May 10 ~ Romans 8:12-17
My dear friends, we must not live to satisfy our desires. If you do, you will die. But you will live, if by the help of God's Spirit you say "No" to your desires. Only those people who are led by God's Spirit are his children. God's Spirit doesn't make us slaves who are afraid of him. Instead, we become his children and call him our Father. God's Spirit makes us sure that we are his children. His Spirit lets us know that together with Christ we will be given what God has promised. We will also share in the glory of Christ, because we have suffered with him.
Scripture taken from the Contemporary English Version © 1991,1992, 1995 by American Bible Society, Used by Permission.
God has a funny sense of humor. I am a person with little to no will power when it comes to certain things… such as chocolate. I could never keep chocolate chips on hand for baking. Once the bag was opened, they seemed to methodically disappear over the course of just a few days. Cookies and candy, especially around Halloween, Christmas and Easter, may have well been wrapped in neon signs that said, “Come and get it!” So I asked God to help me control my love for chocolate, and He did… He allowed me to develop an allergy to it! I KNOW – I told you He had a sense of humor!
I have heard it all… “Life isn’t worth living without chocolate!” “That has to be the worst allergy in the world!” “How on earth do you survive?” Let me tell you something… there is a whole lot more to life than chocolate! I know some of you find that hard to believe, but there is… and there are worse things than an allergy to it! See, in some ways, I was a slave to chocolate. If it was near me, I felt I had to eat some. Now, I can bake brownies and not even lick the pan. I can be offered a box of assorted truffles or a bag of M&Ms and say, “No thank you.” Oh, sure, it smells great, and I would love to partake… until I think about the hives and the swelling, and the ITCHING… and then I’m over it! I could look at this as a huge inconvenience – or a huge blessing. I am choosing the latter.
Sometimes in our Spiritual life, we hold out on total surrender to God and His will for our lives, because we think we will have to sacrifice something we really love. Who wants to live without the “sinful chocolate” that we all seem to have? For some of us it is a partying lifestyle. For others, it’s a lack of involvement with a church family and getting up off our rears and going to church on Sunday. For others, it’s something we don’t even want to talk about… an addiction of some sort, or a habit we cannot break - or even something we cannot seem to shake… like racial bias or an unloving attitude toward someone else or a particular group of people.
What we fail to realize is that if we wait until we have all of our “issues” resolved, we’ll never find our way to God. And that’s not what He expects anyway. God doesn’t want us to try to fix ourselves… that’s His job – and He does what we cannot. Total surrender to God doesn’t make you God’s slave… it frees you to be the person He called you to be! Don’t wait another day. Don’t try to fix a single other thing yourself. Give up your “sinful chocolate” and embrace the freedom life without it can bring. Acknowledge God as your Father and truly become His child – and discover the fullness of His plans for your life, both now and for all Eternity.
©2010 Debbie Robus
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