Good Morning Everyone,
Our theme for this month: “Self-control”
Our Bible verse for today: “God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.” Genesis 9:1 (HCSB)
Our thought for today: “Disobeying God always leads to bad consequences.”
As was noted yesterday, God has created us with a free will and the ability to make choices about how we will conduct ourselves. He has also provided us with all the guidance we need in order to make choices that are in accordance with His will. It’s then up to us to exercise self-control and conform to God’s prescribed laws.
Yesterday we read of how Adam and Eve exercised their free will and made a choice that was in direct contradiction to what God had told them to do. The end result for them was that they were evicted from paradise. Everything about their life changed from that moment on and everything about life became harder for them. They made a bad choice, they disobeyed God, and they paid big-time for it.
In Genesis 9:1, after the Great Flood, God instructed Noah, his family, and his descendants, to be fruitful, multiply, and fill the whole earth. But in Genesis 11:4, not too many generations later, we read of the people deciding to do the exact opposite. “And they said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the sky. Let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise, we will be scattered over the face of the earth.” We then read of how God intervened, destroyed the tower of Babel, and forcefully scattered them throughout the world. Their lives were completely uprooted by God because they hadn’t obeyed Him to begin with.
We read of a similar situation in the book of Acts with the Jewish Christians in the early church in Jerusalem. Jesus had specifically told them in Matthew 28:18-20 and Acts 1:8 that they were to go throughout the world to spread the Good News about Him. But they didn’t do it. Instead they settled-in and camped-out right there in Jerusalem. So we then read in Acts Chapter Eight of how God allowed a great wave of persecution to descend upon them which forced them to run for their lives. The majority of the Christian community was forced to leave Jerusalem to seek refuge in outlying lands. As they went, they spread their faith and thus ended-up doing the very thing Jesus had commanded them to do to begin with.
In all of those cases life would have been so much better, and so much easier, if they had simply done what God told them to do to begin with. The same is true for us. In the Bible God has clearly told us what He wants us to do – and what He doesn’t want us to do. Now it’s up to us to make good choices and to control ourselves in a God-honoring way.
Throughout the remainder of the month we will consider what exercising self-control (or not exercising it), looks like in a practical day-to-day way in terms of things like sexual morality, gluttony, financial stewardship, good deeds, faithfulness, and much more.
The bottom line is pretty straight-forward: Obey God and you will be blessed; don’t obey God and you will suffer. It’s pretty simply, really.
God Bless,
Pastor Jim
Oak Hill Baptist Church 