The following is an excerpt from my book – Living by the Words of God (Monthly payment religion / PART ONE / pp. 49-50).
I am beginning the process of revising this book. If anyone wants to be an “editor” on the project I would gladly welcome the help. My thought is that I have good content in the book, but I need to really trim it down and highlight the more meaningful, attention grabbing sections, such as the one below. I am also going to put the book in ebook format so it will be available very inexpensively on various readers, such as iBook and Kindle.
Let me know if you want to help.
Monthly payment religion …
I remember several years ago my brother telling me how car salesmen that he worked with bragged about selling cars to people who did not even know how much they actually paid for the car.
They did not know the ultimate cost because they only cared whether or not they could make the monthly payment. It seems that sometimes we are like that with the bigger issues of life also. Going along, buying what happiness we can, making our monthly payment, neither knowing nor caring about the ultimate cost.
But we need to stop and think. Don’t I want to know the ultimate price I will end up paying for my current lifestyle? Am I paying glory to God looking to ultimate happiness? Or am I making monthly payments on a religion that is just enough to let me get by?
Look at the price Israel paid for not giving God the glory and living by his words. The irony of this text should astonish us. They abandoned God’s words and the promise of true life for their own words that came with their “monthly-payment” religion. And God finally said “Okay, have it your way.”
- But you will never again say, “The message of the LORD,” because the only message you speak is your own words. You have changed the words of our God, the living God, the LORD All-Powerful (Jeremiah 23:36 NCV).
“… the only message you speak is your own words. You have changed the words of our God, the living God, the LORD All-Powerful.”
After years of changing the words of God instead of living them, they were left with their own message, their own words, not God’s. Is this what we are doing? Are we, as they did, changing the words for something that better fits our lives?
