Jan 14: Religious Relationship
James 1:19 “Understand this, my dear brothers and sisters: You must all be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to get angry. Human anger does not produce the righteousness God desires. So get rid of all the filth and evil in your lives, and humbly accept the word God planted in your hearts, for it has the power to save your souls. But don’t just listen to God’s word. You must do what it says. Otherwise, you are only fooling yourselves. For if you listen to the word and don’t obey, it is like glancing at your face in a mirror. You see yourself, walk away, and forget what you look like. But if you look carefully into the perfect law that sets you free, and if you do what it says and don’t forget what you heard, then God will bless you for doing it. If you claim to be religious but don’t control your tongue, you are fooling yourself, and your religion is worthless. Pure and genuine religion in the sight of the Father means caring for orphans and widows in their distress and refusing to let the world corrupt you.”
Over the last few days I’ve been pondering about what God has for us this year. The direction we will be walking in and what we need to grow into. I realize as the years have past and we continue to walk along each other, we need to grow. Not only in quantity, but we also grow in quality. This is why today I echo the words of John the Baptist, “less of me and more of Him”. It’s important that we grow in quantity, but that we also grow in quantity. Quality that represents the One who we call our Lord and Saviour, in the faith. The phrase used by John, is one we should always have in the back of our minds. Am I growing so that there’s less of me and more of Christ? Or as I continue to grow older, is there less of Him and more of me? It’s important to understand that in order for our lives to grow in faith we need to mature.
It is important to know that to mature we need to focus on Jesus and our thoughts should be centered on Him. Spiritual maturity will only come by consecrating (surrendering) our lives to Jesus. This consecration is having a ‘religious relationship’. It is God-given practices that allows us to draw closer to God in what pleases Him.