FBC Daily Devotional – January 12, 2021

Faith Baptist Church

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Your week is going well, that your day yesterday got the week off to a good start and as we are marching on into this new year, that you're experiencing the

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Lord's blessing and you're getting some ideas crystallized in your mind as to what the

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Lord would have you to do, focus on, work on in this year. Maybe one of those things is this

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Bible reading plan, especially good and helpful if you've never followed a plan to do so, systematically reading through the

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Bible. If you're following the plan that we're recommending, you're today in Matthew chapter 5 and reading verses 27 -48 and then also a few verses in Proverbs 1 verses 29 -33.

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This passage in Matthew 5 is right in the middle of Jesus' Sermon on the

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Mount, as we call it. In this sermon, Jesus said a lot of things to upset the, shall we say, the conventional wisdom of the scribes and the

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Pharisees. One area he zeroed in on in today's reading is in their teaching regarding adultery.

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The idea, the attitude of the scribes and the Pharisees was, as long as you don't engage in the outward behavior of adultery, then you're good, you're all right, things are fine between you and God.

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They considered it merely from an outward behavior perspective, but Jesus, he focuses on the heart.

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He zeroes in on the birthplace of adultery, and that is what goes on in the thoughts and the desires of the heart, regardless of the behavior.

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And he even indicates that the outward behavior may never occur, but if what's going on inside, in the thoughts and the desires of the heart, are adulterous in their character, then one is guilty before the

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Lord. So he puts it this way, he says, everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

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Okay, well, that's convicting enough. So what to do about it?

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Jesus says, take radical action. Take radical action. He goes on to say, if your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away.

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If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away, for it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell.

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Well, should we take this literally? I suppose if we did, and people were obedient to this literal exhortation of radical action that Jesus gives, there'd be an awful lot of people walking around with patches over an eye and with one hand, and yet they would still be crying out,

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Lord, okay, I got rid of my right eye and I got this patch over it, but what about my left eye?

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It's still causing me to sin. What do I do about that? Do I pluck it out too? So I don't think it would be appropriate to assume that Jesus is talking about the literal tearing out of the eye or lopping off of the hand, because neither of those actions are going to guarantee a lust -free life.

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You might think that perhaps the trauma of the action itself would be so great that it would destroy any possible lustful desires, but I seriously doubt it.

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Now what Jesus is really focusing on here is the channels through which that temptation comes, the eye gate and the hand and what you grasp ahold of.

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I think that's what he's getting at here, that these are the channels through which that temptation comes, and what he is saying here is to damn up those channels, to close them off, take whatever radical action is necessary so that the temptation can't find its way through, doesn't find its way through.

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All right? So when you think about the different channels through which temptation comes your way, temptations that you find it very easy to yield to, what radical steps do you need to take to close them off?

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What do you need to do? What radical steps do you need to take? That's something to ponder long and hard on and to take seriously.

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I shared with you some time ago about the guy who struggled, I mean he didn't tell me about struggling with lust and the potential for adultery and adultery in his heart, he didn't talk about that, but he did talk about his struggle with alcohol and drunkenness, and he said he just couldn't help going into this liquor store every time when he walked by it, and he had to go by it, or he did go by it every day going home from work, and he walked to and from work.

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So it was very easy for him, he'd see this thing coming and it gives him plenty of time in his mind to mull over how good a nice refreshing cold one would take, or cold six, or cold fifteen, or whatever it is, and before you know it he's walking into the place and he's walking out with a pack.

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And so I said, look, you've got to take the radical action, you've got to find a different route home, don't go by that place that you used to frequent all the time that you associate with the drunkenness and the good euphoric feeling that you get when you're drunk, you've got to lop that off, you've got to pluck that eye out.

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So what is it for you, what is it for me? What Jesus is calling us to do is to take that radical action.

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May he give us grace to do so. Our Father and our God, we realize that what our

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Lord is calling upon us to do is serious, but it's also doable.

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And I pray that we would do the honest thing of considering those channels of temptation that come our way, and then take the radical action that we need to take to close off those channels as much as we possibly can.

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Give us grace to do this, we pray, and we ask it in Jesus' name, amen. All right, well have a good day, and may