Knowing God Devotional is an online daily devotional written by Andrews Baah Kwafo, the president of The Bible Daily Network.
The world’s system is like ancient Babylon, where the children of God are forced to submit to systems and structures that battle for our time with the Lord and our convictions in the Word. Standing on your grounds to live by faith doesn’t happen by luck. It’s by intentionality.
When you don’t understand why God tells you to do something, it’s not the time to complain to Him. You only have to do it as you trust Him. See, God isn’t only your heavenly Father. He’s also your leader. That means there are things He knows that you don’t know, and just because you don’t know something doesn’t give you the audacity to disobey Him.
Your work will be revealed by fire on the second coming of Christ. Whether you build it on the foundation of Christ or with gold, silver, hay, wood or straw, God’s fire will reveal it. So if you do God’s work shabbily, men will not see it, but God will see it. There’s nothing hidden before God. Even the motives of your heart are plain before Him.
We all know that there are some people in this world doing marvellous things, and yet they aren’t born again. So does it mean Jesus is lying? No. What Jesus meant when he said, “Without him, we can do nothing,” is that when God weighs people’s works, those that are relevant before Him are those Jesus is involved in. This is why effective kingdom productivity heavily depends on your intimate fellowship with Jesus, and ministers can attest to this truth.
As long as we live in a wicked world (1 John 5:19), there’ll be persecutions against our faith. And when the persecution becomes as fierce as people hating us and blood-brothers delivering up (total neglect to take care of our needs, so to say) siblings to get killed, we should endure till the end.
You may be well trained in church to live a godly life. But what about your personal fellowship with Jesus? How is your love for Him like today? Have you forsaken your first love — the Lord Jesus, who saved you and gave you eternal life? Think about this.
If you’re a leader, note that there’ll be times at least one of your team members will tell you that he disagrees with your ways of doing things. Sometimes, it’s good to listen, probably because you don’t know everything. Other times, you have to explain your actions in order to teach them the vision behind what you are doing.
In order to be Christ-like in all your ways, you’ve got to humble yourself before God to be trained. That includes spending time fellowshipping with the Holy Spirit. That also includes submitting to spiritual mentorship in Christ and being consistently present in the gathering of the saints.
Emphasising forgiveness is very important in our relationships with one another. No matter what you do, people will offend you. However, Colossians 3:13 tells us to forgive others as Christ has also forgiven us. Note that there are no conditions attached to that scripture. Your point may be correct, but to prevent strife and promote peace, lay aside what makes you think you’re right and forgive your offender.
God’s love is patient. To express it, you’ll not get everything you want; because you’ll consider other people’s interests in your decisions. You’re only required to reject people’s opinions when their thoughts aren’t in synchrony with what God has told you to do.
There’s nothing good and perfect that doesn’t come from God. God is so good and full of light that even His turning produces light. That means, when He turns His back on you about something, there’s still glory in it, not because He’s wicked, but because He wants to implant His Word in you through difficult situations. So God sometimes allows us to pass through trials in order for Him to work out His Word in our hearts.
By becoming a consistent doer of God’s Word, you also become an onlooker of the perfect law of liberty. What that means is that your life starts to get transformed to become more Christlike. Why? Because the cleansing power of the Word gradually flushes out destructive content in you and replaces it with sound doctrine. And since you live out what’s in you, you’ll begin to manifest the ways of Jesus physically.
