Reading your Bible for today August 6

August 6: Isaiah 66:1-5

KJV Key Verse: Isaiah 66:2
For all those things hath mine hand made , and all those things have been, saith the LORD: but to this man will I look , even to him that is poor and of a contrite spirit, and trembleth at my word. 

Devotion:
This is a prophecy from hundreds of years before Christ pointing to the time when Christ would already have been to pay the ultimate sacrifice for all of our sins. What God is saying is that the person who continues to offer up a sacrifice after learning about the sacrifice Christ has already made, will be guilty of killing the animals needlessly. It would be as if the person is saying to Christ that His sacrifice was not good enough to last!

Christ offered up the ultimate sacrifice so we would never have to try and better it to see if God would forgive us when our sacrifice was big enough to atone for our wrong-doings. Christ’s death on the cross is more than enough to cover all of mankind’s sins and more besides! Because Christ’s offering was so pure, any other offering would be like dirt being offered up instead. If that warning wasn’t enough to get people to stop then they have already chosen to do their own thing instead of following Christ.

When we say we believe and trust in Christ we should be proving it all the time by trusting in Him. We should not be looking for another way in which we can try and better anything He has already done for us – we simply cannot hope to achieve such a feat. But all we need do is look around us and see all the people who would rather try and prove themselves to be better than others rather than agreeing we are all God’s children and all need to live for His glory alone.

We don’t need to prove ourselves by building the most expensive things we can or by buying luxuries we will never get round to using; God sets us a task to give Him the glory. If we are lucky enough to earn a whole bunch of money then we can and should use that to do good; but we also deserve to buy things for ourselves as well because we have done the work for it. That is not the same as giving God the glory though; you can still buy expensive things as well as giving God the glory… How about giving God the glory by helping out fellow people who are in need…

Points to Ponder:
Do you look to the old times, how things used to be?

Or are you looking forward to what you can do with Christ?