Change Your Ways

How long will you who are simple love your simple ways? How long will mockers delight in mockery and fools hate knowledge?

(Proverbs 1:22)

Meditation

 I don’t know about you, but I don’t see a lot of wisdom being displayed by too many lately, including myself. Believe me, I’m the last person to make any claim to having wisdom. In fact, the first wise thing I did in my whole life was coming to Jesus, and by then I was 44 years old. Before that, I made one unwise choice after another. I only had brief encounters with wisdom even though I had a 3.9 GPA in college. Book smarts were getting me nowhere, like I was pedaling hard but getting nowhere. I was so smart, I thought it was foolishness to be a Jesus Freak, as I used to call them. As you can see, I wasn’t very wise back then either. My simple ways, being “one of the guys” was more important than making wise decisions.

Before coming to Christ, I had been so full of myself, I didn’t realize how empty I was. I would get up and go to work every day, come home to my family, party on the weekends, but that was it. I was more like a programmed robot than a man. I didn’t pay much attention to my moral decline, mostly because I thought I liked the person I had become. I didn’t care about people I might hurt, or whether it was right or wrong to steal, or cheat, or lie. I know I am completely to blame for my rebelliousness, and I cheated myself and my family out of what was real and good. When I accepted salvation offered by Jesus, he poured himself into my empty heart and filled me to overflowing.

I’ve been on God’s earth for six decades. I’ve seen the people of this country foolishly turn away from God. Even though I wasn’t a believer most of that time, the country seemed more stable and friendly when there were godly people in our local, state, and federal governments. These days, all that happens in the halls of government is bickering and stalemate. Many are the politicians in our government today say in their hearts, "There is no God." We’re in a struggle to save the lives of the unborn in the country. Just in America alone, since 1972, the corpses of nearly sixty-five million babies have been thrown in the trash can, or their body parts sold for profit. Since God is the one who knits those babies together in their mother’s wombs, it’s the pinnacle of stupidity to murder his creation.

It's time for us, as individuals and as a nation, to put our foolish and simple ways behind us. We are closing in on the Day of the Lord, when we will have to give an account. Our unbelieving and simple ways will only lead us to destruction, and our mocking tongues will be the death of our souls. We're here only a relatively short time compared to eternity. If we continue in our foolishness, Judgment Day will not be good for us. Our final destination will be hell and we'll have no one to blame but ourselves. God's will for us is to follow Jesus with our whole hearts and minds. We have no excuse on Judgment Day for where we go when God has done so much to save us.

Daily Prayer

Oh God, you are great and wonderful. You created us in your image to bring glory to yourself. Even though we are made in your image, we are the simplest of beings. Our ways are so much below your ways, it’s a wonder we’re able to survive. It’s obvious you are the only reason we haven’t gone extinct at some point in our past. We are so inhumane to each other that we take delight in the ways we can kill each other. We mock you as we take the lives of the unborn and call it choice. Now the discussion is swirling around the idea of killing a baby that survives the attempt to kill in the womb. What will be next? We are fools who can’t stand the idea that we don’t know everything there is to know. We put our possessions up on a pedestal and worship them as if they were the most important things in our lives. Father, we ask you to help us to leave our simple ways behind and find your way for our lives. In Jesus’ name, we pray. Amen!