What Have We Asked to Save Us?
Today’s devotional
Approval can feel like an answer to a question we have hardly admitted asking. A compliment reassures us that our work matters. Soon we may begin asking achievement to reassure us that we matter. The work can still be good, while the weight we place upon it becomes more than it can bear.
Jesus connects treasure and the heart in Matthew 6. Our deepest loyalties take shape around what we protect, pursue, and fear losing. His words invite honest attention to the life we actually arrange. They do not require suspicion of every pleasure, loving relationship, or meaningful responsibility. Created goods can be received with gratitude without being asked to become God.
The difficulty often appears in the way we pursue something good. Care for a child can tighten into control. Love of truth can become pleasure in being superior. Meaningful work can crowd out the people it was meant to serve. We should examine our own desires carefully rather than assume that another person's visible effort reveals the whole heart.
Romans 7 gives language to the distress of recognizing good while remaining caught in destructive patterns. Knowing the right answer does not automatically free us to live it. We need truthful teaching, and we need the saving help of Jesus Christ. The cry for deliverance turns our attention beyond another attempt to manage ourselves through information alone.
God's grace meets us within this divided life and calls our loves toward truth. We can begin noticing the routines that strengthen our desire for approval or control. We can receive correction, practice gratitude, and make room for another person's good. These responses do not manufacture grace. They are ways of answering the mercy already reaching toward us.
Choose one good thing to receive today without asking it to prove your worth. Let a task be useful, a meal be enjoyable, or a friendship be a place of mutual care. Allow it to remain a gift with limits. Love becomes more truthful when the people and things we cherish are released from having to save us.
Adapted from chapter 7, “Disordered Love,” in Becoming Fully Human by Dr. R. C. Titus.
Read the Scripture
Open each passage and read slowly. Notice a word, question, or invitation that asks for your attention.
Matthew 6:19-24 · WEBU
19“Don’t lay up treasures for yourselves on the earth, where moth and rust consume, and where thieves break through and steal;
20but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consume, and where thieves don’t break through and steal;
21for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
22“The lamp of the body is the eye. If therefore your eye is sound, your whole body will be full of light.
23But if your eye is evil, your whole body will be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!
24“No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You can’t serve both God and Mammon.
Romans 7:14-25 · WEBU
14For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am fleshly, sold under sin.
15For I don’t understand what I am doing. For I don’t practice what I desire to do; but what I hate, that I do.
16But if what I don’t desire, that I do, I consent to the law that it is good.
17So now it is no more I that do it, but sin which dwells in me.
18For I know that in me, that is, in my flesh, dwells no good thing. For desire is present with me, but I don’t find it doing that which is good.
19For the good which I desire, I don’t do; but the evil which I don’t desire, that I practice.
20But if what I don’t desire, that I do, it is no more I that do it, but sin which dwells in me.
21I find then the law that, while I desire to do good, evil is present.
22For I delight in God’s law after the inward person,
23but I see a different law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity under the law of sin which is in my members.
24What a wretched man I am! Who will deliver me out of the body of this death?
25I thank God through Jesus Christ, our Lord! So then with the mind, I myself serve God’s law, but with the flesh, sin’s law.
Pause and respond
For reflection
Which good thing am I asking to give me the security or worth that it cannot finally provide?
A practice for today
Choose one ordinary task and finish it without seeking extra recognition. Thank God for its real value, then turn your attention toward someone else's good.
A prayer
Lord Jesus, you know the good things I love and the demands I place upon them. Free me from seeking salvation in approval, achievement, or control. By your grace, teach me to receive your gifts with gratitude and love the people before me truthfully. Amen.
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