"I Was Crushed"

This morning, as I was reading my bible, a verse caught my attention that I hadn’t really given thought to before. Let me share it with you.
God speaking: “…I was crushed by their adulterous heart, which has departed from Me, and by their eyes which play the harlot after their idols…” (Ezekiel 6:9)
A couple of things struck me…

We live in a world that glorifies sin. It calls evil good, and good evil. Much of our culture and media today is based off of little to no morality, and pushes messages that encourage you to step over your moral lines drawn for yourself and try the unthinkable. Pride, selfishness, divorce, sex before marriage, gay marriage, adultery, murder, hate, lying, envy, slander, and on and on –these things are often portrayed as good.

Our Christian culture is not left unaffected by this either. How many Christians do you and I know who minimize sin against God? It is hard to find someone who weeps over sin anymore. Most people either push it under a spiritual rug of hypocrisy and pretend it’s not there, or put it on display for all to see and actually take pride in it.

Let’s bring it a little more personal… How many of us do the same thing?

It struck me that each day it is so easy to completely minimize any sin I do and think it’s no big deal to God. I often forget to even confess it to God, let alone realize that my sin is against God and therefore affects God.

I know God is big enough and strong enough to handle it. He is not weak. In fact, everything He is, is infinite in measure. But He is also the Source of love, and to be real with you, love hurts.

Often the most painful thing is to reach out to someone in sacrificial love and be rejected by them in spite of it. Have you ever experienced that?

God experiences that moment by moment. I think that if all the times our hearts strayed away from Him in Spiritual adultery, seeking other “lovers” were put together in one pile - whether in the form of entertainment and other simple time-wasters that have no effect on eternity, or in the form of sin itself in all its ugly forms, the mountain of our adultery would stand in proof against our love for God –or proof of a lack thereof.

Just like a wife who constantly looks at other men and pines after them in her heart is our heart when it strays to other things to meet our needs and replaces God with them.

Oh, that we would see our sin like that! Do you realize, dear Christian, that God is jealous over you? Like a husband who watches his wife flirt with other men, He watches our hearts constantly straying to other things and sins, looking for what only He can give, and is crushed by it.
Christian… that ought to break our heart. How can we do that to Him?
Let’s run back to our heavenly Lover and weep before Him, recognizing that our heart-adultery breaks His heart. Let’s remember that Christ’s blood was shed, and risen life was given so that we could be free to be wholly God’s and love Him as He deserves- with everything we have and everything we are.

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