “I have obeyed the voice of the Lord. I have gone on the mission on which the Lord sent me. I have brought Agag the king of Amalek, and I have devoted the Amalekites to destruction. ~ 1 Samuel 15:18-21

Saul was a people pleaser more than a God pleaser. He always seemed to believe that sacrifice was more important than obedience. He didn’t learn from the last time he sacrificed instead of obeying. It’s like he just didn’t get that God wanted obedience. His need to please the people was stronger than his need to please God. It’s almost like us today when we say God understands.

This is just like Saul when he says, God understands those animals weren’t taken for us, but to offer a sacrifice to Him, so God should be pleased. Like us, Saul tried to justify his disobedience, although he should have known better after all those years of being guided/mentored by Samuel and hearing from God Himself.

Today we have the word of God and the Holy Spirit to guide us, but more often than not, we do everything based on our feelings versus what God says because God understands that we’re mere men and made from dust. These are the lies of the enemy that we believe. These are the lies that keep us in bondage.

LORD, help us to stop making excuses for our disobedience and ask for forgiveness. Help us to lay it on the altar, draw close to You, and put up a fight against our flesh. Encourage us as our flesh weakens the more we walk in obedience to You. In Jesus’ name, I pray, amen.

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Have Confidence in Christ

¹ There was a wealthy, influential man named Kish from the tribe of Benjamin. He was the son of Abiel, son of Zeror, son of Becorath, son of Aphiah, of the tribe of Benjamin. ²His son Saul was the most handsome man in Israel—head and shoulders taller than anyone else in the land.²¹Saul replied, “But I’m only from the tribe of Benjamin, the smallest tribe in Israel, and my family is the least important of all the families of that tribe! Why are you talking like this to me?” ~ 1 Samuel 9:1-2, 21

Saul was from a great family of influence and wealth. He was more handsome than any other man in Israel, even being head and shoulders taller than them, yet he saw himself as no one. He had no confidence in who he was. This is how a lot of us are today. We are sons and daughters of God Almighty, yet we don’t see our own self-worth. We look at ourselves through tainted eyes that can’t see who God has formed us into and who He is shaping us to become.

So many of us miss out on our potential and our call because we are too busy holding onto rejection from our past or shame of past regrets. When rejection or shame tries to sneak in, we have to remind ourselves who we are in Christ Jesus. We are sons and daughters of the Most High. We have a purpose and call for our lives from the Creator Himself. Our debt has been paid with the precious blood of God Almighty Himself. Don’t let the stronghold of rejection or regret keep you from seeing who you are in Christ Jesus.

Peace. Love. Go Forth and Have Confidence in Christ.

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Call On The Word

¹⁷and take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God ~ Ephesians 6:17

The Sword of the Spirit is our greatest weapon. It’s our defensive and offensive weapon. Why? Because the Sword of the Spirit is the Word of God, and Jesus is the Word of God. He isn’t dead but alive. He is the King of kings and LORD of lords. He is the Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End, the one who was, who is, and who is to come. He is the Word made flesh. Our greatest weapon is the Word of God because it is Jesus. The Word is alive and active, sharper than any double-edged sword, because every time we quote Scripture, we are calling on Jesus to come to our rescue.

Peace. Love. Go Forth and Call On The Word.

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