Genesis 13:1-13
Well, good evening. What a treat
it is to be here with you. This is loud. Is it loud? Do you feel it? Okay. I’m glad
I’m not the only one. Well, if you have a Bible, I
wanna invite you to turn with me to Genesis chapter three,
or 13, I’m sorry, Genesis chapter 13, and we will be exploring
verses one through 13 of Genesis chapter 13. And this passage
I want you to think about as we read about the decisions that
you make. What goes into the making of
those decisions? What motivates you? What kind
of people and values and thoughts do you have as you go about making
the big decisions that you have in this life? Last, the passage
that you would look at previous to this one in chapter 12, particularly
in verses 10 through 20, is a well-known passage where Abram makes a very
poor decision, right? He goes to Egypt because there’s
a famine in the land, so he goes to Egypt and he basically has
his wife Sarai lie to the people about his relationship to Abram,
to say that she is his sister, so that they will not kill Abram. And so she is taken by Pharaoh
into his palace, and there’s a deception that Abram has brought
to bear upon Pharaoh, and he has mistreated his wife, failed
to protect her. He makes a very poor, foolish
decision that is rooted in fear. That is the grounds of much of
his decisions. And I wonder how many of the
decisions we make are based in fear. How much of that aspect
of our lives plays into our decision making. But by the very grace
of God, apart from any merit whatsoever in Abram, God is merciful
to him. God not only doesn’t allow Abraham
to be killed as he goes into Egypt, not only does he not utterly
destroy him, but he brings him out of Egypt and he brings him
back into the land of Canaan and he leaves Egypt a very wealthy
man. He leaves much wealthier than
he was prior to the time that he came into Egypt. And his nephew
Lot, you’ll see here, goes with him. And he ends up being a very
wealthy man as well. And so as they get into Genesis
chapter 13, as we discover this place where they’re at now, moving
back into the land of Canaan, what we see there is that you
have two very wealthy men with heaps of cattle and a whole host
of servants and under shepherds, and there’s not enough land to
accommodate both of them. It’s like the more money they
have, the more wealth that they have, the more problems that
they have. And so conflict ensues, not so
much between Lot and Abram, but between their various servants. And so decisions need to be made
as to what they’re going to do about this. That’s the context
that you find yourself in here when you look at Genesis chapter
13. And so what I want you to explore as we plumb the depths
of this passage is what most profoundly influences their decisions,
the decisions that they make going forward. What is shaping
that? And so with that in view, let’s
take a moment to pray and then we’ll read God’s word. Father,
we pray your blessings upon your word. We thank you for it. We
pray that you would speak to us by the power of your spirit
through your word and that you would refine our souls and that
you would use us for your glory as we live not only as hearers
of it but also as doers of it. We ask that you would work that
out in our hearts and in our lives this evening for the sake
of your glory. We pray in Jesus’ name, amen. Genesis chapter 13 beginning
in verse one says this. So Abram went up from Egypt he
and his wife and all that he had and lot with him into the
Negev. Now Abram was very rich in livestock
and silver and in gold and he journeyed on from the Negev as
far as Bethel to the place where his tent had been at the beginning
between Bethel and Ai to the place where he made an altar
at the first and there Abram called upon the name of the Lord.
And Lot, who went with Abram, also had flocks and herds and
tents, so that the land could not support both of them dwelling
together. For their possessions were so great that they could
not dwell together. And there was strife between
the herdsmen of Abram’s livestock and the herdsmen of Lot’s livestock. At that time, the Canaanites
and the Perizzites were dwelling in the land. Then Abram said
to Lot, let there be no strife between you and me and between
your herdsmen and my herdsmen, for we are kinsmen. Is not the
whole land before you? Separate yourself from me. If
you take the left hand, I will go to the right, or if you go
to the right hand, then I will go to the left. And Lot lifted
up his eyes and saw that the Jordan Valley was well watered
everywhere like the garden of the Lord, like the land of Egypt
in the direction of Zoar. This was before the Lord destroyed
Sodom and Gomorrah. Lot chose for himself all the
Jordan Valley and Lot journeyed east. Thus they separated from
each other. Abram settled in the land of
Canaan while Lot settled among the cities of the valley and
moved his tent as far as Sodom. Now the men of Sodom were wicked,
great sinners against the Lord. Amen, this is God’s word to us
this evening. Well, the researchers in the
field of psychology will tell you that the average person makes
around 35,000 decisions in a day. Can you believe that? 35,000
decisions in a day. Most of these are so minor that
you don’t even give thought to them. But some of them are huge. And if you look back at some
of the decisions maybe you’ve even had to make in the past
week or over the course of your life, for sure you can think
of massive decisions. And if you overthink the decisions
that you have to make, it can drive you crazy. You can wonder,
I mean, am I making the right decision? What if I make the
wrong decision? What if I should have gone this
way instead of that way? And it can make you just absolutely
lose your mind if you dwell upon it too much. And it’s possible
to make very wise decisions in this life, but suffer profoundly
because of the wisdom of the decision. You make a good decision.
You make a decision that honors God, loves your neighbor, is
good for you, and you end up suffering as a result of this. Daniel, for instance, makes a
decision to live by faith and not by sight. He suffers under
the hand of Nebuchadnezzar, right? You see John the Baptist, he’s
being a faithful witness to the grace and truth of the gospel. He’s pointing Herod to the Lord. What ends up happening? His head
ends up on a plate for it. And we see all the apostles,
they’re seeking to bring the gospel to the ends of the earth.
They’re seeking to be faithful witnesses to the Lord. And they’re
all martyred for it, except for John. they make wise decisions,
they honor the Lord, and they suffer for it. And then there
are those who make very poor, ungodly decisions, and they seem
to be reaping great rewards for their poor, ungodly decisions.
And those are just innumerable examples of that. And Abram,
for instance, is an example of that in chapter 12, where he
makes a foolish, fear-based decision, and despite the foolishness of
that decision, he comes out and he ends up profiting immensely. And all of this happens under
the wisdom and the sovereignty of God. But the ordinary principle
of life, the ordinary principle that we have is that you reap
what you sow. In other words, the decisions
that you make, you face the benefits or the consequences of that. And oftentimes, We make poor
decisions and we suffer tremendously as a result of it. But what you
need to remember is some good news. Because the good news is
that in Christ, in Christ you are more than the sum of your
decisions. Does that make sense? You are
more than that because you are ultimately in Christ. His grace is sufficient even
for those who make remarkably poor decisions. You are defined
not by your decisions, but by his grace, by his righteousness
imputed to you in the gospel received by faith alone. And that is good news when the
decisions that we make and the history of our life is not always
exactly in line with God’s will, with what he would have us to
do. However, I should also say this. The choices that we make,
the decisions that we make, very much reveal the object of our
greatest affection. Who or what it is that we are
ultimately worshiping. What or whom it is that serves
as our functional God. And I think that what we discover
in this passage are at least two factors that go into the
shaping of our decision. There are a lot of factors that
go into it, but there’s always at least these two. And the two
that I want us to explore in this passage are these. Number
one is that our decisions are first of all influenced by our
understanding of God. And secondly, our decisions are
influenced by our personal character. So they’re influenced by our
understanding of God and our personal character. Now let’s
first look at how Lot and Abram understand God. What we discover
in the passage is that after Abram makes this terrible choice,
he places his wife in a situation where she is going to be defiled
and abused. I mean, that’s how serious and
wicked the decision is that he makes here. And yet, in God’s
mercy, He returns to Canaan. He returns a very wealthy man. And if you look in verses 3 and
4 of chapter 13, what you discover is he journeyed on from the Negev,
that’s the desert in the southern part of what is now Israel, as
far as Bethel, which is this little place just to the north
of Jerusalem. to where he had been at the beginning,
between Bethel and Ai, to the place where he made an altar
at the first. And what’s important about that? What’s important about that is
that Abram, in light of his foolish, wicked decision, repents. He repents. He owns the sin for
what it is, and he goes right back to where he was before he
went into the land of Egypt due to the famine. And he goes back
and what does he do? He worships. He goes back to
the place to where he built the altar. That’s the place where
he goes to worship God. And he does this because he understands
that God has rescued him, and he’s rescued him not because
he’s such a great person and such a faithful servant and such
an obedient follower of the Lord, but God rescued him not because
of his obedience, but despite his disobedience, despite his
wickedness. And it’s an amazing picture of
the gospel. We sing. that great hymn that
all of us know, amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that did
what? That saved a wretch like me. And he understood his wretchedness
and it compelled him to worship. The grace that he received despite
his evil compelled him to worship. And God becomes central to his
understanding. God’s mercy and all that God
has revealed himself to be to Abraham becomes central to his
understanding of himself, of his personal self-understanding,
and it becomes central to his understanding of the world around
him. All that God is, all that God shows himself to be becomes
central to that understanding of himself and of the world around
him, and he starts to live his life under the gracious authority
of the Lord. who pulled him out of Egypt.
But notice what you don’t see here in this passage. What you
don’t see here in this passage is Lot worshiping God. You don’t see that. Now, that’s
an argument from silence, and it’s always dangerous to make
an argument from silence, but I think it’s a rather conspicuous
silence. It’s a loud silence, for lack
of a better term, in that we obviously see one person doing
something that the other person is not doing, and we see one
person worshiping God. God becomes central to his frame
of reference for all of life, and a lot, on the other hand,
you don’t see that. It’s so hard to make sense out
of Lot, because whenever you encounter him, you encounter
him doing something stupid, absolutely foolish, with almost complete
and utter disregard whatsoever for God. When you get to chapter
19, when God’s about to pour out his unmitigated wrath on
Sodom and Gomorrah, you see maybe just slight glimpses of of a
sense that maybe these people around him are, you know, not
exactly the people that you want your daughter to go on a date
with, right? You know, you kind of get that
sense, right? That maybe this is just not the greatest crowd
that he could have been hanging out with. But that’s about the
most godly thing that you see from law. You don’t see him making
any wise, good, God-honoring decisions in any encounter that
we see of Him in this book of Genesis, and then somehow you
get to 2 Peter chapter 2, passage that we read in our New Testament
reading tonight, and you discover that Lot was a righteous man. I mean, I just don’t even always
know what to do about that. He just doesn’t seem to make
any decision that truly honors the Lord. And nonetheless, what
you see here is this huge contrast between Abram and Lot, and their
understanding of God. Because what Abram does here
is he looks to God He worships God, he believes in God, he believes
in the promises of God, he starts to live by faith and not by sight,
and he does so throughout the course of his life, however imperfectly.
I mean, he’s going to make other foolish decisions down the road,
but his life is going to be generally shaped by a repentance and faith
that is aimed towards the Lord who called him out of the Ur
of the Chaldees and brought him into the land of Canaan and made
promises to him. That’s going to shape his understanding
and God is going to be the central frame of reference of his life.
And Lot, on the other hand, is fundamentally a pragmatist because
what you see here is he makes a decision upon what is going
to bring him the most prosperity. He lives entirely by sight. It’s
incredible what you read here, that he looks at this land and
he just sees that it’s so fertile and so lush and so well prepared
for his cattle, for his livestock, for his herdsmen, for his whole
life to just prosper. I mean, that market is is just
shooting straight up, and he sees a great opportunity for
himself. And he makes this decision to
go to that land, to go to the land east of the Jordan, and
he does so without any regard for his own spiritual health,
for that of his family, for that of his herdsmen. There’s no God-framed
reference at all in his decision making. It’s a purely pragmatic, self-absorbed
decision. And I think it forces you and
I to be honest with ourselves and ask whom or what was the
ultimate consideration the last time You made a big purchase
or took a new job or moved to a new home or made any decision
of significance in your life. Whom or what is ultimate to you
in your decision making? And I think the most fundamental
way to see the desires and the thinking and the decisions that
we make become increasingly shaped by God. to be a person who seeks
to know Him more deeply, to truly cultivate your love for Him. I mean, that seems like the most
obvious thing that a person could say, but it’s absolutely true. I mean, I don’t know how you
make decisions that are honoring to the Lord unless he is the
chief object of your affection, the apple of your eye, the one
for whom you live your whole life, the one who shapes you,
and the one you desire to enjoy, and the one that you desire for
your whole life to be informed by. And the only way that happens
is if you seek to cultivate a warm, deep, knowledgeable, intimate
love for the Lord. That you make the gathering together
on the Lord’s Day under the Lord’s Word read and preached and sung
and prayed and heard and celebrated in the sacraments. central to
your life, that you orient your life around that. And that you’re here even this
evening, morning and evening, I mean, bathing yourself in the
word, plumbing the depths of it throughout the week, becoming
a person of prayer, living your life in connection with the church,
other people who are seeking to glorify and enjoy the Lord
who made them and takes care of them. That’s the only way
that I know to develop an understanding of God that is warm, that is
intimate, that is full of love to where the decisions that you
make will be shaped by all that he is for you. And what I think
you see here is that Abraham and Lot have very different understandings
of God. Abram makes decisions under the
gracious authority and providence of God. Lot makes decisions where
God is pushed to the margins and he becomes one of maybe a
myriad of different factors that go into his decision making.
Certainly not the primary ultimate factor in his decision making
and he just lives for his own fleshly desires. So that’s number
one. how you understand God. Number
two, the second point of contrast, is that you’re going to notice
a difference in their respective character. When you get to verse
two, here in this passage, what you discover is that Abram was
very rich in livestock, in silver, and in gold. And what you, what
that Hebrew word means, very, it carries with it the idea of
something being heavy, of being burdensome. I mean, we’ll even
talk about, you know, when someone is extremely wealthy, they are
loaded, right? They are loaded. I mean, you
get that picture that they are just loaded down. They have so much money that
they don’t even know what to do with it. I personally don’t
even understand what that could possibly be like. I don’t know
if you do, but they don’t have any idea. They’re just loaded
down, and that is how Abram was. He was exceedingly wealthy and
Lot stacked up pretty well too. I mean, he was doing just fine. And they had all this wealth
and wealth comes with tremendous blessings. It’s a great blessing
when God provides for us beyond what we could have ever expected.
But also when you come into exceeding wealth, it has its burdens. It
has its tremendous burdens, and that’s what’s happening here.
So in verses five through seven of this passage, you see that
they have all of this livestock, and there’s so many herdsmen,
there’s so much livestock, and you’ve got the Lot crowd, and
you’ve got the Abram crowd, and you’ve also got the Canaanites
and the Perizzites, and there’s just not enough room. There’s
just not enough room to accommodate them all. And so there’s this
conflict that starts to happen. It’s a conflict not over poverty.
I mean, you know that a lot of marital conflicts have something
to do with money. Well, this isn’t about a lack
of it. This is about too much of it. What are we going to do
about it? And how are they going to resolve this? Well, I want
you to think about Abram’s life up to this point before we answer
that ultimate question, how they’re going to resolve it. Think about
Abram’s life. When in chapter 12 God called
him to leave the land of Ur, he called him to go to the land
that I will show you. Now that’s a scary thing. I want
you to leave everything behind and I want you to go, and I’m
not going to tell you exactly where, just go and trust me. And that’s what God does. And
he calls them out of this land of Ur, which was a land full
of pagans. They were idolatrous people.
They worshiped a panoply of gods. They were people who had no knowledge,
no interest, no understanding of the one true God. And God,
by his pure mercy alone, comes and plucks Abram out, and he
brings him out of that place, and he brings him to the west
into the land of Canaan. And so what Abram knew is that
he was not going back that way. Whatever decision was made, he
wasn’t going back that way. That was not the direction that
he was going to go. The people were wicked. God had
called him into Canaan. That’s where he was. But what
does he do to deal with the conflict? Right? He deals with the conflict
by taking the initiative to deal with the conflict. In other words,
he doesn’t sweep it under the rug. And I wonder how frequently
matters in our life get out of hand because we’re too cowardly
to deal with it. We won’t confront it. There’s,
at times in our lives where we wait until the lava is already
completely spewing out of the volcano before we stopped to
deal with the fact that there’s obvious smoke coming out. I mean,
if there’s smoke coming out, you’ve got an issue. You’ve got
to deal with it. Don’t wait till the whole town is on fire. He doesn’t wait till that happens. He doesn’t just slap a Band-Aid
on the problem. Instead of having a war break
out between Abram’s herdsmen and Lot’s herdsmen and a conflict
get completely out of hand, what he does is he puts out the brush
fire immediately before it becomes a forest fire. That’s what he
does. And he takes the initiative and
he goes to him and he approaches Lot peaceably because he knows
that he He loves Lot. In fact, when you get to the
next chapter, into chapter 14, you’re gonna see Abram risk a
whole lot to rescue Lot. He rescues Lot, and Lot is in
a, he is in a bad situation because of this stupid decision that
he makes, by the way, which is a whole other sermon in and of
itself. But he loves Lot, and he realizes that he can either
have a relationship with Lot or a situation-ship with Lot.
Does that make sense? You know what I mean by that?
He doesn’t want to have a situationship with Lot. He wants to have a
relationship with Lot because he loves him. And so what he
does is he wants to part ways and do so with godly love rather
than contempt because he values the relationship more than he
values his own personal wealth. And Abram is the elder here.
Abram could have said, I’m taking this land. This town ain’t big enough for
both of us, and one of us has got to leave.” And he could have
said, it’s going to be you. But that’s not what he does.
He expresses humility rather than just asserting his rights.
And in verse 9 here, you see that he defers to Lot. He allows
Lot to be the one that makes the choice. He diffuses the conflict
and he does so with gentleness and peaceableness and humility. In verse eight he says, let there
be no strife between you and me and between your herdsmen
and my herdsmen for we are kinsmen. What a gentle way of approaching
this situation. He doesn’t want to have strife
because they are kinsmen. He chooses the relationship over
his rights. And people who are constantly
asserting their rights, even though they may have those rights,
but people who are constantly asserting their rights at the
expense of their relationship are displaying that their attention
and their affection and their dependence is not upon the Lord,
but is upon themselves. They’re going to do whatever
they feel they are entitled to, and they’re going to live a self-absorbed
life. That’s what’s happening when a person is just constantly
asserting their rights, constantly standing upon that no matter
what it costs to the others that we love. And sometimes, sometimes
we do need to assert our rights because it is important not just
for ourselves, but it’s also important for the well-being
of others. But that is not the situation
that’s happening here. What you see happening here is
that Abram is being magnanimous because he loves Lot and he loves
God. Remember the first point? He
has an understanding of the grace of God and it humbles him and
it shapes his character. God shapes his character. And
so he knows something of the mercy and the patience and the
promises and the holiness and the love the sovereignty of God,
His character is shaped by that, and it shapes how He approaches
Lot. And how much more so ought that
to be the case for us on the other side of the cross, who
can look back into the Scriptures and discover that while we were
yet sinners, Christ died for us. We have all of the hope of
glory, not because we have merited it for ourselves, but because
Christ has merited it for us. We have His promises that as
we leave tonight, we hear this benediction, the Lord bless you
and keep you and make His face to shine upon you and be gracious
to you and lift up His countenance upon you and give you His peace.
That’s not, we’re not sending you off with a wish, like we’ve
got a, dadgum birthday cake in front of us and we’re making
a wish in our head and blowing out the candles and just hoping
it happens, or throwing a coin into a fountain, that’s a promise. That’s what you have. You take
it with you your whole life. And if that’s the truth, how
much more can you and I live with humility and peace towards
people? See, that’s how Abram decides
he’s gonna live before Lot. But then again, notice again
how Lot handles this. There’s nothing spiritually minded
going on here. He never questions Abram’s generosity. He doesn’t write him a thank
you card. I mean, you don’t see anything
like that. He’s not sending him a… He takes that and runs with
it. He’s like, all right, I got the
choice and I’m gonna make it and I’m gonna make a decision.
that is going to prosper me and my herdsmen and my flocks and
my life, and he doesn’t seek the Lord in prayer, because remember,
his understanding of God is pushed to the margins, and so he doesn’t
seek the Lord in prayer, he doesn’t seek the will of God, he doesn’t
stop and think what is going to be most beneficial to them
spiritually, doesn’t consider that at all. And what does he
do? Verse 12, Abram settled in the land. of Canaan while Lot
settled among the cities of the valley and moved his tent as
far as Sodom. Now the men of Sodom were wicked,
great sinners against the Lord.” I mean, the average person in
our society doesn’t know anything about any of the cities of the
Old Testament, of the book of Genesis. You ask them about Ur,
they’re not going to really know much about it. Have you heard
of Sodom? Yeah, they might have heard of Sodom. And they don’t
hear that Sodom was like the great club med experience vacation
spot of of the book of Genesis. They know exactly what happened
to it. I mean, it was hellfire and brimstone. Literally, that’s
what happened to it because that’s how wicked they were. And verse
13 is here because this is something that Abram and Lot already knew. I mean, it wasn’t like Lot was
going to go there and he just is caught totally off guard with
how wicked these people, it was notorious. There’s a redundancy in verse
13. They were wicked. That’s all you have to say, right?
But he also says they were wicked and they were great sinners.
They were wicked, wicked, wicked. That’s how evil these people,
and Lot doesn’t care. He goes and pitches his tent
near Sodom, as far as Sodom, and by the time you get to chapter
19, he’s living in Sodom. He’s in the city. He is sitting
at the gate with the elders of the city where the decisions
are being made. And he becomes completely absorbed
into that culture. Now, he doesn’t start participating
in all of that wickedness, and we see that God in his mercy
pulls him out of that place. He pulls him out of that place,
but he’s there in the midst of it. And his whole life had been
caught up in that deal. Where you go with your understanding of God
says a lot and influences how you’re gonna make your decisions. All of this didn’t matter to
Lot. It didn’t matter to him. He caved in to the lust of his
flesh and the lust of his eyes and the pride of possessions. And a person of godly character
would have considered that before choosing that land, which was
gonna have a polluting influence upon his soul. Lot was not going
to Sodom to be a missionary. Lot was going there to improve
his quality of life. And when you get to Genesis 14,
you see that that doesn’t work out too well for him. In fact,
he loses everything. And then when you get to Genesis
19, his wife turns into a pillar of salt. And his two lousy daughters
and him, that’s about it that gets pulled out of there. So
let me finish with this. Here’s another, profundity that I’m going to
bring to you. We’re not living in a world that’s exactly encouraging
us to build our hope on nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness,
right? I mean, can we agree with that?
Is that pretty much the truth? The world is not shaping us into
Christ-exalting, holiness-pursuing, neighbor-loving, gospel-fueled,
biblically grounded people. That’s not That is not the objective
of what you see on TV or you see on your social media feed,
or that you just hear as you run amok throughout the course
of your day-to-day life. The spiritual dumpster fire that
in many respects we live in, along with our own native depravity,
are tools that the evil one seeks to use in order to devour us. And we are going to be able to
withstand in the midst of that, which compels us often to make
decisions that are at odds with who God is, the way that we’re
going to be able to withstand that is to put on the armor that
God has already given to you and to me and to live our life
with that armor in this world. It is in your closet, by faith
we put it on and we live with that as we go into the world
and we make our decisions. And so we strap on the belt of
truth. The belt of truth, there is such
a thing The truth is discovered, it’s not made, it is discovered
in the word of God, which is why we plumb the depths of it
and why we read it and our life is shaped by it. That belt of
truth holds us together. We protect our heart, the sort
of core of our being with the breastplate of righteousness,
the righteousness of Christ. shapes our self-understanding. It shapes the way in which we
make decisions in this life. We’re ready to run with our brothers
and sisters in Christ and we’re ready to run even to his and
to our enemies with the gospel of peace. Do you not see here
how Abram ran to Lot with the gospel of peace, with peaceableness? That’s what we seek to do. As
far as it depends upon us, we live at peace with one another
and with the world. And we run with that gospel of
peace. And we take up the shield of
faith. So when the arrows of the world
come at us to reorient our mind away from God, away from all
that he reveals himself to be, we have faith that thins off
those flaming darts, those bullets that would seek to destroy our
understanding of who God is as he reveals himself in the world.
word. We guard our head, our mind, our thoughts with the helmet
of salvation. Salvation, that is, we are saved
now and we are being saved. We have the hope of glory. If you know your position in
Christ and you know where you’re headed, that you have indeed
been saved from the evil one from the wrath of God that shapes
your understanding that protects your mind and causes you to think
and live and decide in ways that honor the Lord. And you fight
the battle that comes your way with your sword. I walked into
a to have breakfast on Friday and I had this very Bible in
my hand and I was I wanted some French toast. And I went into
the restaurant, and I had my Bible, and this guy says, you
got your sword with you. He was a good old Rockingham
County kind of guy. I mean, you got your sword. And
I had my sword. He knew what this was. This is
a sword. It’s the offensive weapon that we use to fight. And we
fight. If you have hope, people with
hope fight. People who don’t have hope don’t
fight. I mean, if you’re already done
for, there’s no cure, then you stop fighting. If you know that
there’s just no cure for what ails you, you stop fighting.
But you know that you have a cure. Jesus is the cure. You have been
cured. And so you have his word. He
speaks to you through it. You fight with it. not to beat
someone over the head, but you fight the battles that are coming
at your mind, at your heart, at your body, at your soul, every
aspect of your life. And when you do so, you begin
to make decisions that are more and more shaped by who God is
and what he’s like than you do by the lusts of your flesh, which
are constantly at war within you. So cast your gaze upon the
one who came such a distance for you, the Lord Jesus Christ,
as you make your decisions going throughout the course of life.
Amen, let’s pray together. Father, we give you thanks for
your word and press it upon our hearts, shape our lives by it. As we go throughout this week,
we will be confronted with so many things to decide so many
decisions great and small. We pray that as we make those
decisions we would do so in ways that honor you that are shaped
by your word that love our neighbor and that seek your glory. We pray this all in Jesus name
for his sake. Amen.