It’s simple ….
DO EVERYTHING HIS WAY ….
Have you ever read …. and then lingered in the story of Cain & Able? It’s one of those stories that you think you’d see on one of those day-time soap opera programs … not that I know anything about soap opera’s! I broke that bad habit LONG AGO! Thank you Jesus! 🙂
There’s a part of that story that gets me every time I go over it …
Let’s briefly go over the story ~ Abel was a sheep-keeper and Cain was a … well, a farmer. Cain brings an offering and Abel brings the fat portions of the firstborn of his flock. God did not like what He saw from Cain and this made him not just upset but burning angry! God asks Cain why is he so angry … and then God says …..
“If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door and its desire is for you; but you must master it.
Basically God is saying (well my version of it) … ‘do things the way I’ve told you and I will accept it’. If Cain had presented his offering to God the way God wanted it … it would have been accepted. But Cain did not and sin was just waiting for him.
One of my commentaries say it this way …. “sin is waiting for the moment to dominate you”. Woe! Sin waits to dominate us.
But God says .. “but you must master it”.
What does that mean?
What God tells Cain … which means He also wants us to know …. that we can CHOOSE to not obey our desire to follow what our ‘flesh’ wants to do. We CAN tell ourselves … NO! We have a free-will that God knows we can use to choose what HE tells us to do.
You an I …. we can do things the way we want …. but it won’t always ‘go well’ for us. I think when we do things our own way and things turn out well … we get a “see-I-can-do-it-all-by-myself” attitude! You know, just like the one your 2-year old had way back when … or maybe just the other day … or if you don’t have kids ~ admit it … you’ve seen it in some 2 year-old! Just keeping it real here, gals!
But that’s not what God wants … He wants us to depend and surrender and do life the way HE tells us to. He wants obedience from us ….and He believes we can do it!
Paul … in Romans 6 repeats this simple truth. He says ….
Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its lusts, and do not go on presenting the members of your body to sin as instruments of unrighteousness; but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God. For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law but under grace.
So today ….
- Let’s choose to obey Him and His Word …even when we don’t feel like it
- Let’s decide to please Him by obeying Him
- And …. let’s be passionately in love with Him who knows we CAN DO IT! We can Master it!
Blessings Friends,
