Life is hard, living life is harder, and living life as yourself is hardest when you don’t know what to do with yourself. During Noah’s time the bible says God looked upon the earth, and indeed it was corrupt; for all the flesh had corrupted their ways on earth. Genesis 8:12.
But we know that God was pleased with the way Noah lived, for it says, “Noah found grace in God’s eyes.” But why? How is it that Noah lived so differently from all other people of his times? The answer is seen here. Noah walked with God. The bible says Noah was a just man, perfect in his generations.
What does it mean that Noah walked with God? We need to know this because everyone else during Noah’s time got it wrong, and they lost their lives because of it. Mankind typically lives by trying to walk out their lives in response to the things that happen to them or because of the things they want to happen for them. At worst man wants to please other men, and at best man wants to please himself.
Neither is the life we should live. We prefer to walk with ourselves and before others. We do the things we believe are right for us and before others. But we do not have the knowledge or the skill or the understanding to do this in an effective way. We cannot control how others respond to how we live. We cannot see that we should change how we live.
Noah had the sense to live a different type of life and for different reasons. We need that sense today. When you walk with God, you learn to live the life you believe God wants you to live. That is the life we should walk out before God, and the one we should live out before others.
When we live this life, we see that we need to change our ways because we typically try to live by responding to or anticipating how other people will respond to us. We ought to live by how we want God to respond to us.
But we are our own worst enemies when it comes to life and how we live. We live trying to get people to be good to us when we should want to live so that God will be good to us. We live trying to get people to do right before us when we should live so that God will do what is right for us. We live trying to get people to satisfy our needs when we should live so that God knows He satisfies all our needs.
But why don’t we know this? And if we know it, why don’t we live it out? Why did all men live their own way, but Noah lived Gods way? Why didn’t God give us an instruction book for how we should think, believe, and live?
Well, He did. He gave us the free will to teach our wills how to live. And He gave us His Word and His Spirit to be our teachers. But on this we fail because we allow circumstances and others to teach our wills how to react to what is happening or to what we want to happen.
We must understand that free will is not free unless we give it back to Him to be taught by Him how to live freely. We lack knowledge of and understanding of how to live free from the stuff life throws at us and from the stuff we throw at life.
As much as we try to change the things around us and with us for our good, we lack the wisdom to tell ourselves we are our own worst enemies. We fail to realize we must change some things within us if we want to change the things around us.
Let’s stop listening to what we tell ourselves and start listening to what we refuse to hear about ourselves. That is the wisdom God wants us to live by. Proverbs 1:5 says, “A wise man will hear and increase learning. And a man of understanding will attain wise counsel.”
Let’s start living today learning what Proverbs is saying to us, and let’s start rejecting what we say to ourselves. In this way we can stop being our own worst enemies.
Live a Delivered Life. Love you.
Live Delivered 