Has God ever rebuked you for defending or serving Him? You might have had the best of intentions, but sometimes our intentions and convictions don’t align with God’s truth. The following devotional from My Utmost for his Highest discusses how sometimes our convictions don’t align with God’s convictions. Sometimes God needs to rebuke our good intentions so that we can serve Him in the way we should:

God has to destroy our determined confidence in our own convictions. We say, “I know that this is what I should do”-and suddenly the voice of God speaks in a way that overwhelms us by revealing the depths of our ignorance. We show our ignorance of Him in the very way we decide to serve Him. We serve Jesus in a spirit that is not His, and hurt Him by our defense of Him. We push His claims in the spirit of the devil; our words sound all right, but the spirit is that of an enemy. “He . . . rebuked them, and said, ’You do not know what manner of spirit you are of’ ” (Luke 9:55). The spirit of our Lord in His followers is described in 1 Corinthians 13 .

Have I been persecuting Jesus by an eager determination to serve Him in my own way? If I feel I have done my duty, yet have hurt Him in the process, I can be sure that this was not my duty. My way will not be to foster a meek and quiet spirit, only the spirit of self-satisfaction. We presume that whatever is unpleasant is our duty! Is that anything like the spirit of our Lord— “I delight to do Your will, O my God . . .” (Psalm 40:8).

Read the rest of the devotional at RBC ministries.

Has God ever shown you the error of your ways? Has God ever rebuked you for a belief that you had thought was in keeping with His will?

By: Chris. This entry was posted on Friday, January 29th, 2010 at 9:29 am and is filed under Devotional, god, People. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.