Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Compromise! Give a little, take a little! Tolerance! Negotiate! Settlement! Bargain! Words of our present culture. I am struggling with it this very day in one area of my life. And yet as I share this area I am being convicted by what I am about to share. As I looked at my goals for the coming year and have led a bible study group on gaining balance in our lives, the one area that needs balance is the area of my nutrition and my weight control. I have been fairly consistent in my exercise and my trainer said to me the other day that every part of my body is in shape except one. My stomach! My legs are in shape. My arms are in shape. But my stomach needs work.

I do exercise my stomach but I have a problem and that starts in my mouth. I don’t have only one problem but I have a whole mouth full of sweet seeking teeth. I love sweets and carbohydrates and more sweets. Even as I write this I am being convicted about cutting out the very things that keep my stomach from looking the way it did when I was in college.

And yet there is a story that I ran across today in Judges 1 where the phrase is repeated 9 times in one chapter. You see God gave the Israelites a command to go into the promised land and utterly destroy the enemy so that their gods wouldn’t be a temptation to compromise their walk with Him. And yet the phrase that is repeated nine times is “yet they didn’t drive out the enemy from the land.”. The Israelites compromised what God wanted them to do because it was too hard; or they had iron chariots; or they were too tough; or there were too many of them. They had excuses up the wazoo and used the excuses to live in compromise. As a result they never truly experienced true fulfillment.

When I make excuses for eating a small bite sized candy bar or maybe two or three, I am compromising my life and not experiencing all that the Lord wants for my life. Starting today I am going to begin to change my choices so that compromise is turned into obedience and dependence on His power to be victorious. What about you? Is there compromise in your life that God wants to root out of your life? It does take a decision from you to transform that into obedience and dependence but what a journey we have in store for us when we turn those things over to Him. Come and enjoy the journey with me.