Accepting and Claiming
The Lord’s insight. If you still have more to leave than what you have left behind, you are closer to where you were than where you should be.
Ruth 1:16: “But Ruth said, entreat me not to leave you or to turn back from following after you. For wherever you go, I will go. Wherever you lodge, I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God, my God.”
Acts 9:20:” Immediately he preached the Christ in the synagogues, that He is the Son of God.”
Sometimes our relationship with the Lord might seem like it is stuck in the same place. For many of us, our relationship with the Lord may actually start this way and never change. Accepting the Lord should tell us more about who He is and about who He promises we can be.
We can get the feeling we are stuck in the same place because we won’t give up who we are and what we have now so that we can become who we should be and have what we are promised. Think of it this way. We keep playing with our old lives, trying to get a new experience rather than forsaking our old life for a new life and new the new experiences that come with the new life.
In Ruth 1:16, she is in a way saying to Naomi, her mother-in-law, please don’t ask me to go back to the place I was and to the person I was before I met you. I have left that life behind me. I have accepted the new life I believe I will have when I go with you. I will stay where you stay. And I claim the same God that you claim. Ruth accepted something new and she claimed something she never had.
In a like way, it is said in Acts 9:20 that Saul went from being a persecutor of the church to Paul, a preacher of the gospel. He went from being called Saul to being Paul, and from being a persecutor to being preacher. How did this happen? Well Paul left all that he was before He met Jesus, and he accepted the Lord’s call to live a new life. He claimed the Lord as his Savior.
Many of us feel no different in our lives as believers because we do not accept and claim. We must accept the promise of eternal Life the Lord offers us, and we must claim the life the Lord wants us to live daily as we wait. The Lord doesn’t want us to find more enjoyment in hanging on to all our old ways while we keep the promise of a new way of life as an unwrapped gift.
We can know if we have accepted the promise and claimed the life He wants for us by looking at ourselves today to see how much of what we were yesterday still lives in us. If we have not forsaken much, we probably have not moved much. If we do not see what we left behind, we probably still live in those things. If we find more comfort and enjoyment in remaining who we are we may be stuck having an unwrapped promise.
If we have claimed the life that Christ wants us to live daily, we will be different tomorrow from the way we are today. If we are not feeling any different, we are probably not any different. If we are taking into our tomorrows the things we should forsake today, we are probably still living our old lives only with knowledge of the promise of a new life.
So, start each day accepting what it means to have Eternal Life. We cannot rightly have the new while holding to the old. And let’s live each day claiming the life that Christ wants us to live and forsaking the life we lived to ourselves. We must accept His promise, and we must claim that we are His and He is ours.
Lord, encourage each of us to not turn back from following You. Where You go, we want to go. Where You live, we want to live. We want to be one of the people You call Yours. And we want You to be our God. Help us to forsake all that keeps us from this. We want to accept your Promise, and we want to claim You as our Lord and us as your children.
Live A Delivered Life.
Live Delivered 