Lord,
You call us to ‘draw near’ to You. You want us to ‘pay attention’ to
You. Help us to ‘listen’ to His Word (Isaiah 34:1). Your Word is not
always what we want to hear. It will always be what we need
to hear. ‘The Lord is angry with all nations’ (Isaiah 34:2). We don’t
like to hear about Your anger. We prefer to be told ‘You’re doing fine.’
We need to hear about God’s anger. We need to hear about how far we
have wandered away from God – ‘We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
each of us turned to his own way.’ We are sinners. We have turned away
from You, Lord. We have chosen our own way rather than Your way. We must
hear this ‘bad news’ before we can really appreciate the ‘Good News’ –
‘the Lord has laid all our sins on Jesus’, ‘Christ died for us while we
were still sinners’, ‘Christ died for our sins’ (Isaiah 53:6; Romans
5:8; 1 Corinthians 15:3).
We thank You, Lord, that our determined enemy - Satan - is Your defeated enemy. To us, the devil seems so powerful. In Your eyes, He is defeated - defeated by Jesus, our crucified Saviour and risen Lord. Jesus has triumphed over Satan. He has won the victory for us (1 John 3:8; Hebrews 2:14-15). Lord, Your Word says, "Resist the devil and he will flee from you" (James 5:7). Will he really flee from us? He flees from Jesus - but, surely, not from us? Have we not forgotten something? - Jesus won the victory for us. He gives His victory to us. Help us to resist the devil - in the victorious Name of Jesus. He will flee from us. Why? Because Jesus is Lord over Satan. It's not us he's fleeing from. It's Jesus. When the devil comes 'knocking on our door', help us to send Jesus to the door - and send him packing!
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