Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.  James 4:7 HCSB

If you read this blog very often, you will recognize this verse as one I like to use. I think submitting ourselves to God is the most important thing we can do. I also think that we must start our day by asking God to guide and protect us. The devil is going to tempt us to do things that we have no business doing, so we must be prepared to resist him and the best way to do that is by submitting ourselves to God and focusing on God and letting God deal with the rest. The best thing that can happen is that we frustrate the devil and he flees from us.

The quarantine has been difficult to some extent on all of us. My 16 year old niece is no exception. Not only has she been shut off from her friends, but she has been babysitting her 4 year old brother while her mom works at home. She tries to keep him occupied and quiet while her mom attends meetings via the internet and handles phone calls. The other day I went over and he wanted to show me the fort that he and his “Sissy” had built in his room. He told me that she had taken him to McDonald’s for lunch and they had built this fort. It was sounding as if they had a really good day, but when I mentioned that, he said, “We had big trouble!”.  I began to question him and ask what he meant by that. He just changed the subject several times and then ran off to where his dad was saying his dad needed his help. It was clear that he didn’t want to talk about it. It turns out that after the fort was built, he decided he wanted to go play outside which meant in the mud. He got bored with that and wanted to go inside, his sister told him to let her wash his feet off. After she did this, she went to turn the faucet off and he grabbed the hose, soaked her with water and ran inside and locked the door. He was right, big trouble! What he didn’t think about was that his Sissy had a key and would soon be inside, really big trouble!

Now if you are not the one that got soaked and locked out, this is a funny story, right? But isn’t it exactly how we as adults live our lives every day. We walk along, we see temptation, it just looks too good to pass up, so we indulge and then before we know it we are in big trouble.

Now in my 4 year old nephew’s mind, doing this to his sister would be fun. I don’t think he would ever try that with his dad. But as adults, we sometimes forget that we are dealing with our heavenly father. We are more focused on people here on earth. We find it easy to hurt or disrespect others here on earth, but we forget that when we do this we hurt the heart of our heavenly Father which potentially leads to His wrath. When this happens, we have big trouble.

The most amusing part of this is that after my nephew did what he thought would be a lot of fun, he could admit to me that there was trouble that day between him and his sister but he didn’t want to admit to what he had done. Sound familiar? How many times have you hurt someone else and knew you did it, but you didn’t want to admit to it. You didn’t want to talk about it. You wanted everyone to just forget about it. I’ve been there, done that and got the t-shirt.

Well, with God we can confess our sins, admit to what we have done (he already knows) and repent. When we do this He forgives our sin (1John 1:9) forgets about it and removes it from us (Psalm 103:12). We can go from big trouble to peace. We are told in John 16:33 that in Jesus we may have peace. We may suffer in this world but we are to be courageous because Jesus has conquered the world. So to avoid trouble all we have to do is trust in Him, submit to Him and resist the devil.

Have a great day!