Your Life-long Mission

# 212 - Today's Du-votional comes from: 1Sa 15:18,19, "Now the LORD sent you on a mission, and said, 'Go, and utterly destroy the sinners, the Amalekites, and fight against them until they are consumed.' 19 "Why then did you not obey the voice of the LORD? Why did you swoop down on the spoil, and do evil in the sight of the LORD?" (1 Sam 15:18,19) “The Lord sent you on a mission.” I love the picture that the Holy Spirit is trying to paint here for you and I. The Hebrew word for “mission” means “a course of life.” When you and I came to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, God sent us on a mission, a course of life to follow. No, we are not to go out and utterly destroy sinners, remember these Amalekites serve as a type of “sin” for you and I. Our mission is to do battle with what they represent, namely sin, and we are to battle sin in our life until it is consumed, that is, until it is brought to an end in our life. This battle will rage till our dying breath or the return of our Lord. Saul's mistake is he thought he could co-exist with some sins and so he okayed the taking of the spoil. The question for you and I is this. What have we allowed to become spoil in our lives? What sins have we given up on and simply decided to co-exist with? Don't give up the fight my brother and my sister. The struggle is the course of the life of the Christian, the mission we must undertake. Learn from another Saul, renamed Paul in the New Testament who spoke of his ongoing struggle with sin in Ro 7:19 , “For the good that I will to do, I do not do; but the evil I will not to do, that I practice.” His solution? 24 O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? 25 I thank God--through Jesus Christ our Lord!” The solution is Jesus Christ. He alone obliterates sin in our lives. He alone can give us victory over our besetting sins. Sin is put to death by a daily routine of confession and trust in the power of the blood of Jesus to wipe the slate clean. Eph 1:7 says, “In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of His grace.” Believe it! Live it! It is your life-long mission!