Holiness Day-by-Day

Devotional from Navigators by Jerry Bridges

Devotional for Saturday, March 9, 2013 / Sunday, March 10, 2013

When God Is Irrelevant

Today's Scripture: 1 Corinthians 10:31
"Whatever you do, do all to the glory of God."
Read it online at the Bible Gateway: (NIV) (NASB) (KJV) (The Message)

When I talk about specific areas of our subtle, "acceptable" sins, one comment I often hear is that pride is their root cause. While I agree pride plays a major role, I believe there's another sin even more basic, more widespread, and more apt to be the root cause of other sins. It's the sin of ungodliness, of which we're all guilty to some degree.

We don't think of ourselves as ungodly. After all, we're Christians, not atheists or wicked people. How can I say that we believers are all, to some extent, ungodly?

Ungodliness may be defined as living one's everyday life with little or no thought of God, God's will, God's glory, or our dependence on God. You can readily see that someone can lead a respectable life and still be ungodly in the sense that God is essentially irrelevant in his or her life.

The sad fact is that many of us believers tend to live our daily lives with little or no thought of God. We may read our Bibles and pray at the beginning of each day, but then go out into the day's activities and basically live as though God doesn't exist. We seldom think of our dependence on God or our responsibility to him. We might go for hours with no thought of God at all. I believe that all our other acceptable sins can ultimately be traced to this root sin of ungodliness. Ungodliness ultimately gives life to our more visible sins.

Pray that God will make you more conscious of the fact that you live every moment of every day under his all-seeing eye, knowing that he sees your every deed, hears your every word, and knows your every thought. (Excerpt taken from Respectable Sins)

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The text for this devotional comes from the award-winning NavPress devotional bookHoliness Day by Day by Jerry Bridges. For more information or to order a copy, visit theNavPress website.