Riches and pleasures
of this life, are these good things? I
don't think so. Let's study this for a
moment. I've grown up in the shadow of materialism, as have most of us in the
Western world. We've grown up with society all around us at every turn pushing
at us to attain material goods of one sort or another. On a moments deeper reflection, maybe from
the get go out of the Garden of Eden materialism reared its ugly head. Having
to work to obtain their very sustenance, when prior to that all the sustenance
they needed was at their fingertips without any hard labor at all, didn't this
institute a desire for things, a desire to sow and reap a good harvest as
opposed to an adequate harvest? And then
when more than one family began to sow and reap- comparison began. The family
with the better harvest envied by the family with the lesser harvest. Sin birthed envy for the materialistic and
when we take stock of where we are right now, isn't it truthful to say that the
sin of materialism is rampant in most lives?
Satan has allowed us to taste the lives of the materialistic and in
tasting we desire more, we desire better. Our senses have switched from the
desire for the barest necessity towards the desire for accumulation, and the
best we can afford. We love being able
to show off the things we can afford because we believe success is measured in
our possessions. We are filled with regrets of past actions which caused our
lives to turn down such paths that we feel we were robbed of fortunes that
might have been. Riches and pleasures of
this life.
You don't have to be
rich to be consumed with the desire of pleasure. Pleasures of this life. Anything that makes
our flesh nature happy at the expense of our spiritual nature is a pleasure of
this life that steals the pleasure of eternal life from us. This is truth!
Whenever our
spiritual nature is put unrepentantly second to our flesh nature we are
sacrificing eternal life. Even a
seemingly very Christian pastime can become a pleasure to our flesh if we are
sacrificing our spiritual nature. We can't pat ourselves on the back and say we
spent hours helping others and gained much pleasure from that, if we neglected
to have God first in that activity. Many so called Christ followers are going
to be shocked to hear that their wonderful Christian works were in fact void
altogether of Christ. The truth of the
matter is, their works however good were done in selfishness, a selfish
pleasure was derived from their sacrifice.
Self-serving pleasure is contrary to being spiritually minded. Pleasure
is not altogether wrong. We can derive pleasure from spiritually centered
activities. In fact a lot of our pleasures can be spiritual, but God needs to
come first and that pleasure from Him, not a self-induced, self-absorbed,
self-obsessed, self-generated pleasure.
God first, or God
truly will be last in your life and you won't even know it. Satan loves to
deceive us and we stop short of examining our pleasures too closely because we
don't want to be numbered among those whose pleasures of this life rob us of
absorbing the truth through God's word. We'd rather simply believe all of our
pleasures are all on the up and up and God approved and not able to keep us
from truth. As if not examining them will keep the truth from God- which is a
LIE.
Luk 8:14 And that which fell among thorns are they,
which, when they have heard, go forth, and are choked with cares and riches and
pleasures of this life, and bring no fruit to perfection.
Choked with cares,
we can understand this easily enough- not trusting God to get us through the
hard times, but instead we worry about them and let them consume us.
Choked with riches,
this is a bit harder to comprehend, maybe because most of the people in the
world don't have riches to be choked with.
Truthfully you can be choked with the riches of this life by not having
them as well as having them.
Choked with
pleasures, this is hardest of all to comprehend because we are taught and
almost innately through our flesh nature-believe that it's important that we find pleasures as
often as we can, because life is hard and pleasure very important.
What good are any
pleasures, any riches, any cares if God is NOT in them, truly in them, if God's
pleasure is not thought about at all? God's pleasure, God's will, God first in
all we do.
We keep God in His
place and all too often that place is completely separate from the majority of
our lives. We give God His time slot and then go about our days, not fully
comprehending there is no time slot for God- He is either in our entire life or
He is not in our life at all, not really.
Please Father we
would have you in our life, truly in our life, in ALL of our life!
By the grace and
mercy, the incomprehensible love of our Savior, Jesus Christ our Lord!
Amen!
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