Reading your Bible for Today August 8

August 8: Proverbs 14:29-30

KJV Key Verse: Proverbs 14:30
30 A sound heart is the life of the flesh: but envy the rottenness of the bones.

Devotion:
Part of our growing up is learning to understand the world and people around us – many times we are going to think we just cannot understand people and what they are doing! But as long as we take notice from what people do and their actions and reactions to things, we can learn about them. The hard part comes from trying to learn about our own actions and reactions – making sure we change when we know we are in the wrong!

Allowing yourself to learn from your mistakes and to apply the wisdom is a good start, but far too often we allow our human nature to step in when we should be looking to God for help. Our human nature is very impulsive and is more likely to break something than to fix or side step it. Having the presence of mind to be able to analyse a situation and to do something about it before it gets out of hand is something we should all strive towards. Almost all the time that means we have to hold back our anger and apply our learning instead. If we can get into the habit of doing this extra step, then we will go a long way to keeping the peace instead of breaking it!

Allowing our passion to get in front of us is only going to get us into trouble. Being able to control it should be our goal. That is one area where we have the most problems – allowing our feelings to break out even before we begin to think about the situation. I'm not just taking about anger, but lust, greed and envy as well. If we allow those feelings to get the better of us, then they are going to be like a cancer which is growing in our bones eating away at us from the inside.

So we stand up and say “I’m strong, I can take it!”... Wrong! No matter how effective and resilient we may think we are, we will never be able to stand up to our own anger, envy, greed and lust without a whole lot of help from the outside – only God can give us that sort of help because only He is able to avoid those sins!

Points to Ponder:
How often do you get angry with others?

How often has your anger taken you away from God?