Good Morning Friends,
“Ask all the people of the land and the
priests, ‘When you fasted and mourned in the fifth and seventh months for the
past seventy years, was it really for me that you fasted? And when you were
eating and drinking, were you not just feasting for yourselves?’” (Zechariah
7:5-6)
Right things can be done for the wrong
reasons.
In this passage in Zechariah, the Lord challenged
His people to examine the motives behind their religious actions. They fasted
regularly and feasted according to what the Law commanded. The question the
Lord asked was whether they doing those things with the right heart and thought.
Were they fasting and feasting for the Lord – or for themselves?
We can ask yourself the same question about
the “religious” things we do.
We go to church. We pray. We read the Bible. We
attend small Bible study groups. All of those are good things. All of those are
things that please the Lord and that He wants us to do. All of those things can
be done for right reasons and with right motives. They can be done for the Lord
and express hearts of love and gratitude toward Him. All of those things can also
be done for wrong reasons and with the wrong thoughts and motives behind them.
They can all be done simply out of duty or out of the hope of reward that will
come because we do them or out of some other motive that doesn’t reflect a true
heart devotion to the Lord.
God’s challenge to all of us is to examine our
hearts. He encourages us to evaluate our thoughts and motives. Even good things are meaningless when done
for wrong reasons.
His, by Grace,
Steve
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