January 26
Psalms 119:33-34 Teach me, O LORD, the way of thy statutes; and I shall keep it unto the end. (34) Give me understanding, and I shall keep thy law; yea, I shall observe it with my whole heart.
Paul said that the natural man does not receive the Law of God; that our carnal mind is in enmity with the mind of God.
It takes work to learn the Law of God. It doesn’t come naturally because we do not rationally understand it, but yet to obey it in a robotic ritualistic fashion would defeat its main purpose which is to train and teach our hearts and spirits into His ways.
Without properly understanding the way of His statutes, we miss the point. This is what the prophets and Jesus were constantly telling the religionists of their days, that they followed the letter of the Law and not the Spirit of it (John 6:63; 2 Corinthians 3:6), and that was because they did not understand His statutes with their hearts, they only knew the “letter”!
Those who are satisfied with only following in a ritualistic fashion are not only cheating God of His due from our hearts, but also they are deceiving their own selves with the spirit of “religion”. Their type of adherence to the Word resembles more the ways of paganism than the ways of God. Do they do that because they are afraid of the cost of truly understanding what God expects of them, and thereby would be responsible for it (John 9:41)?
May God help us to give God more credit for giving us not just a religion, but a ‘living faith’ leading us into the wonderful knowledge of His person in an intimate and real fashion.
John 6:63 It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.
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