Psalms 51:17 The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.
The word contrite in Hebrew is ‘dakah’ which means one that is crushed to pieces. Paul wrote of being a ‘living sacrifice’ holy and acceptable to God. Being a living sacrifice means we often can walk off the altar. To be a continual living sacrifice we need to renew our minds day to day! Let your mind be renewed — off the things which are worldly and onto those things which are Godly. When our minds are focused on those things above, on His holiness, His righteousness, His grace, and His mercy — we realize that we can always be closer to Him! We understand what Isaiah meant when he said, “our righteousness is nothing but filthy rags before the Lord.”
When God provided for Himself the perfect sacrifice, His Son, 2000 years ago — His heart bursted! His heart was cut through — cut for you! God desires you to be a living sacrifice and a necessary ingredient is a heart that has been cut through by God’s sharp knife. When you allow your heart to be continually cut through by God’s Spirit, then your life will be a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable before Him!
It’s wonderful what God can do with a broken heart, especially when we give Him all the pieces!
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[worthy_plugins_devotion_single_body]For a season, I worked in Washington, D.C., for one of America’s largest Christian political organizations. Sometimes I saw how politics could get ugly and, more often than not, how it changed people — not for the better…but usually for the worse!
Have you ever felt uneasy, unsettled or unstable? Or maybe a better question is — who hasn’t? How do we overcome these feelings?
Is that a trend or something? I don’t know what it is but I’ve heard that phrase said quite a bit. We were even walking down the Wal-Mart isle to pick up a few things and my wife showed me a T-shirt with “I have issues” written across the front! I guess the world is coming to the sad reality that we really do have some issues.
It never ceases to amaze me, the way the devil uses our offenses and our “offendedness” to divide and conquer marriages, relationships, churches — even entire nations!
There’s an old adage, “Have the heart of a lion!” Hearing it, we think, “courage”. This recalls a quote I once heard; “Courage is contagious. When a brave man takes a stand, the spines of others are often stiffened”. I doubt there’s a single hero story in which the fearless leader fails to inspire the righteous determination of his army or people. The voice of the captain resounds through the ranks evoking the fierce cry of every warrior ready to face death or worse, for the cause. Courage truly is contagious.
The Hebrew word for “face” is “panim”, (the Hebrew letters, peh-nun-yud-mem), literally “faces”, a plural word. Normally, when we think about God, we focus only upon one of His “faces” at a time. God is “love” – or He is “holy”– or He is “just”— or He’s a God of “wrath”. Yet, of course, ALL these “faces” are His at once; and so the word “panim” accurately reflects the truth of God’s multifaceted being. As we get to know Him better we begin to appreciate the complexity of His nature and the fact that our focus on one “face” is a very limited view, since there’s so much more going on in His amazing “Personality”.
Patience is one of those things… so hard to learn it… so hard to practice it faithfully in our daily walk. It’s one of of those things I truly wish we didn’t have to learn — but God requires it of us! As I was reading through this passage again in Exodus, it dawned on me that Moses sat on the mountain for six entire days before the Lord spoke to him. He had to patiently wait for the Lord for six days!