Job 11:13-20 ““Still, if you set your heart on God and reach out to him, If you scrub your hands of sin and refuse to entertain evil in your home,You’ll be able to face the world unashamed and keep a firm grip on life, guiltless and fearless. You’ll forget your troubles; they’ll be like old, faded photographs. Your world will be washed in sunshine, every shadow dispersed by dawn. Full of hope, you’ll relax, confident again; you’ll look around, sit back, and take it easy. Expansive, without a care in the world, you’ll be hunted out by many for your blessing. But the wicked will see none of this. They’re headed down a dead-end road with nothing to look forward to—nothing.” (msg. translation) This episode is about how important it is to set our hearts on God and reach out to Him in our time of need. Music:"Adding the Sun" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Reach Out To God
Job 11:13-20 “Still, if you set your heart on God and reach out to him, If you scrub your hands of sin and refuse to entertain evil in your home,You’ll be able to face the world unashamed and keep a firm grip on life, guiltless and fearless. You’ll forget your troubles; they’ll be like old, faded photographs. Your world will be washed in sunshine, every shadow dispersed by dawn. Full of hope, you’ll relax, confident again; you’ll look around, sit back, and take it easy. Expansive, without a care in the world, you’ll be hunted out by many for your blessing. But the wicked will see none of this. They’re headed down a dead-end road with nothing to look forward to—nothing.” (msg. translation)
When I read this, I thought is sounded so beautiful. I usually the use the New Revised Standard Version-Catholic Edition for the translation, however, sometimes I like to look at various translations because even though they all say the same thing, they say it using different words. If you haven’t done this before there is a website you can go to www.biblegateway.com and you put in the verse you are looking for and then there is a drop down menu where you can select all different translations of the Bible. It really cool. There is also an app called The Bible app and it has a bunch of Bible translations on there too if you prefer apps to websites. The message translation is one that takes the Bible verse and puts it in terms that are more common in todays language.
Today this verse is telling us that if we set our heart on God and reach out to Him, and if we scrub our hands of sin and refuse to entertain evil in our homes, then we will be able to face the world unashamed and keep a firm grip on life, guiltless and fearless. Is it me, or is this said with such ease? As if it’s not that difficult to do. I was going to say that the first part is not that hard, we can set our hearts on God and reach out to Him pretty easily, however, then the Holy Spirit stopped me and said, “Are your hearts set on God?” Instead of answering this question quickly I think we should take a moment and think about it. What are our hearts set on? What is the first thing we think of in the morning? What is the first thing you think about all throughout the day? What is the last think you think about before bed? How many times throughout the day are you thinking about God? Do you think about Him more than anything else? Is there something else in your life that you set your heart to? What comes to mind for me is my phone, social media and watching TV. Am I putting these things above God? Is my heart set, maybe by default, to these things? I want God to be first in my life. I want to set my heart to Him, so why am I going on social media before having my prayer time. Why am I always checking my phone, but not finding the time to write in my journal. Man, this isn’t where I thought this would be going today and yet I feel very convicted to take a hard look at my priorities and align them with my desire to put God first. We can say we love God all we want, but if our actions don’t align then those might just be words.
It also said that we reach out to God, and I though this was easy too. However, again the Holy Spirit reminded me about how much we like to solve things on our own. Also, how hard it is for some of us to turn to the Lord. There are many reasons why someone might struggle reaching out to the Lord. One of those reasons might be that they have a hard time asking for help. They just want to fix it themselves so that they don’t have to ask for help. Another reason might be that they don’t feel they are worthy of help. They feel they aren’t good enough to ask God for help. Someone else might think that God has let them down in the past because He didn’t answer their prayers the way they wanted Him to. It could be any number of reasons that we are not reaching out for the Lord. However, as this verse is saying, if we could figure out how to set our hearts to God and reach out to him, we would be able to have a firmer grip on life.
It also says if we scrub our hands of sin and refuse to entertain evil in our home we will be able to face the world unashamed. Wouldn’t that we great! In my opinion there is far too much shame in this world. I mean there are a lot of awful things going on in the world, but the people doing them are not the ones that are filled with shame. The people that are filled with shame are the people who are trying to do in God’s eyes and yet feel like they are falling short. We feel shame because we aren’t as good a parent as we want to be. We feel shame because we tried and failed. We feel shame because we aren’t living up to the perfect standards that we decided God wanted from us. Shame does not come from the Lord. The Lord does want us to acknowledge our sins and then repent for them but he doesn’t want us to feel shame from them. This verse is telling us to scrub sin from our hands. The person who is saying this is talking to Job, whom we know is blameless in the eyes of the Lord. Job was not being judged with all these things that were afflicting him. There will be many people throughout your life that will try to tell you about your sins. They will try to make you feel shame because of some perceived sin that you have done. You are the best judge of your sins. Do not let others make you feel ashamed. Yes, try not to sin and try to not entertain evil from you home. However, if you do sin, repent to the Lord and accept His forgiveness.
This verse is pretty long, so I will cover the second half of it in the episode on Thursday. Today I challenge you to think of ways in which you can set your heart to God. What would that look like for you? What could you do to show God that He is number one in your life? For me, that looks like starting my day off with His word, even if I feel I have other things I need to do first. It means writing in my prayer journal before sitting down to watch TV. What will it look like for you? The second things we talked about is scrubbing out sin. What does this look like for you? If you are Catholic, maybe it means going to confession more often? If you are not Catholic, maybe it means sitting down with God and discussing the ways you are not living the way He is calling us to live. Maybe it means you pick one thing that you know you shouldn’t be doing, and stop doing it. This will look different for each one of us. I ask you to take a few minutes and think about how you can implement these two requests into your lives. God is calling us to be better, let's answer that call!
Dear Heavenly Father, I ask you to bless all those listening to this episode today. Lord we are all struggling with different things. Help us each figure out how we can reach out to you more. How we can set our hearts on you and how we can scrub out sin in our lives. Lord, help to convict us of how we can change. Help us to not feel shameful. Help us to repent and turn back to you accepting your forgiveness and feeling your love. Lord, you don’t condemn us, you just love us. Help us to feel that love and to love you back as best we can. You are so amazing Lord. The way you forgive our sins and love us so completely. We are so very grateful and we ask all of this in accordance with our will and in Jesus’ holy name, Amen.
Thank you so much for joining me on our journey to walk boldly with Jesus. This week’s witness will be Brandy H. Brandy talks about her faith, her family, and the miracles she saw God do with her youngest daughter. It is a fascinating witness of God’s glory and you won’t want to miss it. I look forward to spending time with you tomorrow! Have a blessed day!