Reading your Bible for Today April 15

April 15: Mark 7:20-23

Key Verse: Mark 7:23
All these evil things come from within and defile a man.

Devotion:
Just when we are sitting back and thinking “pride cannot be that bad; I mean, it's not exactly affecting that many people,” we come across the words of Christ where He lists a whole string of evil; and guess what is in the middle of it! Pride!

Jesus had just explained to the disciples how nothing they would eat would defile their spiritual bodies – in other words it should not be counted against you to not eat food just because someone has made up a rule we should not eat a certain food type because it is against their religion. But equally, we should not blindly go ahead and do so in front of them knowing it will upset them. That is just being obnoxious! It is this type of thing which defiles us, not the physical eating of the food, but what we are doing against the spirit of the other person.

The list of things Jesus gives shows us just where He thinks pride belongs – slap bang in the middle of what we may think of as being really evil things. In other words, pride is something Christ takes very seriously because of the spiritual damage it can do. He is not so concerned about the physical damage we do to our bodies by eating something which makes us sick as the spiritual damage we can do to our bodies when we let ourselves get involved with the hidden dangers Christ sees.

We know that He looks at us from the inside. We know He looks to see what is on our hearts. We know He is a discerner of spirits. So why can't we see why He looks so seriously upon pride? Because of the blinkers we put on when we take up pride in our lives. We block out everything we don't want to see just so we can focus on our pride. We ignore the feelings of others. We even put them down. We break them spiritually. We affect their very beings by what we do. That is why God wants us to put pride behind us and focus on Him instead.

Points to Ponder:
Do you really think you can get away with it?

We are all God's children – behave like we are!