An Update on My Thursday Devotion

If you read my post from a few days ago, you'll know that I was planning a devotion for my class. However, yesterday I was thinking about how my classmates would be totally bored out if I just talked the whole time, so I went on Youtube, asking God to help me find something to make my devotion more interesting. About three minutes later, I found this!

I was so amazed! After watching the video, I was like, God, you really ARE amazing!. He literally gave me this video to show to my class - that's how amazing He is! So, I shortened my devotional speech and downloaded this video to show to my class. This is my shortened devotion (the red parts are the things I added to make it relate to the video):

(after showing the video)

This girl Emily Griffin started off her life thinking that it didn’t matter what she did, God would still forgive her in the end and she’d still end up in heaven if she repented. A lot of our secret philosophies on life are “live a party now, ask God for forgiveness later, and then go to heaven”. But that’s not what God has planned for our lives.

The book Chasing Daylight says:

You were born to live a great adventure; You were created with a divine destiny; You are called to fulfill a great mission. You were designed for unique purpose. Now you are called to live it out.

This is kinda like what our speaker last week told us: life is an epic journey, right? What this book talks about is that God is so often misunderstood when people know Him for judgment and rules. Actually, Jesus calls us to a life of unimaginable adventure. And it begins the moment we choose to follow Him. Because when we do, we pass from a mere existence to real, true life (walking in the truth). His promise is that in Him we will find the life that our hearts have always longed for.

There is no principle that says everyone who does God’s will lives and easy life – at least not on this earth. Even when we live, it doesn’t mean the victory comes without suffering.

If we are going to seize divine moments, we much accept the reality that we have no control over many so many things. We have no control over when we die or how we die. We must take responsibility now over what we do have control over – how we choose to live.

Emily told us that she had troubles and that it was difficult to get over her obsession with drinking even as she was trying to fill her life with Jesus. To follow Jesus is to enter the unknown, to relinquish security, and to exchange certainty for complete confidence in Him.

Are you willing to live a life that honors God and reflects His character and leave the outcome to Him? Are you willing to live by faith and trust him to be faithful? There will be days on this journey of faith when the crystal clear outcome will be something you don’t like. On those days you must, like Jesus, declare, “Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but your will be done”.

I know that sometimes the current outcome may seem sucky, but God promises that with Him, lives that are lived built on full pursuit of Him and His plan won’t every be regretted no matter how difficult it was to live that life. This is because these sort of lives are at their best – and there’s nothing more that we could possibly ask for.

Even though a lot of you guys right now are trying to block out what I just said, I really encourage you today to make a choice. Everyone (even the people who pretend to not care) has some sort of desire or want to live a full life with purpose. Everyone. So what I encourage you to do today is to ignore your impulse to impress others by pretending you have it all together. You don’t. The truth is, you don’t. God is the only person who can control whether you go to heaven or not. What you can control is how your life ends up, and what you leave behind. What you can control is whether or not you want to die a content, happy person that leaves behind a mark that says ‘I lived life to its fullest’. And I know you all want that.

Here’s a verse that God suddenly brought to my attention yesterday: Romans 14:7-8

For none of us lives to himself alone and none of us dies to himself alone. If we live, we live to the Lord; and if we die, we die to the Lord. So, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord.

This verse you see at the end is another great "God showed me story". I was looking at my favorite verse in the Bible in Romans (which I will probably talk about in some other post sometime soon) when I suddenly looked at this verse and went, Wow!!! God, again?! And this was after the video experience. Cheesy as this "story" may sound about God showing me what to use for my devotion, I really believe it was Him, because I couldn't have done this without Him! God is GOOD!