When God is Irrelevant

When God is Irrelevant




"Whatever you do, do all to the glory of God." 1 Corinthians 10:31

Yesterday I shared a devotional from Henry Blackaby on sowing seeds of righteousness. On the same day, I read this devotional from the pen of Dr. Jerry Bridges, and it was a powerful follow-up that I believe will cause you to think this morning about the issues that we might be dealing with that have become known as "acceptable" sins:

When I talk about specific areas of our subtle "acceptable" sins, one comment I often hear is that pride is their root cause. While I agree that pride plays a major role, I believe there is another sin even more basic, more widespread, and more apt to be the root cause of other sins. It's the sin of ungodliness, of which we're all guilty to some degree.

We don't think of ourselves as ungodly. After all, we're Christians, not atheists or wicked people. How can I say that we believers are all, to some extent, ungodly?

UNGODLINESS may be defined as living one's every day life with little or no thought of God, God's will, God's glory, or our dependence on God. You can readily see that someone can lead a respectable life and still be ungodly in the sense that God is essentially irrelevant in his or her life.



The sad fact is that many of us believers tend to live our daily lives with little or no thought of God. We may read our Bibles and pray at the beginning of each day, but then go out into the day's activities and basically live as though God doesn't exist. We seldom think of our dependence on God or our responsibility to Him. We might go for hours with no thought of God at all. I believe that all our other acceptable sins can ultimately be traced to this root sin of ungodliness. Ungodliness ultimately give life to our more visible sins.

Pray that God will make you more conscious of the face that you live every moment of every day under His all-seeing eye, knowing that He sees your every deed, hears your every word, and knows your every thought. (Dr. Jerry Bridges from Respectable Sins -- NavPress)

Good message to ponder this morning, brothers. Allow this to work its way into your heart and mind. -- Bill Welte is President and CEO of America's KESWICK

DIGGING DEEPER: Proverbs 14; Genesis 33-35; Matthew 10:1-20

DIG THIS QUOTE: Let the reader … carefully remember, that grace is either absolutely free, or it is not at all; and, that he who professes to look for salvation either by grace, either believes in his heart to be saved entirely by it, or he acts inconsistently in affairs of the greatest importance. – Abraham Booth (1734-1806)

Determined Digging: Level 1 -- Deut. 31:8 Level 2 -- Psalm 1