Daily Devotional for Friday January 2, 2015

Our Walk with Christ is the Basics of Our Relationship

DAILY DEVOTIONAL FRIDAY JANUARY 2, 2014 (John 8:12)

Living for many years in Chicago and being a huge fan of the Chicago Bulls NBA basketball team during their incredible string of 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; moving without the ball.

The basics were the foundation from which he was then able to do the more spectacular, and the bedrock of his game. 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 360-slam dunk, people with little or no contact with the Lord 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, and 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 in our relationship with the Lord, since it is something that 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, where we are spiritually fed, and where we have opportunities to serve the Lord. When people have sin in their lives, 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 love you and care about you. 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 and to stay connected each day with the Lord. The 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.

Jesus loves you and will never leave you nor forsake you. It is His desire to have intimate contact with His children every day. Since that is the only thing we will take from this life into the everlasting, shouldn't that be our desire as well?

In His love and service, Your friend and brother in Christ,

Bill Keller