Prayer: Father, thank You for reminding me of Your mercy. Your mercies are new every morning! Amen.
Reading: Jeremiah 3 key: vs. 6-8 “Then Adonai said to me in the days of King Josiah: “Have you seen what backsliding Israel did? She went up on every high mountain and under every green tree, and there she committed adultery. Yet I thought that after she had done all this she would return to Me. But she did not return. Even her unfaithful sister Judah saw it. I noted that when backsliding Israel committed adultery I sent her away and gave her a certificate of divorce. Yet, unfaithful Judah, her sister, did not fear. Instead she also went and committed adultery.” TLV
Attention: Today, Adonai introduces a term He uses to describe Israel and Judah’s spiritual condition of broken relationship, “backsliding.”
I remember as a youth hearing my pastor preaching on the spiritual condition of backsliding. Backsliding is defined as a breakdown of a spiritual lifestyle and compromising on the things one does to stay in close relationship with God. Such things might include reading the Word daily, praying constantly, and not allowing the concerns of the world to draw you away from God.
How does Adonai define backsliding? When the people of Judah and Israel began to worship other gods, they did as they saw other nations worship their gods. They would go out of town or to the wooded areas and build shrines out of wood or stones and place them under the trees. What they thought they were doing in secret, God could plainly see, and He called it adultery. Not the kind of physical adultery of fornicating in the woods, but spiritual adultery in leaving the lover of their souls. Adonai is their Covenant Father/Husband. He is their God, and they are His people, and they are chasing after other gods.
How might we be committing spiritual adultery with God? I recall a time years ago when I joined some Christian friends in dining at a Chinese restaurant. We were visiting with each other while we waited for our order one among us brought everyone’s attention to the place mats in front of us. Each placemat had a printed version of the Chinese Calendar and what it meant according to the year you were born. It was a fortune telling device. Most of the party would have said it was an innocent thing to participate in, just like the fortune cookies. I have never felt that was the way God felt about it. Are there additional ways that we flirt with the occultic practices of the world? Every day, newspapers around the world print horoscopes. Do you check your horoscope? Have you ever consulted a medium?
Backsliding is a form of compromise which Adonai calls adultery. If you claim the blood of Yeshua, I call on you today to repent and return to the lover of your soul. No longer look to sources outside your relationship with God.
Action: I choose to repent and return to God with all my heart.
Yield: I choose to submit my life anew to the Sovereignty of Adonai.
Engage: I choose to engage with the Holy Spirit in living a holy life unto God.
Relationship: I choose to life in obedient, intimate, holy lifestyle with God.
Prayer: Father, may we return to You and worship You only. I repent of the ways I have compromised and backslid. Restore unto me the joy of my salvation. Amen.
Memory Verse: Colossians 1:18-20 “He is the head of the body, His community. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead— so that He might come to have first place in all things. For God was pleased to have all His fullness dwell in Him and through Him to reconcile all things to Himself, making peace through the blood of His cross— whether things on earth or things in heaven!” TLV
Music Video: Hillsong—Devoted https://youtu.be/bl1BPMKWlQ0?si=KmgQdBTxy0rWrbMi
Remember, “Abide in Yeshua, today!”