A Good Starting Place

...everything else is worthless when compared with the priceless gain of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.

Folks seem to be consistently perplexed about what the will of God is for their lives. The will of God… volumes of books have been written on how to know the will of God.

Believers tend to make things complicated. Hearing from God one way or another is the age old excuse for the good things and the wrong things we do. If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard the phrase, “God told me such and such ” I’d own that place on the beach I dream of. I wonder how many times God actually told us or we just decided on our own it was what seemed best. Not pointing fingers… I’m including myself here.

There are some passages in the Bible that flat out tell us what IS the will of God. No guessing. No praying. No trying to make it fit with our philosophy or theology. No twisting or turning or distorting can make it say what we wish it did. Just plain and simple instructions. If we applied what we DO KNOW the Bible says about God’s will first, and lived it out, the will of God wouldn’t be such a mystery to so many folks. [It’s good to remind yourself that if you are a child of God, you are precious to Him and He is not withholding anything of Himself to those who know Him. ]

For this is the will of God, your sanctification; that is, that you abstain from sexual immorality (or sexual vice~ in another translation); that each of you know how to possess his own vessel in sanctification and honor, not in lustful passion, like the heathen who do not know God. I Thess. 4:3-5

One translation says, “Stay away from all sexual sin then each of you will control/manage his own body and live in holiness and honor”.

Sanctification… it’s a good starting place. We don’t hear much about it these days. It’s certainly not what itching ears want to hear. It means we separate ourselves UNTO God and we allow the holiness of Him to make us holy. In another place He says, “Be holy as I am holy”. Those words tell me it is possible for me to BE holy and LIVE holy.

I wonder if some of the music we listen to would fit with this admonition. If the music we listen to and the movies/TV we watch promote sexual sin do we think it helps us in our sanctification to let it in our ears and eyes?

Oh, that thinking is ‘SO yesterday’!

Wow, what if we just made that one adjustment. What if we actually learned how to possess our own vessel (body) in sanctification and honor! What if we just wanted to do God’s will at any cost to our flesh? What if that was more important to us than what anyone else thinks of us?

I’m asking myself these questions. What about you?