Episode 458

TODAY’S READING:

“9 Who do you think you are – recklessly grabbing and looting, Living it up, acting like king of the mountain, acting above it all, above trials and troubles? 10 You’ve engineered the ruin of your own house. In ruining others, you’ve ruined yourself. You’ve undermined your foundations, rotted out your own soul.

Habakkuk 2:9-10

 

I spent some time in the book of Habakkuk. And I was reading the entire book, and I was reading the NIV version. It was a little bit complicated to understand for me, and so I went into the Message version. And then these two verses stood out to what do you think you are essentially saying? Who do we think we are acting above it all? I mean, this could be on so many different occasions acting as if we’re above the rules. I can like if God’s Will isn’t the will that He has for us, acting as if his will is for other people or not for our particular situation. 

 

The only people that we end up hurting when we cheat the way is us; we pay for our actions one way or another. And the beautiful gift of salvation is that we have the gift of communication with the Father, which means we can repent. 

 

We can talk to him about these different situations that cloud our judgment; we can talk to him about different situations in which we do act as if we’re above it all. And beyond that, we can look at our actions, and we can ask him for forgiveness. We can ask him to help us in strengthening our ways. 

 

We can ask him and helping us stick to righteous living, so sticking to his will and learning when we can and cannot do certain things. Now what I love about this verse is that it very much emphasizes that the ruin of our own house is on ourselves. So by ruining others, you’ve ruined yourself. And what I like about this verse where I can apply this in my personal life is maybe I’m not recklessly grabbing on looting. Maybe I’m not purposely hurting another person. But in many ways, I could be acting as the king of a mountain. I can be acting as if I’m above it all. The best thing about the movies is that we love to go and watch something and escape and watch these actors play different characters. But at the end of the day, we know that they’re actors, and it’s not real. 

 

They live in actual life, and they go home, and they have a family that they attend to, and the person that they’re married on screen isn’t always their wife or husband. They’re pretending we cannot go into life pretending to be someone one day, and then on Sundays, where someone is completely different when we choose to follow Christ. We have to do it fully. Willingly. We have to give up our entire heart our entire way and just learn to be more like him each and every day. So today, let us pray for the strength in doing so.

 

Prayer

Father God, we love you so much. And we just want to be more like you, Lord; we don’t want to act like we’re above it all. We don’t want to act as if some of your wills is for us. While we may be exempt from others, we know that that’s not the way we know that there is a way to live, and that is by your will. So Lord, Today, we ask for the strength to be in righteous living. We ask for the strength in ensuring that we’re not hurting others with our actions. We don’t want to act. We want to be the real thing. We want to be the real thing for you, Lord; we also continue to extend our prayers for our brothers and sisters in Ukraine and in Russia for those who are standing up in protest against the government. And we’re just praying for our world leaders as they are making some big decisions, or we’re praying for peace. We ask that you hear our prayers; we ask that you intervene. We ask that Your love is felt overseas. We love you so much, and we pray this all in your holy name, Amen.