Rom. 12:1-2 So here's what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for Him. Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what He wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.
I like to go hiking. Sometimes I wear my sport sandals instead of my hiking boots because they are cooler. But as I’ve hiked many times in very expensive, intentional sandals made for hiking; I have come to realize two things: it’s easier to get a pebble caught in your sandal, and though they are sturdy, the support is not as prominent as it is when I wear my hiking boots.
What happens when you get a pebble in your shoe? It’s very small and you would think it wouldn’t bother you too much, but as you take a step forward, you know it’s there. Depending on how you walk, it may slide around some irritating your foot all over. Or it may simply lodge itself in one specific place constantly rubbing against that part of your foot.
If you don’t stop, and take the time to remove it, the irritation grows. I’ve tried to press through, keeping up with the hiking party, only to find the discomfort growing so painfully that by the time I actually did stop to remove it, I couldn’t go any further. Now I'm five miles into the hike and cannot take another step forward. My only option is to go back and every step of the way will be painful. The further we go with the irritation growing, the longer it will take to recover; and we may never be the same.
It reminds me of the Christian walk, no pun intended. Sometimes we make a bad decision where we must stop, take the pebble out of our shoe, and strap our sandal back on before we can move forward. If we make a bad decision based on our irritation, we have to approach it the same way. Stop, repent (remove the pebble), and strap our sandal back on so we can move forward without the underlying irritation. We won’t get very far if we choose to let the irritation rule our everyday lives. And the people around us will become irritated as well because of our unwillingness to take care of the problem at hand.
Don’t let irritation take root and grow into something it was never intended to be in your life. Stay on the right path with God knowing that He is guiding you one step at a time. If an irritation comes (God bringing something to your attention that you need to properly deal with), stop and let God help you remove it. Don’t stay irritated; respond to His leading so that you can move forward on the path.
Daily Declaration- I AM UNHINDERED
Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a huge crowd of witnesses to the life of faith, let us strip off every weight that slows us down, especially the sin that so easily trips us up. And let us run with endurance the race God has set before us. Hebrews 12:1(NLT)
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