Living Free Every Day® Todays Scripture Repeat these basic essentials over and over to Gods people. Warn them before God against pious nitpicking, which chips away at the faith. It just wears everyone out. Concentrate on doing your best for God, work you wont be ashamed of, laying out the truth plain and simple. - 2 Timothy 2:14-15 MSG Thoughts for Today The Bible tells us that God is our Banner. God, not doctrine. And yet how often do we as Christians focus on doctrinal opinions and differences instead of our Creator? The basic doctrines of the Gospel cannot be compromised, but we tend to take it so much further and focus on the dos and donts presented in the Bible. In doing this, we often become unbalanced in our teaching. We take isolated scriptures out of context and build entire doctrines on them. And then we wave these doctrines, instead of Jesus and his love, as our banner. This kind of nitpicking brings division to the body of Christ. It often causes confusion for unbelievers and even builds a wall of aversion to their receiving the truths of the Gospel. In the words of todays scripture, it chips away at the faith and just wears everyone out. When Jesus walked on earth, the Pharisees and Sadducees carried their banner-waving rules and regulations so far that most of them failed to recognize Jesus as their long-awaited Messiah. Consider this When we focus more on our doctrinal differences than on the Living Word, we miss Jesus. We miss his direction for our lives. We miss his love. We miss his strength. And we can cause unbelievers to miss him altogether. Lets focus on Jesus. Lets join together with other believers in the love of Jesus agreeing on the truths of the Gospel and agreeing to disagree on the rest and carry Jesus banner of love and forgiveness to a lost world. Prayer Father, help me to join with other believers, no matter what their denomination, in forming a united body to carry the Gospel to people around the world. Help us to focus on you and the truth of salvation and refuse to let our differences divide us. In my personal walk with you, help me to grow in my understanding of the Scriptures and to concentrate on doing my best for you, work I wont be ashamed of, laying out the truth plain and simple. In Jesus name These thoughts were drawn from Knowing God My Father: Applying the Names of God to My Personal Life by Jimmy Ray Lee, D.Min.
Posted on: Thu, 01 Jan 2015 15:25:47 +0000
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