My husband, Ben, is the guest writer for the week. He’s sharing some truths he is discovering. Read on . . .
Some parasites are a nuisance and some can be deadly if left in your body long enough. The one thing that all parasites have in common is they rob nutrition that is intended for your body to use to grow, build immunity, etc.
Did you know we can and often do have spiritual parasites that rob us of spiritual nourishment and growth? I recently discovered that I had spiritual parasites that were eating the fruit of the Spirit from my life. I am still a child of God, but by allowing these parasites to take root in my life I was robbing myself of the joy of an intimate relationship with my Savior. Read Philippians 3:7-8 below and let’s talk more about what this means….
The apostle Paul says, “whatever things were gain to me, those things I have counted as a loss for the sake of Christ.” Right before these verses, Paul had just listed his Jewish religious credentials and then he says all of these things were a loss for the sake of Christ. The word he uses here for loss is an accounting term for negative. It means Paul didn’t view these religious actions as getting him part of the way to Christ or improving his relationship with Christ, but they took him away from Christ — in other words, they were all parasites.
A spiritual parasite is anything you do that takes away from an intimate relationship with Christ. These parasites can range anywhere from church busyness that draws you away from you taking the time to grow in Christ to a pursuit of your own fleshly desires. On one end of this spectrum is just doing too much and staying too busy to be intimate with Christ. On the other end of this spectrum is outright habitual sin that not only steals our time but makes it impossible for us to be in an intimate relationship with Christ.
When we lived in Honduras, we came in contact with water and food that were often infested with parasites. We had to continuously take steps to attempt to keep parasites from entering our bodies and be diligent to take action to kill them if we found that we had them in us. Likewise, it takes daily and sometimes even moment by moment diligence to keep from being infected with spiritual parasites and when we find them to kill them — it is not something you do once and forget about it.
What parasites do you have in your life? Will you take action today to get them out?
Maybe you realized today that you have never trusted Jesus as your Lord and Savior. Jesus died for all of our sins and if we place our faith in Him we are justified immediately. We are saved not so we can spend the rest of our lives doing certain things and avoiding other things to make ourselves holy, but rather we are saved so that we can spend the rest of our lives on earth getting to know Jesus and allowing Him to remove all of those parasites for us.
Most people choose one of two paths in dealing with their spiritual parasites that lead to failure. Either they ignore their parasites and pretend they are not there or they make a plan and try harder to get rid of them on their own. I have tried both of these approaches with my parasites and neither works because it is like trying to obey the law of God — we are not capable in our own power. We remove our parasites in the same way that we come to Christ in the first place — we come to Christ in humility acknowledging that within our own power we are incapable of ridding ourselves of them and we trust that He will remove them and then He has the freedom to work in us to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. We cannot eliminate the parasites ourselves because if we did we would boast that we finally did it and that takes the glory away from God and He will not share His glory with anyone.
When we give our problems to Christ and trust Him to deal with them He is faithful to do it and we will have a burden lifted off of us. We will experience a freedom that cannot be described and we will worship Him and give Him the glory that only He deserves. Then and only then we will enjoy the fruits of the Spirits (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, and self-control). We can stop reading the scripture to learn what we are to do and not do or to read through the Bible in a certain time period, but rather read it to get to know Christ more intimately. Our prayer life becomes about knowing Christ. Our witnessing becomes all about what He has done and continues to do in our lives and the freedom it gives. People will want to know this Christ because He is the one who sets them free not the one who enslaves them with a list of rules.
Ben
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Dr. Paul Gotthardt, Pastor at Sherwood Baptist Church teaches a detailed message about these things that are “competition” to our relationship with Christ (see link below). This message is the 4th of a 5 sermon series on your relationship with God. I highly recommend you watch or listen to the entire series, but this particular one linked below addresses the topic of competitions to our relationship with Christ.
Video: https://sherwoodbaptist.net/media/sermons/the-competition-of-relationship/1702/?play=video
Audio: https://sherwoodbaptist.net/media/sermons/the-competition-of-relationship/1702/?play=audio
Entire Relationship Series: https://sherwoodbaptist.net/media/sermons/series/246/
Such great words, Ben! Sometimes people are the parasites. They have bad attitudes and try to rob you of the joy God has given you. Acceptance of God’s will for your life, even if it’s sickness, boggles some people. They simply don’t believe you can have joy and peace facing an illness that may end your life.
This is Julie. Don’t let them steal your joy and peace. The only difference between us and others is that we have been confronted with the reality of our future death. Everyone else is facing the same thing, but living as if they are unaware. When a life-threatening illness enters the scene we get the opportunity to do some serious soul searching and reflecting on how God is working in our lives. When we reach the milestone of having peace with even the hard things life brings, sometimes others can’t reason how you have that God-given peace about an unknown future. It is only because of our relationship with a trustworthy God that we have His peace flowing in our spirit. I am so thankful for how He works in our lives.