Holy and Blameless

Heartbreaking words today.  "These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far away.  Their worship is a farce, for they replace God's commands with their own man-made teachings."  Matthew 15:8-9, NLT  When I came to my study of our Sunday School lesson from Deuteronomy I read these verses: "Hear, O Israel!  The LORD is our God, the LORD is one!  You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and with all your might.  These words, which I am commanding you today, shall be on your heart.  You shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up."- Deut. 6:4-7, NASB

There are days when I am as guilty as the people of Israel.  There are days when I honor God with my lips but my heart is far away.  I know I do not love the LORD with ALL of my heart and ALL of my soul and ALL of my might.  But I want to.  I want my heart to be so near to His that I never stray.  I want to be a child of the King who loves Him with every fiber of her being.  How thankful I am that He knows me so well.  He knows that I struggle with a deceitful heart.  "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?"- Jeremiah 17:9 KJV.    The LORD knows it.  He knows my heart.  He knows yours as well.

I have been giving a lot of thought to the blessings we have in Christ as I begin to make my way through Ephesians.  One of those blessings is that God chose us to be holy and blameless.  I don't feel very holy or blameless.  I had been taught that to be holy was to be set apart and while that is true, I found that Webster's defined it as, "devoted entirely to the deity or the work of the diety."  That brings me right back to  that verse in Deuteronomy.   You shall love the LORD your God with ALL of your heart, soul, and mind.  ALL- holding nothing back, in entirety.  Oh thank goodness for the verses I read in Psalm 19 today.  I wrote them down in the confession section of my prayer journal this morning.  I think I may need to write them on my bathroom mirror, my refrigerator, inside every cabinet door, post them above my computer.  God knows me so well.  He even knows how I should pray.  "How can I know all the sins lurking in my heart?  Cleanse me from these hidden faults.  Keep me from deliberate sins!  Don't let them control me.  May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing to You, O LORD, my Rock and  my Redeemer."- Psalm 19:12, 13a, 14.


Grace, Peace, and Mercy,
Deb