Be On Guard

“Be on guard. Stand firm in the faith. Be courageous. Be strong. And do everything with love.” 1 Corinthians 16:13-14.

A couple weeks ago I was at a prayer night with some of my good friends and the essence of these verses came to my head while we were praying for me. I didn’t know the reference at the time but just the idea of standing firm was repeating in my head. Now yesterday at Church I was reading along with my pastor as he was preaching on the end of 1 Corinthians. I was slightly uninterested in the fact that Paul himself was writing the last couple verses and not letting a scribe write for him, so my eyes wandered the page. It was a really cool realization for me since I had prayed that verse over myself with these guys, weeks before I knew that it was an actual verse.

The part that was resonating in my head a couple weeks ago was stand firm in the faith. Just to hold to what you believe. Recently I’ve been somewhat purposefully questioning what I believe more so in regards to church services and what that should entail but also in regards to my personal journey through life. I haven’t really come up with any conclusions yet but I really feel that God is going to take the Church somewhere that it’s never been and all the churches that follow his lead will be blessed. Not that the churches that don’t follow will be cursed, but something is going to happen and the Church needs to follow, whether it’s similar to tradition, or it’s completely different.

But more so in the past few days I’ve been thinking about the, “be on guard” part. There are so many different ways that the enemy can steer you into dead ends and off roads and where you aren’t supposed to be. Now I’m still trying to figure out where I should be. However, that really isn’t my concern, I’ll end up where God wants me to be whether I tried to get there or not. The worst is when Satan throws thoughts in your head, but when there are also pure thoughts. Which is which? I find it so hard to distinguish between pure desires and corrupt desires. Maybe sometimes I think that the corrupt desire is actually a pure desire until I’m neck deep in a situation and realize, “hey, you aren’t God.” Then on the contrary, I don’t follow pure desires sometimes because I think it will be to hard to do, or it’s easier to follow the corrupt ones. As I’m writing this I feel like Paul a little bit in Romans 7-8. He’s writing about how his sin causes him to do wrong things that he does not want to do because he wants to do the right thing. But him talking about this isn’t to complain, so don’t get that idea. The answer to his questions is Christ Jesus. Then Chapter 8 starts with “So now there is no condemnation for those who belong to Christ Jesus.” He isn’t complaining about his desire to do good things but his nature is to do bad things. He’s simply acknowledging this and letting the church know that it’s human to fail and fail a lot.