OUR GARDEN OF GETHSEMANE.

DAILY DEVOTION.

DAY THIRTY FIVE.

LUKE 9:23.  Then He said to them all, "If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me".

Being a disciple of Jesus is not about us, not about what we want, but about us losing our lives, or our own desires to follow Jesus. in our verse today we see the sequence of events that need to take place in our lives in order to follow Jesus, Firstly we must have a desire to follow Him, is that your hearts desire? if it is then we must be willing to deny ourselves, to lay our lives down, this can be the hardest thing to do, and we will come back to this one. Then we need to take up our cross, the cross speaks of the work that Jesus accomplished for us through His death on the cross and that we can only fulfill what Jesus has called us to do because we have been crucified with Him and it is now His life in us, this is a daily thing that we must do because each day has its own challenges and and each day we are called to walk in the will of God for our lives, it is as we do this that we can follow Jesus, knowing that He will lead us every day in His purpose. So what is our garden of Gethsemane? If we look at the life of Jesus we can get an understanding of this from Him. Jesus knew, even from a very early age, what He had come for. At twelve in the temple He said to His parents, "Did you not Know that I must be about My Father's business?" During His ministry He spoke many times of His death and suffering and resurrection. He was fully aware of what He had to go through for you and I. On the night of His betrayal He went to the Garden of Gethsemane to pray, He knew that this was the night that He would be betrayed even before it happened and that He faced certain death the next day on the cross, this was the fulfillment of what He had come for. In Luke 22:42 we see the prayer that Jesus prayed in the garden, "Father, if it is Your will, take this cup away from Me; nevertheless not My will but Your will be done" We see in the next verses the agony that Jesus went through as He struggled with what He knew He was about to face, yet He knew what was about to happen and what must happen. We obviously will never have to face what Jesus had to face that night, yet we will face our own Gethsemane experience every day, everyday we have to decide whether we are going to do the will of the Father or to do our own thing, Jesus said in Luke 9:24 that if we desire to save our own life will ultimately lose it it is only as we lose our life that we can have the life of Jesus. We all face on a daily basis the struggle between the flesh and the spirit, our flesh cries out to have its own way, Paul shows us this in Romans 7:13-25. As he said the things he did not want to do he did and the things that he wanted to do, he didn't do them, but he knew that it was only through Jesus that he could be set free from the life in the flesh. Paul summed up the importance of knowing the power of the work of the cross in our lives in Galatians 2:20 when he said that he had been crucified with Christ, the knowledge that his old life was dead, when Jesus hung on that cross we were in Him, as it says in Romans 6, the old man has been crucified, Paul goes on to say in the Galatians verse even though he has been crucified he still lives, he now has a new life, and that new life is now in Christ, it is the life of Christ in him that gives him life and that it is by faith that he knows that. It is vitally important that we also know this. This is such an important key in the process of self denial, knowing that the old man has been crucified, that there is no life there, pursuing our own desires and our own will can only lead to death. Once we truly come to the point where we can deny our selves, lay down our will we can then take up our cross. Taking up our cross is knowing that we can walk in the life that Jesus has given us because of what He did on the cross for us, our cross represents the fact that we are totally dead to ourselves. When we look at the life of Jesus and what He came to do we realize that the cross was the ultimate will of the Father for Him, so it is with us, taking up our cross will bring us into the will of the Father, it will allow us to then follow Jesus. To follow Jesus on a daily basis, as our verse says, is to live our lives as His disciples, as ones who desire to bring Him glory, to be lights in a darkened world and to reflect the glory of God, through the love of God, to those around us, and to live a life that pleases the Father, even when others are not around to see what we are doing because ultimately what we do in secret will be brought out into the light. So my prayer for each and every one of us is that we get the revelation of what it is to deny ourselves, to lay our lives down through what Jesus did on the cross for us, to be able able to pick up our cross, knowing that it is not I who lives but Christ who lives in me, and the life that I now live, I live by faith in Him, and because I am in Him I can now follow Him and walk in His will for my life. AMEN.  

KNOWING THE THOUGHTS OF GOD.

DAILY DEVOTION.

DAY THIRTY FOUR.

JEREMIAH 29:11.    For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the lord, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope.

So can we know the thoughts of God? This verse says that His thoughts are thoughts of peace, He doesn't think evil thoughts about us but that His thoughts are directly linked to our future and to give us hope. So if we compare this verse with Isaiah 55:8-9 "For My thoughts are not your thoughts, Nor are My ways your ways," says the Lord "For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thought higher than your thoughts". So do these verses in Isaiah mean that we cannot know the thoughts that God has towards us? I have heard many Christians express that thought, that we can never really know the thoughts and ways of God based on these verses out of Isaiah. So let us take a closer look at the context of these two verses. Isaiah 55:6-7 Seek the Lord while He may be found, call upon Him while He is near, Let the wicked forsake his ways, and the unrighteousness man this thoughts; and let him return to the Lord, and He will have mercy on him, and to our God, and He will abundantly pardon. We see here that the call of God in these verses is for the man who is walking away from God to abandon his ways and his thoughts and to come back to God and to call on Him and that God will have mercy on him and forgive him, it is a call to come back to the ways and thoughts of God. Verses 10-13 show us the result of returning back to God, coming back to His word and His ways, we will know the peace and joy of God, His word will not return back to Him but as we submit our lives to Him it will accomplish the things in our lives that it was sent to do. So we see from this passage in Isaiah that we can know the thoughts and ways of God and that He wants us to know these things so that we can walk in His word and in His purpose for our lives. In Psalm 119:11 David said, "Your word I have hidden in my heart that I might not sin against You" in verse 105 he said, "Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path". God's thoughts and His plans for us are weaved into His word, apart from His word we cannot know the thoughts that God has towards us. In James 1:21-25 James says that we are abandon sin, we are to receive the word of God with humility as it is the word that will save our souls and that we are to do what the word of God says about us because if we don't then we deceive ourselves, and he goes on to say that the man who sees what the word says and then does it will walk in the blessings of God. Paul in 2 Corinthians 10:3-5 shows us that while we walk in this flesh body we do not war in the flesh, it is not a fleshly battle that we are involved in but a spiritual one and our weapons are not carnal or fleshly, but spiritual and that in God they are mighty to pulling down the strongholds that Satan wants to establish in our minds through our thinking, this is why we must take every thought captive and bring our thoughts into obedience to what the word of God says, in other words abandoning our thoughts for God's thoughts. In Romans 12:1-2 it says that we are to offer ourselves to God as living sacrifices, in other words dead to ourselves and alive to God, and that we are not to live our lives conformed to the world but that our we are to be transformed as our minds or thoughts are renewed to the word of God so that we can walk in His ways, in His good, acceptable and perfect will. So can we know the thoughts and ways of God? Yes of course we can, and it is actually imperative that we do know His thoughts and His ways, so that we can live the lives that Jesus died on the cross to give us. AMEN.