THE BENEFITS OF SUBMITTING TO GOD

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In Christ, Mark

The scriptures. May God bless the reading of His holy word.

Show me Your ways, Lord, teach me Your paths. Guide me in Your truth and teach me, for You are God my Savior, and my hope is in You all day long.

Remember, Lord, Your great mercy and love, for they are from of old. Do not remember the sins of my youth and my rebellious ways; according to Your love remember me, for You, Lord, are good.

Good and upright is the Lord; therefore He instructs sinners in his ways. He guides the humble in what is right and teaches them His way. All the ways of the Lord are loving and faithful toward those who keep the demands of his covenant. For the sake of Your name, Lord, forgive my iniquity, though it is great.

Psalm 25:4-11

This ends this reading from God's holy word. Thanks be to God.

As we walk through life each day, we need someone or something to lead us as we face a myriad of questions like:

- What do I need to do today?

- When am I going to do the things I need to do?

- How am I going to handle situations that will arise as I am doing things the things I need to do?

- How am I going to handle situations that happen that I was not expecting?

So how do we typically handle answering these questions? Where do we take our lead?

At times, some of the answers may already be locked in place to an extent.

If you have a job, then you know you need to go to work to make a living. You know you need to wake up at a certain time, dress in a certain fashion, get to work before you’re expected to start, and will presumably get off work at a certain time. Or maybe you’re a stay-at-home parent who has kids in school. You know you need to get up at a certain time to get the kids ready for school. You help them get dressed, have breakfast, and then see them off to the bus. After school is out, you need to get them home safely and take care of them until bed, ensuring they do their homework.

At other times, maybe we are in control of what we do.

Take a retiree for example. You have already have done your life’s work, raised children to adulthood, and now get to reap the benefits of having all your time to yourself. You can get up when you like and then plan your own schedule for day, turning in when you feel like it. Typically, no one dictates what you do.

Notice what is missing from these scenarios? None of them mention consulting God about what He wants us to do.

It happens right and maybe it has happened or is happening to you in your life today. We can get so caught up in planning our lives that we forget to ask God about what He wants, about what His will is for us. Our routines don’t routinely involve God in the scheduling process and too often, that means that God isn’t included in our schedules.

With this, we can too often forget to pray, forget to study our Bibles daily (How many people only open their Bibles at church on Sunday and then leave them closed Monday through Saturday?), and become so busy with our own time management that we fail to be involved in our churches or in volunteering our time for the good of others, extending the love of the Lord and sharing the good news of the Gospel.

Now let’s bring arising situations into the equation. For when we fail to make God an intentional part of our plans and we want to be in control, what do you think happens when we face challenges? Yep, we think we can figure it all out for ourselves. We can do it right? We do everything else, surely we can deal with our own problems.

Is it little wonder we have a society that wallows in issues. Our very self dependence has only brought us higher rates of financial hardship to include indebtedness and home foreclosures, relationship stresses which include increased rates of divorce, depression and despair afflicting people at epidemic levels resulting in elevated suicide percentages, and obesity percentages that are off the charts, resulting in people contracting diseases that are completely preventable. Yes, people are literally eating themselves to death.

Friends, we’re not doing so well while trying to control our lives. And we won’t be because we are not submitting to God. We are not adopting a God-first attitude to everything we do.

Turning to the scriptures, David had to learn this in his life. When he tried to control things, he found himself caught up in lust and committing infidelity which led to a pregnancy he wanted to conceal. He tried to arrange for his mistress’ husband to sleep with her to pin the pregnancy on him but that failed and so David just arranged to have the man killed to try and cover up his iniquity. He thought he had a great plan but God thought otherwise and brought judgment on David, Bathsheba and the effects of the judgment would eventually spread to David’s family. The child he bore out of adultery would die. His daughter Tamar would be raped by his son Amnon who would then be killed by his brother Absalom. That murdering son would then try and kill David himself to gain the throne.

David had to learn the hard way about the consequences of not including God in his life planning. I’m afraid many people today are repeating his mistake from the past and suffering through their own consequences for that decision. That’s what makes this particular devotion critical because God is speaking to all of us and trying to help us avoid the kind of problems life can bring if we tune Him out.

So what did David do to change things? What can we do to change things?

David submitted his life fully to God, and so too must you and I.

Look what David wrote as we look at the middle verses from the 25th Psalm:

Show me Your ways, Lord, teach me Your paths. Guide me in Your truth and teach me, for You are God my Savior, and my hope is in You all day long.

Remember, Lord, Your great mercy and love, for they are from of old. Do not remember the sins of my youth and my rebellious ways; according to Your love remember me, for You, Lord, are good.

Good and upright is the Lord; therefore He instructs sinners in his ways. He guides the humble in what is right and teaches them His way. All the ways of the Lord are loving and faithful toward those who keep the demands of his covenant. For the sake of Your name, Lord, forgive my iniquity, though it is great.

David is in a total attitude of submission. He wants nothing of himself to reign supreme but rather for God to rule his life totally. David discovered that when he took the wheel of his life and tried to navigate through, he only ran aground. And through the series of painful consequences that followed, David saw that the only way to possibly make it through the obstacle course of life is to allow God to lead and guide him through it. It’s just too bad he didn’t do it from the beginning.

We have the story of David and his life in the Bible for a reason. God is trying to use David as an example, to show you and me how He expects us to conduct our lives and what will happen when we don’t. God expects us to submit to Him as He is our Almighty Maker and Master. We are to act as we are, subordinate to Him in every way. The only thing we lose by doing this is our own control as we humbly turn it over to God.

So what do we have to gain when we do this, when we, in the purest sense of humility, submit our lives fully as David did to God?

Well, David shares what he gained, and in turn what we will gain, in the scripture passage. There are four key benefits we receive from God:

1. He shows us His ways.

When we fully submit to God, we send the message to Him that we don’t know the way to go, that we are lost without His help. We ask Him to show us the way and He in turn shows us His way, and He does so through His Son Jesus who told us in John 14:6, “I am the Way and the Truth and the Life.” There is only one way for a Christian, for those who place their faith and trust in Christ, and that is to follow the way of Jesus. We have four accounts of His life (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) in the Bible for a reason, so we can know Jesus as our Savior and we can learn to live as He lived. Submitting to God will result in Him showing us how to walk in the ways of Jesus.

2. He teaches us His paths and instructs us, sinners as we are, in His ways.

Knowing we are all afflicted by sin and thus prone to fail and fall, God not only shows us His ways through Jesus but He is continually training and instructing us along that way. The Holy Spirit was sent to be our great Counselor, ever ready to provide us education from the Lord as to how to live to include handling everything that life brings upon us. There is no situation we can’t handle and get through if we trust in the wisdom of God as relayed to us through the Holy Spirit. It’s in our best interest to receive everything God teaches and then put it into practice.

3. He guides us, the humble before Him, in His truth and righteousness.

When we humbly accept and adopt the teaching and instruction of God, allowing Him to guide us in the ways of Jesus, something awesome happens. We become people of truth and right living (or righteousness). The very truth and righteousness we find in the Lord becomes our truth and righteousness. Sin becomes pushed aside in exchange for a life pleasing to God as we become conformed and transformed into His image.

4. He imparts His great forgiveness, mercy and love upon us.

This is the ultimate reward for humble, obedient submission to God. For we will never know the depths of His forgiveness, mercy and love until we fully realized how lost we are because of our sinfulness and how much we need salvation.

When God shows us and teaches us about His ways, when He instructs and guides us toward truth and righteousness, we truly discover how great God and his ways are. And we fully see how depraved we are without them.

So with all this, where are you at in your life today?

Are you the David before full submission, controlling your own life, living by your own desires, and finding your life wrecked by your sinful decisions? Or are you like the humble, submissive David who has decided to allow God to fully show you His ways in Christ Jesus, guide and teach you in His righteousness, and in doing so, reveal the amazing enormity of His forgiveness, mercy and love?

You know where you are and so does God. My prayer is that if you haven’t already humbly submitted to the ways of God through His Son Jesus, you will today. He is ready to receive you and lead you to a life of love and peace and joy and hope forever.

Amen.

In Christ,

Mark

PS: Please share this with anyone you feel might be blessed by it.

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