Distracted Devotion

ALL – Psalm 32:1-11
ALL – Proverbs 21:5-7
OT – Nehemiah 3:15-5:13
NT – 1 Corinthians 7:20-40

Interesting passage for the day: I am saying this to help you, not to try to keep you from marrying. I want you to do whatever will help you serve the Lord best, with as few other things as possible to distract your attention from him. – 1 Corinthians 7:35, The Living Bible

Thought: Marriage is good. God created it, designed it, gave it to man and woman as a gift. Marriage is good, and it is a good thing to get married.

But marriage can also be an obsession. Young men and women crave the deep relationship of marriage and pursue one another with the intensity of a starving man being given his first opportunity at food. They devote themselves to marriage and its pleasures. God becomes a distraction.

Even when marriage isn’t an obsession, it still consumes. It consumes time. It consumes resources. Again, marriage is good, and time and resources may be spent doing good things to build up a marriage. To be married responsibly requires a man and a woman to take on the full-time responsibility of nurturing one another—mind, heart, and body—and usually also requires them to carry the responsibility for children. Marriage consumes married people. And even in a good marriage, it is easy for God to be a distraction.

God did not create us to see Him as a distraction. He created us to know Him, to love Him, to obey Him, to worship Him, to serve Him in wholehearted devotion. In some ways, singles have an advantage over married couples. Singles can most easily make sure that their primary relationship is with God, that their fullest love is for God, that their time is devoted to God. Unfortunately, too many singles fill their lives with alternative loves, too, whether work or entertainment or just lounging around. But single or married, God is God, and He calls us to devote our lives to Him. Single or married, our devotion to Jesus Christ should spur us toward creative self-discipline that discovers and invests time, resources, energy and emotion into loving and serving Him.

Single, married, working, unemployed, sickly, strong, rich, poor – our status does not cancel out Jesus Christ’s appeal to us, “Come, follow me.”

Question: Whatever your status in life, how have you been distracted from following Jesus wholeheartedly? How could you live the very life you already have, but live that life fully for Jesus?

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