A Valentine parallel

I hope you had a wonderful Valentine's Day. My wife and I did. I got her a very cool coffee mug and took her out to dinner that evening. Actually, my word for next year is "reservations." If you didn't make reservations, probably at least a day in advance, then the special place you might have liked to take your sweetheart, was more than likely, all booked up. Of course this leads to the punch of it, and that is, when I had exhausted all the locations I wanted to take my wife, and found them booked, I ask her where she would like to go. Right quick she told me a place she has wanted to go for some time now. So being as it was "her night," that's where we went. You can bet next year when I take her out, I'll be calling a week in advance to make sure the time and place is just right. You might be thinking, "isn't that how it's supposed to work?" You take her where she wants to go. You're right of course. That is the point of making her night the very best it can be for her. The day belongs to her.

You know I found this experience sort of paralleling a Biblical truth. God's perspective according to the Bible is, that by God personally paying the penalty for our sins in His death on the cross, He really bought us, with His shed blood. Our sin, mine, yours, had created a dept, which I might add, you and I never could have paid. But Christ Jesus paid it on the cross. Therefore, from God's perspective (which is absolute truth) God owns us. We are His. Our lives, our very existence, belongs to Him. Now, since we are His, do we act like it? Do you live like it? I'm afraid that probably most of us tend to live our lives, moving along as we will do, trying to do our best and doing primarily what we each want, hoping God will bless what we are doing, and then crying for help when something doesn't work out according to our personal agenda. Can you see what's wrong with that, from God's perspective?

So now you ask, "am I supposed to ask God what to do in every detail of my day?" Does God want me to go here on my vacation? Does God want me to go there to eat tonight? Well, of course the Bible doesn't tell you where to eat out for dinner, but, you know what? The Bible does tell us what God wants our disposition to be toward Him.

That disposition can be found in this question. Will it please God? Will doing this or that please God? Will spending my time doing this please God? Will spending my money on that please God? Will making this or that choice please God? Every choice you make throughout your day, "does it please God?" That is the revealing question.

1 Corinthians. 6:20: For you have been bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body.

Psalm 73:25: Whom have I in heaven but You God? And besides You, I desire nothing on earth.

Adam Barkley is pastor at the First Baptist Church in Minden.