Daily Devotion 8th Feb 2017

Heb 13: 5Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God has said, ‘Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.’

The writer of Hebrews knows the difficulty of the believers living during that time, they people were mainly simple farmers,  fishermen and holding other menial jobs which did not enable them to earn large income.

Poverty was the normal way of life; this is still true in most communities outside the urban towns or cities. In third world countries the people can hardly survive on what little they can earn. Life is indeed a struggle for most and for many this is their worry day after day.

With the progress of education and society this has opened the door for people to be more skilled and has enabled them to be higher wage earners. But for the less educated, they are caught in this poverty trap and they struggle to put food on the table. Unfortunately this is part of the fabric of society and we will find some of these within the local churches.

Whether the people are poor or rich, they are equal in the eyes of God and sometimes because of their poverty they have to put in long hours in their work to earn the little extra. These economic demands have often caused them to be unable to spend more time with God. They miss out on the weekly worship, they miss out on the prayer meetings and soon they will grow distant from the Church and they will grow cold spiritually and fall away.

The writer of Hebrew recognized this and he addressed it in this letter. His advice was ‘Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God has said, ‘Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.’ God who is Omniscience knows all our needs, 

He knows every single need that we have even before we bring it before Him and He has a plan and a blessing for us.

All that we need to do is to trust in Him and ask Him to bless us. We have seen this becoming a reality so many times but there are responsibilities to this. Firstly we need to be a true child of God, faithful in our walk with God and fully committed to His ways. God needs to see that we are faithful before he can bless us.  If not His blessings can become a stumbling block to us and cause us to fall.

By this I mean that God must see that we are able to be trusted in handling the skills or blessings that He puts in our hands. This can be wisdom, wealth, positions, authority etc. How do we deal with each of this? Would we continue to be faithful and humble or would we be overcome by pride and lust?

God knows who we are and what we are. God also knows if we can handle the blessings that He will give to us. If we cannot handle it, we will be destroyed by it. Many have started well but have fallen along the way like the prophet Balaam. There are in fact many in ministry who have fallen because of money and fame, this is what the writer of Hebrew is telling us. ‘be content with what you have’ do not run after greatness and greatness will run after you.