BBD 01.17.18 Clean It Out! (New)
Posted by: wrathered <wrathered@...>
Since June 8th 1998, this is
the 1791st
Burning Bush Devotional
17 January 2018
Clean It Out!
If we confess our sins, He is
faithful and just to forgive us our
sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. – 1 John 1:9 NKJV.
But Jesus, being aware of it, said to them, “Why do you reason because you have no bread?
Do you not yet perceive nor understand? Is your heart still hardened? 18 Having
eyes, do you not see? And having ears, do you not hear? And do you not
remember? When I broke the five loaves for the five
thousand, how many baskets full of fragments did you take up?” – Mark 8:17-19
NKJV.
A woman in England was having trouble seeing and thought she had
cataracts. She had quite a bit of discomfort from her eye which she believed
was cause by old age and a dry eye problem. However, the problem of her being
unable to see, and her discomfort, was not any of those things. Doctors found a
“bluish foreign body” in her eye, which actually was a hardened mass of soft disposable
contact lenses stuck together. There were 17 of the lenses in the hardened mass
and underneath was found 10 more of the soft disposable contact lenses. Once
the doctors had all of that mess cleaned out, the woman could see very well and
no longer had the discomfort she had been experiencing prior to the surgery. (BBC News
07.17.17)
Jesus told his
disciples in Mark 8:15, “Take heed, beware of the leaven of the Pharisees
and the leaven of Herod.” The disciples did not
understand and thought that Jesus was talking about how they did not have any
bread with them. Jesus was speaking of a spiritual reality while the disciples
had their minds on a worldly material issue. That is why Jesus appears to be
perplexed with them. “Why do you
reason because you have no bread?” In other
words, why are the disciples even talking about this, worrying about this, don’t
they remember how Jesus fed the 5,000? The disciples were not ready for the
spiritual feeding that Jesus wanted to give them. The disciples had their focus
on the world, instead of the spiritual. They were so full of the world,
concerned about material things that it made them unable to see the spiritual
truth Jesus was trying to teach them.
Today’s followers of Jesus appear to often have a similar problem of
focusing on our material needs and problems instead upon the spiritual. We
worry about so many things, let us remember what Jesus tells us, “Therefore I say to you, do not
worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your
body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than
clothing? Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap
nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them (Matthew 6:25-26).”
In the same chapter of
Matthew, Jesus gives direction as to how to clean this worry out of our lives
as He says in Matthew 6:33, “But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness,
and all these things shall be added to you.”
Another issue (Although many think of worry
as being in the same category.) that too often blocks our ability to see the
spiritual reality is sin. The fix for this problem is surgery, spiritual
surgery, to clean out the mess. That’s why 1 John 1:9 is in the Bible, “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all
unrighteousness.”
Copyright © 2018. Ed Wrather. The
Burning Bush website has been online since January 31, 1998. On June 8, 1998
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