Today's Devotional

 

March 5, 2008

                                                                                         

Subject:  Hate Your Life

Luke 14:26 "If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple."

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The passage above makes many points but I want to focus on one of them.  I want to talk about how we've got to "hate our own lives."  That's sound strange and it only sounds that way because of things like I saw in my junk email folder yesterday.  I guess that's why it's in the junk folder.  Anyway the email was saying that we need to learn to love ourselves and to commit to our own happiness and how we need to make peace with our bodies.  My goodness that all sounds so sickening.  See the world would have you believe that your problems in life, like low self-esteem and your poor image of yourself are there because you don't focus enough on you.  That's wrong.  If you want real happiness and contentment in this life, you're going to have to get the focus off of you and onto the only real person who can give you joy and peace; that is the Lord Jesus Christ.  

I've argued with many people about this idea because many feel that there are other people, husbands, wives, friends, relatives who have a responsibility to make them happy and I can truly say that God has made clear that anyone who holds such a viewpoint is inevitably going to be disappointed.  

Today you need to realize that loving God is way ahead of everything else you must do in life.  Compared to that love you must hate your life.  If you try to squeeze loving yourself or your life ahead of that principle you are sad I'm sure.

Carlen