Daily Devotional for Friday, March 22

Draw Nigh to God and Repent

“Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you. Cleanse your hands, ye sinners; and purify your hearts, ye double minded. Be afflicted, and mourn, and weep: let your laughter be turned to mourning, and your joy to heaviness,” James 4:8, 9.

A. W. Tozer wrote a book entitled Nearness Is Likeness. The following quote is from that book: “The more we are like God, the nearer we are to God. I may be sitting in my living room with my Siamese cat on my lap, and my wife may be twenty feet away in the kitchen, yet I am nearer to my wife than to the cat because the cat is unlike me. We have very little in common.”

The above quote asks, “Do we have any likeness to God? What do we have in common with God?” As a saved believer, you are as close to God as you want. Your sin had separated you from God, and Jesus repaired that fracture when you believed in Him. Yet, we still sin daily, and while that never takes us from God’s hand, it strains our fellowship with Him. We must draw nigh to Him again. We do that by fixing our sin problem, and we do that by repenting and seeking forgiveness. This daily repentance is not to get us into God’s Heaven (Jesus took care of that), but to make us like God and to help us draw near Him.

James tells us to cleanse our hands. Jesus certainly did all of the work for our salvation, but our daily sanctification takes effort. You have to step up to the sink, so to speak. James leaves us with one last thought in our devotional passage and sets the stage for another question. He tells us to be afflicted and mourn. Over what? Our sin should make us sad. How do you feel about yours? Does it bother you at all?

JUST A THOUGHT
Are you more like Jesus today than yesterday?

Wally Fry