Underguarded Moments: Part 5 — A ‘Time With God’ Audio Devotion

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Transcript

Each day at this time, I like to meet with you and help you take some time with God. That’s what we want to do together today, time with God. Not time with John North, but time with God. That’s right. God wants to speak to you even in these just couple of minutes that we spend together.

Are you listening though? Are you ready to receive what he has to say to you? Do you know that if you make it the practice of your life every day to take a little time with God where your heart is really open to Him, ready to respond to what he has to say to you – that you will find your life changing in such a great way.

God wants to rebuild your life into the best life imaginable, the kind of life He created you to have. He loves you so much, and he made you to enjoy life lived with meaning and purpose.

He wants to fill your life. The Bible says the kingdom of God does not consist of eating or drinking, but righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit.

God wants to fill your life with joy, meaning, peace and righteousness.

Are you listening to him each day, spending time with him? We’re talking this week about unguarded moments in our lives, those moments when our own sinful nature or the devil likes to attack us and try and destroy the spiritual growth we’re starting to see happen in our lives.

So we need to be on our guard, reduce those unguarded moments. We’ve seen that when we get physically hungry – this is an unguarded moment, and we need to take care of our physical needs to be alert and strong and ready to face temptation when it comes.

We’ve seen that anger produces unguarded moments, and we need to learn how to respond rightly to people when we are angry with them, not to allow anger to remain in our hearts and fester.

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We’ve seen also that when we live our Christian life on our own as a loner, that that is a terribly unguarded situation. God made us for fellowship, for companionship with other people who love him, and he works through them in our lives to help us grow spiritually.

The other unguarded moment I want to bring up to you this week is our need of rest – tiredness, exhaustion can be an unguarded moment.

Tiredness, exhaustion can be an unguarded moment.

You remember in the Old Testament there’s the story of Elijah the prophet and how God uses him at Mount Carmel to challenge the occultish prophets of Baal, that idol, and there at Mount Carmel, they have this sort of contest, and the prophets of Baal try to get Baal to bring down fire on their altar, their offering that they create. And of course nothing happens.

And then Elijah prays a simple prayer, and God sends fire down that consumes the altar. The whole nation recognizes how foolish they are to have been ignoring God, and they destroy and kill all those prophets of Baal. That the queen, Queen Jezebel, had sponsored.

It says in 1 Kings 19, Ahab told Jezebel all that Elijah had done, how he had killed all the prophets with the sword. So Jezebel gets furious and threatens that she’s going to do the same thing to Elijah and sends all these people out to find him, and Elijah runs for his life. He’s terrified. He forgets how God has already helped him and starts thinking he’s on his own and he takes off. He runs and runs and runs until he’s exhausted.

He lies down, says, just somebody kill me. He’s so depressed, experiencing deep depression. He says, ‘enough now, Lord, take my life’. And he lies down and God helps him to sleep.

Then an angel wakes him up and has some food for him to eat and then tells him to lie down and sleep some more. He sleeps again. Again he wakes up and the angel has food.

You need to learn to rest in your life. Remember that God made one day out of every week as a day of rest.

You need to learn from God’s principles.

To take rest, not to feel guilty about stopping. When you stop and rest, spend time with family, time worshiping God, you will find that you are so much more able to respond rightly in those times of testing and temptation.

I’m John North.

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