Daily Devotional for Sunday May 21, 2000

Staying Connected

(John 8:12)

Living many years in Chicago, and being a huge fans of the Bulls basketball team during their incredible string of NBA championships, it was a special treat to watch Michael Jordan perform his magic on the court. In the early years of his career, Michael did many incredible feats that almost defied gravity. While he became well known for the spectacular, most people forget that Michael had mastered the basics...dribbling, passing, and moving without the ball. The basics were the foundation from which he was then able to do the more spectacular. Our walk with Christ is similar in the sense that it is the basics of our relationship that we must be cognizant of each day, thus becoming the foundation of our Christian experience. Just like it is not realistic to expect someone who never played much basketball to do a slam dunk, people with little or no contact with the Lord each day have unrealistic expectations about their Christian experience.

Let me give you one fact to start with that I want you to pay very close attention to. THE ONLY THING THAT YOU WILL TAKE FROM THIS LIFE INTO ETERNITY IS YOUR PERSONAL RELATIONSHIP WITH CHRIST. Think about this for a minute. We spend so much of our life focused on education, career, making money, family, friends, hobbies....we devote practically all of our time and energy in these areas...yet in that twinkle of an eye when your life is over and you pass into eternity, the ONLY thing that you will take with you is your personal relationship with the Lord. I am not trying in any way to diminish those things I listed, since it is part of the human experience we all share. What I am saying is that we need to make sure that we take time each day to nurture and grow our relationship with the Lord, since it is something we will experience for eternity.

How do we do this? Stay connected. It goes back to the basics. We need to take time each day to pray and read the Word, We need to be in a local church where we have fellowship with other believers, are spiritually fed, and have opportunities to serve the Lord. When people have sin in their life, the first thing they do is quit reading the bible, quit praying, and quit going to church. Why? Because we really are no different than our father Adam. Remember in the Garden of Eden after he sinned. He was hiding from God. That is what we do, we "hide" from God. That is the time we need God the most!!!!! That is how satan tricks you into falling even deeper into sin, by "disconnecting" from the Lord.

I will be praying for you today because I really do love you and care about you. I will be praying for you to refocus on the basics, to stay connected each day with the Lord. Your quickest way to defeat sin in your life is to get immediately reconnected to God, confess your sins, repent, and get back into that intimate daily relationship with Him that will help you from falling. He loves you and will never leave you nor forsake you. It is His desire to have intimate contact each day with His children. Since that is the only thing we will take from this life into the everlasting, shouldn't that be our desire as well?