Forks in the Road… 7/25/2019

WARNING PREACHY...

Leviticus 10:10

¹⁰ so that you can distinguish between the holy and the common, between the unclean and the clean,

Back in 1994 God taught me how to budget my money.  I was 24 years old and up until that time the only thing I understood about budgeting was not to overdraft my checkbook nor spend beyond the limit of my credit card.  So long as I had enough money each month to pay my bills, I was fine.  So when I started to learn to budget according to God’s economy it was a complete paradigm shift for me.  The very first lesson that I had to learn in order to manage my money according to God’s economy was that I had to learn the difference between a necessity and a want. 

I remember being in the grocery store where a child had wanted something from the checkout line’s “last-chance” impulsive buying opportunity.  He kept whining “Mom, I don’t want it, I “neeeed” it.”   

How many times have I whined such words to God?  But in God’s economy I had to learn that all those things I thought I needed were really just a want.  In that day the biggest things were cable TV, the vehicle I drove, and cigarettes, that I naturally thought were necessities for life, but I learned quickly that all of them in fact were not, and together they made up a huge portion of where my income frivolously went each month.

As I read Leviticus 10, this verse jumped out to me as to how to navigate our lives according to God’s economy: we need to learn to "determine between the holy and the common".  We are called to be holy as He is Holy and this is as straight forward as deciding every fork in the roads of our lives to honor Him.  For me, the idea to honor God is more a motivator for me than just doing what is right   (If honoring God is not a motivator for you, then I think there is something wrong with your faith but you most definitely need to find what a motivator is for you is and use it.)  But when we learn the lesson between what is holy and what is common in the economy of God, forks in the road become clear (or at least clearer).

And so this is the first lesson of being sanctified and of being “holy as He is Holy”, to learn the difference between what is holy and what is common.  When we learn this lesson (and we really care) the decisions that we make will naturally become less about what we want and more about what we need.