Today!

March 21

II Chronicles 7:14 says, “If My people, who are called by My name, will humble themselves and pray and seek My face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and forgive their sin and heal their land.”

But Isaiah 1:11-14 says, "To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices to Me? Says the LORD. I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed cattle. I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs or goats. When you come to appear before Me, who has required this from your hand, to trample My courts?

“Bring no more futile sacrifices; incense is an abomination to Me. The New Moons, the Sabbaths, and the calling of assemblies— I cannot endure iniquity and the sacred meeting. Your New Moons and your appointed feasts My soul hates; they are a trouble to Me; I am weary of bearing them.”

Our God and Savior is long-suffering, not willing that any should perish (see II Peter 3:9), but it is apparent from the words of Isaiah that He does reach a breaking point; He does weary with the way professed believers give lip service to Him without surrendering their hearts or their minds or their lifestyles to Him.

Taken together the passages in II Chronicles and in Isaiah tell us that there is a limit to what our Lord will put up with. He is eager to save us; Jesus died to set us free from sin and its consequences, but He will not abide our feigned worship and false life before Him.

He poses to us the same decision He expressed in Joshua 24:15, “And if it seem evil unto you to serve the Lord, choose you this day whom ye will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”

Will we, like Joshua, resolve to be faithful to the One who delivered the people from bondage in Egypt? Will we relinquish our attachment to the world and its pleasures and its foibles and sins in order to serve Christ in the beauty of holiness according to Psalm 29:2? Will we “Worship the LORD in the splendor of His holiness; and tremble before Him, all the earth,” as Psalm 96:9 admonishes that we do?

We have a choice to make, People! It is time to stop playing church! It is time to stop straddling the fence between commitment to Christ and abandonment to the world and its pleasures!

Will we be people on our face before Him according to II Chronicle 9:14, or will we be people rebuked by Him according to Isaiah 1:11-14? The sobering words of II Corinthians 6:2 are more weighty today than when they were first spoken, “Behold now is the accepted time; behold, today is the day of salvation.”

How many tomorrows can there be until Acts 1:11 is fulfilled, “This same Jesus who is taken from you into Heaven will come again in like manner as you have seen Him go”? And when He comes, for all of us collectively or for each of us individually, it will be too late to turn from the wickedness that has beset us.

TODAY is the day of our repentance; TODAY is the day to place our lives as a living sacrifice at His feet. (See Romans 12:1.)