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Good day and welcome to your Kingdom Connection Devotional with Minister Angela for Friday! Today we will close out "Who's Loving Who?" for the month of February. This topic is so very important because it gets to the root of who we are and what truly matters to us. I want to encourage you to review the devotionals a second time and to add the necessary transformations to your prayer list and spiritual goals list. It is OUR responsibility to guard our own heart. Jeremiah, Chapter 17:9-10 gives us an important insight. It says:
9"The heart is more deceitful than all else And is desperately sick; Who can understand it? 10"I, the LORD, search the heart, I test the mind, Even to give to each man according to his ways, According to the results of his deeds.…
Deception has to be watched for
because it is one of the most effective tricks of the enemy. In most cases, Satan cannot be blatant and trip many of us into just shouting, "We HATE God!" We ALL know better, but he can surround us with things that appease our eyes, he can introduce us to the things that tantalize our flesh and he can put us in positions that will cause us to lift ourselves up in pride. When we walk and abide in these choices, we may as well say, " I HATE God" because the end results will all be the same. The atheist and the list of comfortably practicing sinners that say they love God are all going to the same place. The Apostle Paul tells us,
9. Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who submit to or perform homosexual acts, 10. nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor verbal abusers, nor swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of God.… I Corinthians 6:9-10
God does have standards. That has never ceased. And while we do not have the ability to live so righteous and holy that we can EARN our way into His Kingdom, we can live so reckless, fulfilling our own desires to the utmost, that we miss eternity with Him. He has power to deliver us from whatever lust and prideful acts we are overcome by. Our sinning should be done out of a struggle NOT complete surrenderance. We are to surrender to God not to ourselves. LOL
Now the deal is, the Lust of the Flesh, the Lust of the Eyes and the Pride of Life are powerful tools that take us out of the will of God. They each have the ability to turn our hearts FROM God to ourselves and there are NO exceptions. When Jesus was in the wilderness He was literally tempted by Satan in all three areas.
1) To turn the stones into bread while He had fasted 40 day would have fulfilled a lust
within in His
flesh.
2. Becoming the
ruler over all the
kingdoms Satan
showed Him would
have addressed a
lust of His eyes
3. Jumping off the cliff and allowing/daring the angels to save Him so that He did not dash His feet would have shown His pride.
Temptations are described as being BOTH desirable AND available. Christ considered it because Satan is superb at what He does. Satan knows how to present exactly what we like and which buttons to push to make us turn our love for God into a love for ourselves.
When we blatantly ignore God's instructions and directions and instruct Him to talk to the hand, then we have become full of ourselves and are walking in pride and arrogance. It is to tell God we know better than He does so shut up. We may call ourselves loving ourselves but we are merely setting ourselves up to oppose the Most High God.
When we seek after things, and sacrifice our walk with God in order to gain and maintain things in the natural we are not loving ourselves because we deserve it, we are operating from the lust of the eyes.
When we allow our flesh to partake of its every desire, be it sex, drugs, food, etc.. then we are not loving ourselves we are feeding into the lust of our flesh.
The world will pass away WITH these vary desires but loving God with all of your heart, mind and soul will gain us eternal life
Lust
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of the Flesh
of the Eyes
The Pride of Life Part II O O
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