Recovery Devotional 281 The Whole Counsel of God

JMD Devotional 281 Matthew 4:1-4 The Whole Counsel of God

Matthew 4:1-4 (AMP) THEN JESUS was led (guided) by the [Holy] Spirit into the wilderness (desert) to be tempted (tested and tried) by the devil. And He went without food for forty days and forty nights, and later He was hungry. And the tempter came and said to Him, If You are God's Son, command these stones to be made [loaves of] bread. But He replied, It has been written, Man shall not live and be upheld and sustained by bread alone, but by every word that comes forth from the mouth of God.

In my early ears I encountered a lot of cults and denominations that caused me a lot of pain and confusion. Everyone had their own twist on the Word, and certain scriptures that they emphasized and others that they diminished or neglected (because they contradicted their espoused doctrine). Only by the grace of God did I avoid becoming bitter and cynical from this experience; and from dropping out of the race altogether in frustration! I personally resolved not to pick and choose in order to manipulate the scripture into what I wanted to say; so much so that I gravitated toward those passages that bothered me most, because I intuitively knew that was what I most needed to hear. God’s Word is the anvil that has broken many hammers. Building doctrine out of an isolated verse can create a tottering structure; it is not good workmanship. My rule of thumb is the more Biblical writers were moved to repeat something, the more the evidence of inspiration and conformance to a divine standard. If you can find it three times in the scripture, that is rock solid. None-the-less, those verses that throw ‘little wrenches’ into our point of view should not be disregarded; if for nothing else the hard passages cultivate humility and dependence on God for discernment.

Acts 20:27 (AMP) For I never shrank or kept back or fell short from declaring to you the whole purpose and plan and counsel of God.

Dear God,

You know I care about being faithful to Your Word. I have a spreadsheet of every scripture used in my verse cards and devotionals, which I sort and mine for passages that I have overlooked. I am not afraid of running out of gem-quality ore, ever! I want to know and share You fully, to engage Your whole counsel. Please continue to challenge and convict, shape and cleanse me through Your Word. May I be free of the blood of all men because nothing was held back that they needed to hear.

Amen

All (but*) quotes are from The Amplified Bible, published by

the Lockman Foundation. (AMP)

Copyright © 1954, 1958, 1962, 1964, 1965, 1987 by The Lockman Foundation

*New International Version (NIV)

Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society

**Scripture taken from The Message. Copyright © 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002. Used by permission of NavPress Publishing Group. (Eugene Peterson's easy-to-read, contemporary Scripture translation)

I originally produced these blogs between 2006 and 2007, which were then published in my book, JMD Recovery Devotionals. In 2010, I am sending these out to a few people as I review them and see if my point of view has changed.

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