- Pray for yourself. Do not be deceived, the Lord cannot be mocked. What you sow is what you will reap.
- Examine yourself. Are you living a life which will be found worthy to enter into the Master’s joy, or will you be cast into the outer darkness with the dragon? Ask the Lord for a spirit of repentance and reflection over your life.
- Ask Him to help you walk in line with Him so that you will be found worthy to enter into His rest. Pray this for the Body of Jesus Christ in your territory.
- In a whirlwind year, we need to allow Holy Spirit to turn us around in any way necessary so that we would not enter 2015 with any type of oppression, depression or distress. This passage speaks directly into the freedom that is available to us.
The Apostle Paul had already written a letter to the church in Corinth, to confront a harmful situation. Now, in a second letter to the church in Corinth he follows up to commend the fruit of their response:
“Although I felt awful at the time, I don\’t feel at all bad now that I see how it turned out. The letter upset you, but only for a while. Now I\’m glad – not that you were upset, but that you were jarred into turning things around. You let the distress bring you to God, not drive you from him. The result was all gain, no loss. Distress that drives us to God does that. It turns us around. It gets us back in the way of salvation. We never regret that kind of pain. But those who let distress drive them away from God are full of regrets, end up on a deathbed of regrets. And now, isn\’t it wonderful all the ways in which this distress has goaded you closer to God? You\’re more alive, more concerned, more sensitive, more reverent, more human, more passionate, more responsible. Looked at from any angle, you\’ve come out of this with purity of heart. And that is what I was hoping for in the first place when I wrote the letter.” (2 Corinthians 7:8-12a