Daily Devotionals

Truths to Live By - One Day at a Time

Devotional: September 14th

“As the Lord lives, there shall no punishment come upon you for this thing.” (NASB)

Earlier in his reign, Saul had decreed that all mediums and spiritists should be cut off from the land. But then things went from bad to worse in his personal and public life. After Samuel’s death, the Philistines massed against Saul’s army at Gilboa. When he couldn’t get any word from the Lord, he consulted a witch in Endor. She fearfully reminded him that he had ordered the removal of all witches from the land. It was then that Saul reassured her, “As the Lord lives, there shall no punishment come upon you for this thing” (NASB).

The lesson is clear. People have a tendency to obey the Lord only as long as it suits them. When it no longer suits them, they can always think up excuses for doing whatever they want.

Did I say “they”? Perhaps I should have said “we”. We all tend to evade Scriptures, bend them, or explain them away when we don’t want to obey.

For example, there are some plain instructions concerning the role of women in the church. But they seem to clash with the current feminist movement.

So what do we do? We say that those commandments were based on the culture of that day and do not apply to us today. Of course, when we once admit that principle, we can get rid of almost anything in the Bible.

Sometimes we come to some hard-hitting statements of the Lord Jesus concerning the terms of discipleship. If we feel they demand too much of us, we say, “Jesus didn’t mean that we should do it, but only that we should be willing to do it.” We deceive ourselves that we are willing, when we have no intention of ever doing it.

We can be very firm in demanding that offenders be disciplined according to the stern demands of the Word. But when an offender turns out to be our relative and friend, we can insist that the demands be relaxed or overlooked altogether.

Another device we have is to classify Scripture commandments as “important” or “not important.” Those in the “not important” category can be disregarded—or at least that is what we tell ourselves.

In all of these false reasonings, we are actually wresting the Scriptures to our own destruction. God wants us to obey His Word whether it suits us or not. That is the pathway to blessing.