08/12/2022
As I sat listening to the sounds of morning by the creek today, I opened my Abide app for a Daily devotion. The scripture reference for today is from Proverbs 4:23 which says, "above all else, guard your heart for everything you do flows from it." When I've heard this snippet in the past, I always thought about how what I say and do affects other people, but it truly affects how I affect my own relationship with God. From here, God led me into this string of logic that probably should be obvious to me but sometimes I am just willful enough to say, "Nahh, that can't be it. Continue course and speed." Well... Not today, Satan.
Here's what God taught me again this morning:
I allow a lot of distractions which keep me from being devoted to listening to the Lord and to pursuing him. More often than not, a distraction isn't really a distraction, it's a willful decision not to do what I feel the prompting of the Holy Spirit telling me to do. Most likely, it is spending time with the Lord, turning off the television, turning off the phone and giving myself over completely to reading his word or listening to what he has to say. I deafen my own ears. Sometimes I don't realize that I am doing it until I feel the tugging of the Holy Spirit and that shameful, guilty feeling brought on by the same disobedience of Adam & Eve in the garden... I know what I've done., and yet I seldom correct it. How can I continue to expect God's blessing and his providence in my life when I continually push him away? How can I expect to have a close, intimate, personal relationship with him and want to minister to others when I continually put him off and don't give him 1st place in my heart? Somehow there's a disconnect from the idea that I am in despair, discouragement, frustration or even anger, or that my ministry is stunted and shutting the Lord out. I cut him off, but it is most certainly connected. HE is the Prince of Peace. HE is my All in All. HIS mercy is new every morning. Rejecting the prompting of the Holy Spirit in my life means that there IS no peace. I don't HAVE everything I need. There IS no new mercy in the morning... not when I have pushed it away with both hands. Surely at some point in my life, the light will go on and I will stop this vicious cycle of rejecting good spiritual food and marveling at the fact that I'm starving spiritually. There really is a correlation between starving and not eating, go figure. The discord in my life and the lack of communication and communion with the Lord are directly related. Ding!Ding! Ding! I think the light just went on.