Weekend, April 15, 2023
Guard Your Strengths
If you think you are standing strong, be careful not to fall. (1 Corinthians 10:12 NLT)
Have you ever noticed that when the great men and women of the Bible sinned, they seemed to always fall in the areas of their greatest strength?
Take Abraham for example. He was a man of faith. But did he ever have lapses of faith? Yes. He asked his wife, Sarah, to lie and say she was his sister, because she was very beautiful. He was afraid Abimelech would take her away and kill him in the process. Abraham was known for great faith, yet he fell in the area where his faith was lacking.
The Bible describes Moses as the meekest man on the face of the earth. Yet there was an occasion when he lost his temper and struck a rock that God had told him to only speak to. Then he personally took credit for what God had done up to that point, incurring God’s wrath. As a result, he couldn’t enter the Promised Land.
Peter was known for his great courage, and justifiably so. After all, he was one of the first to publicly follow Jesus Christ and lay it all on the line for Him. Yet he underestimated his own weakness when he said to Jesus, “Even if everyone else deserts you, I never will” (Mark 14:29 NLT).
Not only that, but he was flatly contradicting what Jesus had said: “All of you will desert me. For the Scriptures say, ‘God will strike the Shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered’ ” (verse 27 NLT).
We can do the same. There may be a certain area of our lives that we’ve had under control for a long time, so much so that we don’t even guard it anymore. And because we think we’re strong in that area, we begin to lower our defenses.
Be careful. An unguarded strength can become a double weakness.
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