Don't be a pretender

[logi bear]

Another devotional from one of the pastors of my church, - a reminder that God takes sin seriously, and sometimes needs to take drastic measures.

Don't be a Pretender
October 31st, 2011

Think about what makes you happy. For me, it’s the 3 “F’s” which is: Fellowship, family and food! As I was contemplating this thought of what makes each of us happy, I thought, “God, what makes you happy?” It’s holiness that brings our Lord happiness. 1 Peter 1:16 says, “It is written, be Holy for the Lord our God is Holy.” The word holiness can be part of our lingo, our “Christianese” so-to-speak. We can so easily throw around the word, “holy” and we really don’t even know what it truly means.

The Strong’s Concordance defines, “holy” as: Physically pure, morally blameless, ceremonial consecrated. Webster’s dictionary defines it like this: Devoted entirely to the Deity or to the work of the Deity. Holy is found in 544 verses in the Bible. Clearly, it is a topic that is near and dear to the heart of our Lord.

The only way that we can be holy before God is through the cleansing and washing of the blood of Jesus Christ. So many times we pretend we are holier than we really are. Maybe we wear a tie to church on Sunday and we put on our best clothes and get all ready. While there, we act like we are somebody that we are not. Hypocrisy is a huge thing that people have been dealing with since the beginning of time.

The account of Ananias and Sapphria in Acts 5 is an example of people pretending they are something they are not—pretending to do something that they were really not completely doing as they held back some of the money they claimed they had given. Peter discerned that they allowed Satan to fill their hearts with a lie as they pretended to do something that they were not doing. The issue here was not that they weren’t giving all the funds. The issue was that they were pretending to give all the funds. Sin begins in the heart. It’s out of the abundance of the heart that the mouth speaks.

Our hearts are a place where no one else can see. We can allow unrestrained sin to dwell in our hearts and no one else knows. We can conceal our hearts. We can present ourselves in such a way, on the outside, that no one really has any clue what is going on inside of our hearts. It’s a very dangerous thing.

It takes integrity for a person to recognize that God sees their heart and they want to be right before the Lord, regardless of how we can appear to others. We can fool men, but we can’t fool God. So Ananias drops dead after he lies. Drastic measures instills fear in the people of the Lord. God has to keep His church holy. He will keep His church separated from the world. Satan is the father of lies and there is no room for that in His church. God will preserve holiness. Sometimes, as in Acts 5, it takes drastic measures.

Satan always seeks to keep his victims blind to the consequences of their sin. Satan keeps us focused on our sin so we don’t focus on what’s going to happen if we don’t stop. Satan desires to keep you in darkness to what the consequences of your sin are going to be soon. But God is always reaching out in His grace, giving you opportunity to repent of those sins. Proverbs 25:14 says that the secret (or intimacy) of the Lord is with those who fear Him. If there is anything in our lives that is contrary to the way that His Word tells us to live, we need to deal with those things, immediately. God takes sin seriously. He sees all and He knows all. We need to be like the Lord. And to be like Him, we must be holy as the Lord our God is holy.