Aug 29, 2022
Would you say that you
really understand your own motives?
Hi, I’m Mike Henry Sr.
with Follower of One. Thanks for joining me again today on the
Follower of One podcast. I’m grateful that you’re here today. We’re
talking about how we have this tendency to misunderstand our own
actions. Today. I want to read Romans 7:15 from the New American
Standard Bible.
“I do not understand.
So I’m not practicing what I would like to do, but I am doing the
very thing I hate as a Christ follower.” I felt like this verse was
the application and the practical working out of my faith in my
life. For many years, I struggled with my own desires to be more
Christlike, to do the things that he would have me do, to live in
such a way that would glorify him. Yet my habits and behaviors and
my moment-by-moment choices mess me up every time. One of those
areas for me is in eating snacks. I always just kind of give myself
a pass, and before I know it,I’ve eaten way too many snacks. I give
myself this pass and what I would like to do, I don’t really do it.
I do the things that deep down in my soul (my habits, and
subconscious) I think I want to do, but they take me off. I believe
the Bible gives us a great explanation that when I listen to my
flesh, when I listen to the world around me, and when I listen to
the nature tugging on my spirit, it pulls me away from God. What I
am doing I do not understand. I misunderstand my own actions.
I don’t practice what
I would really like to do, but I do the very thing I don’t want to
do. I make choices in the short run to be lazy or to be selfish.
Each of us, I believe, does this. Each of us have this capability
to make a short-term temporary decision that takes us away from
God, away from the opportunities to minister to other people.
It requires discipline
and hope for us to turn from this challenge, and hope is a key word
for me. I hope to talk about the word “hope” much more in the
coming weeks because I’m reading a book called Hope Rising by Casey
Gwinn and Chan Hellman. It’s an interesting book and they have a
definition for hope in there.
This is where I wanted
to be for today. Instead of misunderstanding our actions, let’s
focus on hope. Their definition for hope states (this is a quote),
“hope is the belief that a thriving future is possible and you have
the power to make it.” So I don’t read the book from a particularly
Christian perspective.
I’m only four chapters
into it, so I’m less than a third of the way in. But what I find in
hope, and we find in the Bible,(I’ll talk about this in future
days), is that hope is the belief that a thriving future is
possible and God has the power to make it. So the Holy Spirit has
the power to make it so, and to work through us.
He’s given us the
opportunity to be agents in that process. That’s what Paul’s
talking about here in Romans 7: Left to ourselves, we’re not
capable of participating in God’s program. We’re not capable of
taking part in that, but the Holy Spirit transforms us and is the
down payment for that. Our sin has been paid for. We no longer have
to make these choices as he goes about through the rest of Romans 7
and into Romans 8.
Rather than
misunderstanding our motives and our beliefs, let’s enter our life
every day with a biblical perspective. Today, that’s our challenge.
Let’s remember that our flesh and our choices and our habits,
they’re not necessarily what God would do. They might be, in fact,
the very thing we would hate. But we can choose today to say “Here
I am” to God and let him put us to work in our workplaces and in
the lives of the people around us. We can go into any work
situation and begin with the prayer, "Jesus. Here I am. What would
you have me do today?” And then it’s God’s job to put us to work.
Thank you for being a marketplace minister. Thanks for considering
how you can make a difference by re-understanding your own motives
and your own choices. And don’t forget to join us at www.community.followerofone.org.
You can check it out
there at no cost, and you can see about becoming part of a
community of people that are helping o