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Make a Decision


          To fear the Lord is to hate evil; I hate pride and arrogance, evil behavior and perverse speech. (Proverbs 8:13)

          Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall. (Proverbs 16:18)

          The greedy stir up conflict, but those who trust in the Lord will prosper. (Proverbs 28:25)

          One of the complaints I hear is about the sense of entitlement that young folks today have. Now, my first response to this is that every generation is attacked by the generations that came before it as being useless, foolish, indulged, and evil. And each new generation looks back at the generations that have gone before and sees uselessness, foolishness, indulgence, and evil.
          Scripture doesn’t blame one generation or another. We’re all selfish. We are all prideful. We are all greedy, and those three are all probably facets of the same sin. We would be like the Most High. We want to be God, determining our own reality. That’s pride. We want our vision of how things should be to prevail. We think “right” is (or at least should be) what we declare to be right, and that includes our getting all we think we deserve. We think that we should be granted the same level of privilege (or more) as that other person over there (whoever that might be.) That’s greed. Both are entitlement.
           Even those who claim they want God to be on the throne of their lives tend to be like Cathleen in this video: Cathleen. But it’s obvious that pride, greed, and entitlement all lead to “…make a decision…You just did.”
          The belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, and the sword of the Spirit seem to be the weapons most useful in fighting these battles. It comes to mind that in selecting a few from the list, we might reach the conclusion that they aren’t all needed each time. That’s not true. We always need all of them, but accepting the truth that we are not God, accepting the fact that we are limited, and that we should not get all that we want seems key. Doing the good that we can with what’s available, and looking to the Word to find out what the good we can do includes as well as what the evil that we should not do includes also seem great places to start.

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